Global Motion and the Production of Knowledge / Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng -- The Savant in Motion and at Home -- Two Bohemian Journeys: Real, Imaginary and Idealized Voyages at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century / Ofer Gal -- Xu Xiake's Travel Notes : Motion, Records and Genre Change / Yi Zheng -- Those Who Stayed: English Chorography and the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries / Claire Kennedy -- Dialogues and Skeptics--Traversing Geography and Cultures -- 'How Very Little He Can Learn': Exotic Visitors and the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge in Eighteenth Century London / Vanessa Smith -- Diplomatic Journeys and Medical Brush Talks: Eighteenth-Century Dialogues Between Korean and Japanese Medicine / Daniel Trambaiolo -- The Circulation of Sericulture Knowledge through Temple Networks and Cognitive Poetics in Eighteenth Century Zhejiang / Philip S. Cho -- Motion as Free Thinking and Social Circulation -- Travel as a Basis for Atheism: Free-Thinking as Deterritorialization in the Early Radical Enlightenment / Charles T. Wolfe -- Late Traditional Chinese Civilization in Motion, 1400-1900 / Benjamin A. Elman.

This volume comprises studies of the early modern drama of motion and transformation of knowledge. It is unique in taking its global nature as fundamental and contains studies of the theme of motion and knowledge in China, Europe and the Pacific from the 16th to the 18th century. People living around the turn of the 17th century were experiencing motion in ways beyond the grasp of anyone less than a century earlier. Goods and people were crossing lands and oceans to distances never envisioned and in scales hardly imaginable by their recent predecessors. The earth itself has been set in motion and the heavens were populated by a whole new array of moving objects: comets, moons, sun spots. Even the motion of terrestrial objects-so close at hand and seemingly obvious-was being thoroughly reshaped. In the two centuries to follow, this incessant, world-changing motion would transform the creation, interpretation and dissemination of knowledge and the life and experiences of the people producing it: savants, artisans, pilots, collectors.

Local access dig.pdf. [Gal-Yi-Motion and Knowledge.pdf]

The rise of early modern science : Islam, China, and the West / Toby E. Huff.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 385-406) and index.

Introduction -- 1. The comparative study of science -- 2. Arabic science and the Islamic world -- 3. Reason and rationality in Islam and the West -- 4. The European legal revolution -- 5. Madrasas, universities, and sciences -- 6. Cultural climates and the ethos of science -- 7. Science and civilization in China -- 8. Science and social organization in China -- 9. The rise of early modern science -- Epilogue: Educational reform and attitudes towards science since the eighteenth century.

Publisher's description: This study examines the long-standing question of why modern science arose only in the West and not in the civilizations of Islam and China, despite the fact that medieval Islam and China were more scientifically advanced. To explain this outcome, Tony E. Huff explores the cultural - religious, legal, philosophical, and institutional - contexts within which science was practiced in Islam, China, and the West. He finds in the history of law and the European cultural revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries major clues as to why the ethos of science arose in the West, permitting the breakthrough to modern science that did not occur elsewhere. This line of inquiry leads to novel ideas about the centrality of the legal concept of corporation, which is unique to the West and gave rise to the concepts of neutral space and free inquiry.

Local access dig.pdf. [Huff-Early Modern Science.pdf]