Forthcoming Series: Agriculture and the Making of Sciences 1100-1700: Texts, Practices, and Transcultural Transmission of Knowledge in Asia

 

Series Editors: Dagmar Schäfer, XU Chun, Bethany J. Walker and Aleksandar Shopov

This is the first academic series to explore pre-modern agriculture in its foundational role in informing emergent “sciences” globally. Agriculture is treated as a body of knowledge through which humans learned about their environment; the migration of ideas and practices are traced from texts to other epistemological spaces, from one ancient agriculture and culture to another. By studying historical relationships between knowledge practices and environmental change, this series contributes to the study of science, technology, and medicine, as well debates in global history which is very much relevant to environmental issues we are obliged to address within scholarship and beyond.

Innovatively, the series employs a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective, centers around Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish agricultural texts and sources, provides English translation and comparative analysis of such sources, and brings together Sinological, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian expertise to study the hitherto severely under-explored histories of science and technology in these regions. The comparative study is placed in the context of disparate cultural and literary traditions within a global framework.

Volumes in the series will deal with notions of life and death, plants and animals, as well as the formation of disciplines such as rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, or medicine. In addition to the texts, this series will examine diverse forms of agricultural knowledge that did not conveniently fit into the discrete scholarly categories of their respective times: legal writings, cosmographies, dictionaries, materia medica, manuals of mechanical art, as well as artifacts and visual representations.

All volumes in this series will be published in Open Access with financial support from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

ISSN: 2772-9834