Table of Contents -- Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750-1850 -- Part One: Sounds and Stages -- The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words -- The Fate of Rhetoric in the "Long" Eighteenth Century -- Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments -- The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger -- Early Schiller Memorials (1805-1808) and the Performance of Literary Knowledge -- Modern Architecture Takes the Stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Architectural Spectacles -- Part Two: Pedagogies and Publics -- Performance and Play: Lichtenberg's Lectures on Experimental Physics -- Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity -- Staging the Knowledge of Plants: Goethe's Elegy "The Metamorphosis of Plants" -- Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist -- Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form -- Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Forms of Musical Knowledge: The Case of the Piano -- Afterword: The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz -- Bibliography -- Index.