Terra Incognita A History of Ignorance in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Identifying gaps in knowledge is the first duty of any historian who sets out to understand the past. It is impossible fully to understand our forebears without some idea of what they did not know: the history of ignorance is an indispensable part of history itself. To write a comprehensive history of ignorance would be an impossibly vast undertaking – it is necessary to limit oneself to a specific field. Here Alain Corbin focuses on our planet, exploring its mysteries past and present, and the intensity and eventual decline of the modes of terror and wonder it aroused. For thousands of years, we humans knew nearly nothing about the Earth. Our horizons were limited to our territories, villages and locales. Certain locations on the map simply read ‘Terra Incognita’. Corbin recounts the many errors and uncertainties that littered the paths we followed in the attempt to discover the secrets of our blue planet, with a particular focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, meteorology was pitted with uncertainties. In 1840, the depths of the ocean were a total mystery. In 1870, the majority of experts believed that a sea spanned the two poles. In 1900, the stratosphere remained an unknown. While ignorance stimulated our ancestors’ imagination, Corbin’s history of ignorance reawakens our thirst for knowledge and changes our view of the world. This highly original book by one of the most creative historians writing today opens up a new terrain for historians. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of history, especially cultural history and the history of science, and to anyone interested in the nature and limits of human knowledge.