This paper is based on a number of reuses of Cassiodorus’ Variae that have been found in notarial documents written in Rome and Lazio between the tenth and eleventh century. Given that the manuscript tradition of the Variae becomes visible only from the twelfth-thirteenth centuries onwards, these reuses are a good starting point to reflect on a specific question: what were the practical …
Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-seven princesses, a war between gods and giants, and shadows that give birth to planets. In this fascinating study, first published in Calcutta in 1823 and reissued here in the 1825 edition, John Bentley (c.1750–1824) strives to strip back the myth…
Presented from the viewpoint of the history of mathematics, this book explores both epistemological aspects of Chinese traditional mathematical astronomy and lunisolar calendrical calculations. The following issues are addressed: (1) connections with non-Chinese cultural areas; (2) the possibility or impossibility of using mathematics to predict astronomical phenomena, a question that was const…
This book explores the relationship between the content of chemistry education and the history and philosophy of science (HPS) framework that underlies such education. It discusses the need to present an image that reflects how chemistry developed and progresses. It proposes that chemistry should be taught the way it is practiced by chemists: as a human enterprise, at the interface of scientifi…
This book investigates the performance of economic development under different forms of government, ranging from autocratic states to liberal democracies. Starting with a critical review of the literature on social and economic development, including the works of Frank Knight, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker, it offers a historical analysis of the expansion of markets, cities and…
This chapter therefore makes a case for a political history of shoes, by bringing together these two rich fields. It will begin by thinking about the nature of political culture in the eighteenth century, where political virtue was evaluated in highly moral and gendered terms, and where shoes became the focus of debates about masculinity and citizenship. It will then turn its attention to c…
The Indo-Aryan language of Sanskrit is the primary language of Hinduism and also a scholarly language of Buddhism. Dating back to the second millennium BCE, it is considered to be the parent of most modern languages of India, and remains central to work in Indo-European studies, philology and linguistics today. First published in 1806, this is a comprehensive grammar of Sanskrit, compiled by th…
Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal to…
The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise. Questions about the emergence of structure, the nature o…
In 1906, Nello Vernon-Wood (1882–1978) reinvented himself as Tex Wood, Banff hunting guide and writer of “yarns of the wilderness by a competent outdoorsman.” His homespun stories of a vanishing era, in such periodicals as The Sportsman, Hunting and Fishing, and the Canadian Alpine Journal, have much to tell us about the west as envisioned by those who wanted to leave the industrialized w…