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Institute's Bibliography (PuRe) Team

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Working Group Books

Working Group Books are a specialty of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG): volumes written by two or more authors which are the result of intensive collaboration, involving multiple working sessions in which drafts of the individual chapters are presented, discussed, and revised. Many MPIWG research projects publish their principal results in this form, in addition to books and articles by individual participating scholars. These Working Group Books are especially well suited to opening up new fields of research and to covering topics from a comparative perspective, both challenges that invite collective rather than individual scholarship.

 

 

2023
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Sanctorius Sanctorius and the Origins of Health Measurement

  • Teresa Hollerbach

This open access book offers new insights into the Venetian physician Sanctorius Sanctorius (1561–1636) and into the origins of quantification in medicine.

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Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science & Politics, 1859–1955

Tuning the World tells the unknown story of how the musical pitch A 440 became the global norm.

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Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation

The experiment has long been seen as a test bed for theory, but in Split and Splice, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger makes the case, instead, for treating experimentation as a creative practice. His latest book provides an innovative look at the experimental protocols and connections that have made the life sciences so productive.

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Working Group Volume

Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues

Was plurilingualism the exception or the norm in traditional Eurasian scholarship? This volume presents a selection of primary sources—in many cases translated into English for the first time—with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which traditional Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism.

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Wissenschaft und Diplomatie: die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft im Feld der internationalen Politik (1945–2000)

Wissenschaftsdiplomatie gilt neuerdings als Hoffnungsträger in der Bewältigung der globalen Herausforderungen der internationalen Politik. Zugleich rückt das Zusammenspiel von Wissenschaft und Diplomatie während des Kalten Krieges in den Fokus der Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

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Der Traum von der Einheit der Wissenschaft: Verleihung des Gerda Henkel Preises 2020

In ihrer Preisrede anlässlich der Verleihung des Gerda Henkel Preises sprach die Wissenschaftshistorikerin Lorraine Daston über den »Traum von der Einheit der Wissenschaft«.

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Working Group Volume

Moving Crops and the Scales of History

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop

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Colours on East Asian Maps: Their Use and Materiality in China, Japan and Korea between the Mid-17th and Early 20th Century

With a multi-perspective approach and transdisciplinary methods (humanities and sciences), this book offers an in-depth and systematic study of hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps from East Asia.

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Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe

Thomas Morel tells the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe. Mining and metallurgy were of great significance to the rulers of early modern Europe, required for the silver bullion that fuelled warfare and numerous other uses.

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Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900

When the outside world is silent, all sorts of sounds often come to mind: inner voices, snippets of past conversations, imaginary debates, beloved and unloved melodies. What should we make of such sonic companions? Thinking with Sound investigates a period when these and other newly perceived aural phenomena prompted a far-reaching debate.

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Special Journal Issue

Hybridization in the History of Ideas; Historical Geoanthropology

Special issue 1: Hybridization in the History of Ideas ; Special issue 2: Geoanthropology.

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Edited Book

Journalists and Knowledge Practices: Histories of Observing the Everyday in the Newspaper Age

This multi-disciplinary anthology provides new perspectives on the journalist’s role in knowledge generation in the newspaper age—covering diverse topics from fake news to new technologies.

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Edited Book

Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies: Practices from the 2nd/8th to the 13th/19th Centuries

The Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies provides a comprehensive survey on science in the Islamic world from the 8th to the 19th century.

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Working Group Volume

Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions

  • Katja KrauseLópez Farjeat, Luis XavierOschman, Nicholas A.

This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in the history of philosophy, focusing on points of interaction between discrete historical contexts, religions, and cultures found within the premodern period.

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Working Group Volume

Scientific Visual Representations in History

This book explores continuity and ruptures in the historical use of visual representations in science and related disciplines such as art history and anthropology. The book also considers more recent developments that attest to the unprecedented importance of scientific visualizations, such as video recordings, animations, simulations, graphs, and enhanced realities.

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Astrophysics, Astronomy and Space Sciences in the History of the Max Planck Society

This book provides the first comprehensive historical account of the evolution of scientific traditions in astronomy, astrophysics, and the space sciences within the Max Planck Society.

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2022
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Visual Materials in Local Gazetteers

The editorial board are pleased to present volume 3 of the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, which opens with a special section on “Visual Materials in Local Gazetteers”.

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Special Journal Issue

Making History: Technologies of Production and the Estate of Knowledge in East Asia

How did production, the making of things, come to be regarded as an inferior part of the process from the conceptualization of a commodity to its consumption? And how did East Asia, which has long been a place of production, come concurrently to be dismissed by other global actors on account of that fact and denied the potential for innovation?

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Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace

The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into a familiar, desirable commodity.

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Theoretical Knowledge in the Mohist Canon

Presents a new translation and interpretation of a large part of the Mohist Canon. Provides an in-depth cross-cultural comparison of the origin of theoretical knowledge. Discusses the role of the Mohist Canon in a global history of science.

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