Historians and specialists of Literature, German, English and Scandinavian Studies as well as Museology from France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway, Iceland, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Hungary met at Nicolas Copernicus University in Torun (UMK), Poland, May 9-10, 2024, to discuss topics relating to the reception of knowledge from the circumpolar Arctic in Eastern and Central Europe from the 17th to the long 19th century. The conference was nominated Best Research Activity at UMK and financed by grants from the Burgomaster of the city of Toruń, the Excellence Initiative Young Universities for the future of Europe (YUFE), as well as the French National Research Agency ANR via the Junior Full Professorship in Arctic Humanities at MIARC.
The papers were dedicated to single agents of knowledge, their observations and scientific discourses in which knowledge form the Arctic had been absorbed. The aim was to explain the different reasons why various groups - scholars, merchants, newspaper makers or aristocrats - were interested in the Arctic regions, e.g. scientific progress, trade profit, status representation through objects, topicality of news or medicine/ health, which could be promoted through products from the Arctic, etc. The focus was therefore on the reception of travel accounts from the Arctic by scholars in their own publications and debates of learned societies (natural science, geography, history, philosophy, literature), on representations of knowledge in collections (natural history cabinets) as well as the reception of knowledge about Arctic phenomena in everyday life, such as extreme cold, adaptation strategies on journeys or eating habits adapted in relation to the cold. The significance of scientific and (inter)confessional networks, mobility, education, religious minorities, the press and/or trade for the circulation of knowledge was also examined.
The program from the conference can be found here: https://miarctic.org/images/pdf/Arctic%20in%20Eastern%20and%20Central%20Europe-programme.pdf