ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Recasting the History of Almanacs 2

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines almanacs and ephemerides as instruments for imagining and managing a global Earth. Bringing together case studies from medieval Yemen, early modern European navigation, and the Iberian and Iberian-American worlds, it explores how astronomical calculation, environmental prognostication, and religious reflection converged on the almanac page. The papers foreground the role of these artefacts in articulating interconnected geographies and plural worldviews, highlighting both the circulation of shared techniques and the persistence of localised perspectives. Rather than treating astronomical tables, navigational guides, and prognostications as separate traditions, the session demonstrates their mutual entanglement across regions commonly studied in isolation: the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the Iberian-American worlds. Almanacs appear here as sites where local concerns—about weather, trade routes, political upheavals, or interreligious relations—were inscribed within larger cosmographical schemes. This layered character makes them particularly fertile for thinking about shifting perspectives and epistemic disobediences: Yemeni writers who provincialise Latin Christendom while chronicling it in their margins; pilots who refuse to separate astrological from astronomical uses of the stars; Iberian-American compilers who bend metropolitan formats to the demands of new winds and latitudes. By bringing into dialogue Arabic, English and Iberian materials, and by combining methods from the history of science, environmental history, and book history, the session foregrounds the plurality of knowledge

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Michelle Pfeffer, University of Oxford

Individual Presentations

• World History in the Margins of Arabic Ephemerides and Almanacs - Johannes Thomann, University of Zurich

• Sea and Sky: Sailors using almanacs - Margaret Rose Hunt, Uppsala University

• Latitude, Winds, and Prognostication: The Making of a Global Earth in Early Modern Iberian and Iberian-American almanacs - Sergio Orozco-Echeverri, Universidad de Antioquia / I Tatti, Harvard University

Session Organizers

• Sergio Orozco-Echeverri, Universidad de Antioquia / I Tatti, Harvard University

• Isobel Falconer, University of St Andrews