Global exchanges of knowledge in the long eighteenth century : ideas and materialities c. 1650 - 1850 /  edited by James Raven

Woodbridge ; Rochester :  The Boydell Press, 2024.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Technological advances during the long eighteenth century brought new and exciting intellectual exchange between peoples in different parts of the world. Mutual unfamiliarity with textual forms - those sent to as well as received from Europe - also made knowledge transfer unpredictable and problematic. This volume examines how differences in the material production and circulation of textual objects transformed the ways in which knowledge was formulated and received between 1650 and 1850. Essays focus on diverse regions of Britain and Europe, European colonies in the Caribbean and North America, India and East Asia. The volume engages with varied and changing perceptions of China in Europe, the transmission of Christian texts in colonial South Asia, the cross-cultural circulation of natural history and Orientalist knowledge, and the diffusion of the Qu'ran in European Enlightenment libraries. In pursuing global perspectives, thirteen cultural and literary historians, collectively reassess Eurocentric interpretations of a republic of letters, a public sphere, an invention of the self and a reading revolution. They further challenge the extent to which European periodizations of 'the Enlightenment' map onto processes of technological and intellectual change in other regions of the globe"-- Back cover.

History of science, history of text / edited by Karine Chemla.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

What is a Text? -- Spatial Organization of Ancient Chinese Texts (Preliminary Remarks) -- The Constitution of Scientific Texts: from Draft to -- Leibniz and the Use of Manuscripts: Text as Process -- Opera Omnia: The Production of Cultural Authority -- Writing Works: A Reaction to Michael Cahn's Paper -- How Scientific and Technical Texts Adhere to Local Cultures -- Text, Representation and Technique in Early Modern China -- The Algebraic Art of Discourse Algebraic Dispositio, Invention and Imitation in Sixteenth-Century France -- Ancient Sanskrit Mathematics: An Oral Tradition and a Written Literature -- Reading Texts -- The Limits of Text in Greek Mathematics -- Reading Strasbourg 368: A Thrice-Told Tale -- What is the Content of This Book? A Plea for Developing History of Science and History of Text Conjointly -- Epilogue -- Knowledge and its Artifacts.

This book explores the hypothesis that the types of inscription or text used by a given community of practitioners are designed in the very same process as the one producing concepts and results. The book sets out to show how, in exactly the same way as for the other outcomes of scientific activity, all kinds of factors, cognitive as well as cultural, technological, social or institutional, conjoin in shaping the various types of writings and texts used by the practitioners of the sciences. To make this point, the book opts for a genuinely multicultural approach to the texts produced in the context of practices of knowledge. It is predicated on the conviction that, in order to approach any topic in the history of science from a theoretical point of view, it may be fruitful to consider it from a global perspective. The book hence does not only gather papers dealing with geometrical papyri of antiquity, sixteenth century French books in algebra, seventeenth century scientific manuscripts and paintings, eighteenth and nineteenth century memoirs published by European academies or scientific journals, and Western Opera Omnia. It also considers the problems of interpretation relating to reading Babylonian clay tablets, Sanskrit oral scriptures and Chinese books and illustrations. Thus it enables the reader to explore the diversity of forms which texts have taken in history and the wide range of uses they have inspired. This volume will be of interest to historians, philosophers of science, linguists and anthropologists.
Local access dig.pdf, [Chemla-History Science and Text.pdf]

Abstract: “Intersemiotic translation” is categorized by Roman Jakobson as one of three types of translation. Translation of illustrations in the late Qing novels, either directly from verbal signs or visual signs, can also be regarded as a typical kind of “intersemiotic translation.” The present article studies illustrations in Chinese Christian literature in the late Qing period, especially those in the Chinese translations of John Bunyan’s works, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. Questions to ponder are how inter-semiotic translation occurs between these illustrations—in either transferring or transplanting the meanings from one sign system to another—and how it establishes its legitimacy through religious negotiation, ideological conflict, and cultural integration. The illustrations in the Chinese translation versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress manifest the translators’ and illustrators’ manipulation of repertoires of Chinese religious signs, thereby indigenizing a foreign religion. These illustrations, nevertheless, are not only associated with Christianity, but also with the long-lasting visual signs of Chinese culture. Hence these translated illustrations could be considered as a type of “Translated Christianity.”

Local access dig.pdf. [Yao-Translated Illustration.pdf]