The CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion” was dedicated to studying processes of knowledge change in premodern European and non-European cultures. Investigating long-term epistemic movements in specific historical constellations, it developed a set of conceptual instruments suitable for their description. Its guiding hypothesis was that, despite a tendency – both in self-descriptions and in later (external) assessments – to perceive knowledge in cultures before 1750 as fundamentally stable, premodern knowledge was in fact in a state of constant flux, often in the very places where stability of knowledge was claimed most emphatically.

In order to grasp the characteristic dynamics of premodern knowledge change, the interdisciplinary research network deployed the paired concepts of ‘episteme’ and ‘transfer’ as systematically correlated descriptive categories: while the former conceives of knowledge as linked to claims of validity, which in turn manifest themselves in specific discourses and practices, and are always bound to specific media and materialities, the latter understands epistemic change as a recon-textualisation of knowledge. In the process of being re-contextualised, knowledge acquires new associations and enters into new interrelationships. When it comes to exploring the transformations of premodern knowledge, it is precisely these reciprocal and constantly evolving relations that make it necessary to move beyond long-established categories such as periods and cultural spheres.

Indeed, one of the CRC’s key findings is that premodern knowledge refuses to comply with the schemes of periodisation traditionally imposed by the historiography of knowledge; that the validity claims of knowledge are constantly altered in the process of its recontextualisation, because the contexts of reception and the frameworks of interpretation also undergo change as knowledge is transferred. Based on (1) the tentative application of the concept of ‘transfer’ in a transcultural context, (2) a special focus on time and historicity, (3) the examination of mediality and represent-tation through the prism of the history of knowledge and (4) a thorough reflection on the role of structures in processes of knowledge change, the notion of ‘oikonomies of knowledge’ was developed, which made it possible to describe more accurately the interwoven, multidirectional dynamics of premodern epistemic shifts.

With the aid of this concept, it was possible to demonstrate how complex cultural entanglements do not merely represent a passive backdrop for knowledge transfer, but are in fact constitutive for the emergence and alteration of epistemic knowledge. Knowledge transfer is characterised by implicit norms, invisible rules and power structures, but also by the selection, reduction and concealment of knowledge. These concrete interactions within and between micro- and macro-structural dynamics of knowledge change were explored by means of exemplary case studies focused on practices, reciprocities and ‘momentum’, with the latter term encompassing the fundamental modes of epistemic movement such as acceleration, deceleration, interruption or initiation. Moving beyond monolinear concepts of causality and/or continuity, these closely interconnected perspectives revealed the manifold and multifarious interactions between different oikonomies of knowledge, and thus contributed to establishing the history of knowledge of the premodern era as a field of research that is of eminent interest for the study of modernity, too.