ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Burying the Torch: Illuminating Diverse Actors in the Making of Premodern Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, historians of science and medicine positioned premodern sources as simple conduits for theoretical knowledge from Graeco-Roman texts to early modern Europe. This narrative centred a ‘learned’ discourse, which was populated by male authors, often working in elite contexts. Despite recent work, this narrative continues to haunt discussions of premodern science and medicine in academia and beyond.

This panel reflects on how we can work with primary sources to make space for the myriad worldviews, experiences, and techniques of diverse actors from the premodern world. We ask how we can read texts against the grain or from the margins (literally and metaphorically), engage with texts of practice, and work with objects in order to trouble asymmetric narratives of knowledge practice and transmission.

This panel centres sources and practices outside of Europe in order to discuss how we can creatively construct histories of science and medicine that are not centred on European epistemologies. Through her investigation of Babylonian astronomy, Alessia Pilloni challenges a modern positivist narrative of scientific progression and makes space for diverse approaches to the production of knowledge. Building on this, Leonie Böttiger investigates premodern Arabic technical manuals to highlight the marginalised voices who inform, contest, and authorise knowledge. Beatrice Bottomley asks how we can read premodern Arabic recipes and techniques against the grain to reconstruct the practices through which free and enslaved women produced and transmitted knowledge about the natural world and the human body.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Laurence Totelin, Cardiff University

Individual Presentations

• Beyond Obsolescence: The Persistent Plurality of Babylonian Astral Science - Alessia Pilloni, FU Berlin

• Women in Tech: Mothers and Housekeepers in Premodern Arabic Technical Compendia - Leonie Böttiger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Aphrodisiac Recipes and Techniques: Rethinking Practical Knowledge of Human Generation among Free and Enslaved Women in the Premodern Islamicate World - Beatrice Bottomley, The University of Bologna

Session Organizers

• Beatrice Bottomley, The University of Bologna

• Leonie Böttiger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science