Editors: Katja Krause (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Maria Auxent (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Dror Weil (University of Cambridge)
Publisher: Routledge, 2022 – Open Access
This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space.
The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience.
Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Experiencing Wissenstransfer in the First Episteme: Mesopotamia – Markham Geller
Introduction: Making Sense of Nature in the Premodern World – Katja Krause with Maria Auxent and Dror Weil
Experience and Knowledge among the Greeks: From the Presocratics to Avicenna – Michael Chase
Introduction: Experience Terms in Translation – Steven Harvey
The Epistemic Authority of Translations: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and John Buridan on Aristotle’s empeiria – Katja Krause
Scientific Tasting: Flavors in the Investigation of Plants and Medicines from Aristotle to Albert the Great – Marilena Panarelli
Making Sense of Ingenium: Translating Thought in Twelfth-Century Latin Texts on Cognition – Jonathan Morton
The Encounter of Image and Xiang (象) in Matteo Ricci’s Western Art of Memory (Xiguo Jifa, 1596) – Shixiang Jin
Introduction: Experience, Translation, and the Norms of Science – Jamie Cohen-Cole
Translating Method: Inference from Behavior to Anatomy in Avicenna’s Zoology – Tommaso Alpina
Translating from One Domain to Another: Analogical Reasoning in Premodern Islamic Theology (kalām) – Hannah C. Erlwein
Can the Results of Experience Be the Premises of Demonstrations? Four Hundred Years of Debate on a Single Line of Maimonides’s Treatise on the Art of Logic – Yehuda Halper
The Weight of Qualities: Quantifying Temperament in Early Modern British Mathematical Medicine – Julia Reed
Introduction: Translation in Practice: Visualizing Experience – Katharine Park
Translating Alchemical Practice into Symbols: Two Cases from Codex Marcianus graecus 299 – Vincenzo Carlotta
Translating Medical Experience in Tables: The Case of Eleventh-Century Arabic Taqwīm Works – Dror Weil
From Textual to Visual: Translation and Enhancement of Arabic Experience in the New Book Genre Tacuina sanitatis of Giangaleazzo Visconti (c. 1390) – Dominic Olariu
The Pictorial Idioms of Nature: Image Making as Phytographic Translation in Early Modern Northern Europe – Jaya Remond
Introduction: Expertise in Translation – Sven Dupré
The Translator’s Cut: Cultural Experience and Philosophical Narration in the Early Latin Translations of Avicenna – Amos Bertolacci
Toledan Translators, Roger Bacon, and the Dynamic Shades of Experience – Nicola Polloni
Table Talk – Florence Hsia
The Experience of the Translator: Richard Eden and A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553) – Maria Auxent
Epilogue: Windows, Mirrors, and Beads – Lorraine Daston
List of Contributors