1st Edition
Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation
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.
Table of 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
Part I: Contextualizing Premodern Experience in Translation
Experience and Knowledge among the Greeks: From the Presocratics to Avicenna
Michael Chase
Part II: Experience Terms
Introduction. Experience Terms in Translation
Steven Harvey
Chapter 1: The Epistemic Authority of Translations: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and John Buridan on Aristotle’s empeiria
Katja Krause
Chapter 2: Scientific Tasting: Flavors in the Investigation of Plants and Medicines from Aristotle to Albert the Great
Marilena Panarelli
Chapter 3: Making Sense of Ingenium: Translating Thought in Twelfth-Century Latin Texts on Cognition
Jonathan Morton
Chapter 4: The Encounter of Image and Xiang (象) in Matteo Ricci’s Western Art of Memory (Xiguo Jifa, 1596)
Shixiang Jin
Part III: Sciences and Scientific Norms
Introduction: Experience, Translation, and the Norms of Science
Jamie Cohen-Cole
Chapter 5: Translating Method: Inference from Behavior to Anatomy in Avicenna’s Zoology
Tommaso Alpina
Chapter 6: Translating from One Domain to Another: Analogical Reasoning in Premodern Islamic Theology (kalām)
Hannah C. Erlwein
Chapter 7: 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
Chapter 8: The Weight of Qualities: Quantifying Temperament in Early Modern British Mathematical Medicine
Julia Reed
Part IV: Verbal and Visual Systems
Introduction: Translation in Practice: Visualizing Experience
Katharine Park
Chapter 9: Translating Alchemical Practice into Symbols: Two Cases from Codex Marcianus graecus 299
Vincenzo Carlotta
Chapter 10: Translating Medical Experience in Tables: The Case of Eleventh-Century Arabic Taqwīm Works
Dror Weil
Chapter 11: From Textual to Visual: Translation and Enhancement of Arabic Experience in the New Book Genre Tacuina sanitatis of Giangaleazzo Visconti (c. 1390)
Dominic Olariu
Chapter 12: The Pictorial Idioms of Nature: Image Making as Phytographic Translation in Early Modern Northern Europe
Jaya Remond
Part V: Expertise in Translation
Introduction: Expertise in Translation
Sven Dupré
Chapter 13: The Translator’s Cut: Cultural Experience and Philosophical Narration in the Early Latin Translations of Avicenna
Amos Bertolacci
Chapter 14: Toledan Translators, Roger Bacon, and the Dynamic Shades of Experience
Nicola Polloni
Chapter 15: Table Talk
Florence Hsia
Chapter 16: 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
List of Contributors
Tommaso Alpina teaches at the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. He is the author of Subject, Definition, Activity: Framing Avicenna’s Science of the Soul (2021).
Maria Auxent is a historian and philosopher of science, specializing in the history of scientific language and communication. She works at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Amos Bertolacci is professor of the history of medieval philosophy at the IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy. He has published widely on the influence of Avicenna’s and Averroes’s metaphysics in the Latin Middle Ages.
Vincenzo Carlotta, based at Bologna University, works on the history of ancient and Byzantine alchemy. He is currently finishing the edition and translation The Alchemical Teachings of Cleopatra.
Michael Chase
(CNRS Centre Jean Pépin-UMR 8230-ENS-PSL, Paris-Villejuif) is currently working on editions of Avicenna, Notes on the Theology of Aristotle, and the Arabic translation of Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Intellect.Jamie Cohen-Cole is associate professor of American studies at George Washington University. His current book project examines the cultural history of developmental psychology and its study of childhood.
Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022).
Sven Dupré is Director of the Research Institute for History and Art History and professor of history of art, science, and technology at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam.
Hannah C. Erlwein is a postdoctoral fellow in the research group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She holds a PhD in Islamic intellectual history.
Markham Geller directs the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London. He taught at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2010 to 2018 and is a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Yehuda Halper, of the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University, is PI of the Israel Science Foundation project "Hebrew Traditions of Aristotelian Dialectics" and author of Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato (2021).
Steven Harvey is professor emeritus of philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and president of the SIEPM’s Commission for Jewish Philosophy. He has published extensively on medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy.
Florence Hsia is a historian of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on the history of sinology in early modern Europe.
Shixiang Jin is associate professor of history of science at the University of Science and Technology Beijing. He works on the Aristotelian theory of perception and its historical transformation, and the comparative study of East-West epistemology.
Katja Krause, a historian of philosophy and science specializing in medieval thought, teaches at the Technische Universität Berlin and leads the research group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Jonathan Morton is associate professor in the French and Italian Department at Tulane University, New Orleans. His current book project is Engines of Invention: Thinking Machines in the High Middle Ages.
Dominic Olariu is an art historian at the University of Marburg, Germany, interested in medieval and early modern scientific imagery. In 2020 he published an annotated facsimile of the German edition of Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal.
Marilena Panarelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salento, Italy, working on the medieval Latin botanical tradition, especially in the Dominican environment.
Katharine Park is Samuel Zemurray, Junior and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor Emerita of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Nicola Polloni is senior researcher at KU Leuven. His recent publications include The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics and The Philosophy and Science of Roger Bacon (with Yael Kedar).
Julia Reed teaches at Harvard University’s history of science department and is currently collaborating with the "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body" group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Jaya Remond is assistant professor of history of art in the Department of Art History, Musicology, and Theater Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She works on early modern northern European art.
Dror Weil, assistant professor (University Lecturer) in the history of early modern Asia at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, works on the Islamicate world and China during the medieval and early modern periods.
Biography
Katja Krause, a historian of philosophy and science, is Professor of the History of Science at the Technische Universit at Berlin and leads the research group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Maria Auxent is a historian of science specializing in scientific language and communication and the philosophy of science. She currently works at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Dror Weil, assistant professor (University Lecturer) in the history of early modern Asia at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, works on the Islamicate world and China during the medieval and early modern periods.
