Overview

In Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia, 20 authors tell in novel ways the histories of astral knowledge through objects and their imagery. These objects include, for instance, caves and buildings, manuscripts and prints, textiles and metal dishes, instruments and paintings, monuments, and sculptures. Each chapter focuses on specific items, analysing their pictorial content and situating them in the contexts of their production and usage. As its main issue, the book addresses the knowledge inscribed in these images and their material carriers. Particular attention is paid to the interconnection between images, materials, themes, and objects across space and time. This approach enables the authors to highlight the numerous cross-cultural relations between the objects, interlinking their chapters with each other. Thus, this book offers a richly illustrated kaleidoscope of astral knowledge in Eurasia to experts and lay people alike.

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9788869774249

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Rana Brentjes is an art historian, a curator, and a historian of contemporary German History. She is currently the Digital Content Curator of the research project “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She co-edited the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (2023) and co-authored “The scientific environment in Samarkand around Ulugh Beg and the Zīj-i Gūrgānī” in Commentaires du fac-simile du Livre des étoiles fixes d’‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī Manuscrit BnF Arabe 5036 edited by Anna Caiozzo. In her current work she edits and develops the VoH Database, presents its research potential at workshops and conferences, and works on publishing some of those results. Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science focusing on the histories of mathematics, mapmaking, institutions, translations, travels, and astral imagery in Islamicate societies, the medieval Mediterranean, and early modern Occidental Europe. She co-founded and developped the research project “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, which she headed from 2016 to 2021. Her latest publications include edited volumes in cooperation with other colleagues on Narratives on Translation across Eurasian and Africa (2022) and the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (2023), as well as articles on the Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (903–986). Stamatina Mastorakou is leading the research group “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is a historian of science working on the history of astral knowledge and its material culture. Having earned her PhD in Hellenistic astronomy from Imperial College, London, she has taught and conducted research in Athens, London, New York, and Zurich. She specializes on Aratus’ Phaenomena and her current work focuses on how ancient astronomical knowledge was intricately shaped through poetry, art, and politics.

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