Ancient Cultures of Sciences and Knowledge

Edited by Markham J. Geller, Paul J. Kosmin, Lennart Lehmhaus, Matteo Martelli, Heidi Marx, Tanja Pommerening, Bernd U. Schipper, and Sabine Schmidtke

Advisory Board: Florentina Badalanova-Geller, Anthony Cerulli, Marco Formisano, Ida Fröhlich, Brooke Holmes, Rafael Neis, Antonio Panaino, Francesca Rochberg, Jacqueline Vayntrub

This new series attempts to study ancient histories of knowledge and their entanglement with religious, cultural and socio-political aspects, while paying attention to the historicity and cultural relativity of specific figurations of knowledge. On purpose, the editors define knowledge broadly as a cultural assemblage or formation of theoretical and practical concepts and approaches that try to delineate, negotiate and structure human experience of and interaction with the world. This encompasses but is not limited to various sciences and to the following aspects: natural and celestial worlds, creation and creatures, the body, illness and healing, philosophical and anthropological ideas, concepts of law and truth, language, the senses, spatiality and time, or ethnographic approaches.
The series will explore the complex and often-subtler processes of reception, adaptation and production of knowledge together with the practices, protagonists and institutions involved. The scope includes ancient Near Eastern, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, or Graeco-Roman cultures as well as Jewish, Early Christian (Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic etc.), early Byzantine and Slavonic, and Irano-Persian or early Islamicate traditions – and ranges from ancient time to the medieval period. The series aims to offer a comparative perspective by keeping an eye on the embeddedness of knowledge discourses and practices that will help to grasp the particular cultural or religious (e.g., Mesopotamian, Jewish, Christian, Graeco-Roman etc.) character of the specific epistemologies and the knowledge generated through exchanges and transfers. Focusing on the interaction in and between various discourses, such as sciences, philosophy, religion, law, literature and many more, contributions to the series may address different strategies (e.g. borrowing, camouflage, negation etc.), formats (e.g. lists, narratives, exegesis or commentary, disputes and dialogues, compilations) and epistemic dimensions (e.g. embodied knowledge, empirical approaches, models, taxonomies, theorization, or exegetical and other text/tradition-related forms of knowledge). This will help to flesh out a transcultural history of sciences and knowledge and their complex interlacing with ancient religions and cultures.
The series aims at a wide range of readers including specialists from different fields of ancient and religious studies, history of science, medicine and cultural studies as well as those interested more broadly in the entangled histories of pre-modern knowledge cultures, sciences, epistemology and religion. As a forum for pertaining research, studies will be published mainly as monographs (including dissertation and habilitation projects), and thematically coherent edited volumes but also as critical editions, translations and commentaries of relevant material.

ISSN: 2752-1850 / eISSN: 2752-1869 - Suggested citation: ASK