Institute's Bibliography (PuRe) Team
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Scholars of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) have a strong book publication record, with output including individual publications, group collaborations, and edited volumes. Our Working Group books are volumes written by two or more authors as the result of intensive collaboration, and are a particular specialty of the Institute.
“This book is sustenance for your mind as it imagines more democratic and delightful ways we can all fill our stomachs.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
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The book presents proverbs, riddles, and tales collected in Northeastern Niger (Central Sahara), as well as explanations of their deeper meanings.
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The global outbreak of COVID-19 led to an alarming increase in assaults and discrimination against individuals of Asian descent in many countries, including Canada. This surge in racism affected mental health, interracial relationships, and the representation of Asians in a variety of ways. Anti-Asian Racism and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada is a rigorous, comprehensive exploration of a phenomenon that affects millions.
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Toward a Global History of Soil unearths material expertise about soil in the early modern world that has remained largely unexamined outside of the study of agricultural history.
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Theories and practices of signification have flourished across space and time. This book examines premodern thinking on signs in ancient Greek philosophy, Chinese divination, Islamic theology, Hebrew epistemology, medieval Latin logic, South Asian language theory, and early modern European artificial languages.
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This book is the first English translation of a German classic in the social-historical historiography of science in the early modern period. It presents a reconstruction of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ based on a critical historical materialism.
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Placing the special issue within the historiography of human–elephant relationships, the introduction addresses the challenges associated with the integration of elephants into academic narratives.
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This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.
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This book explores the unequal ways that China’s Belt and Road Initiative, commonly called the New Silk Road, is altering livelihoods, places and the environment. From road building projects in Nairobi to grassroots environmental activism in Thailand, researchers from across the globe analyse the project's real-world impacts.
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Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) was a renowned anatomist in his lifetime. He reformed the anatomical understanding of glands, argued that the heart was a muscle, renamed the so-called female testicles as ovaries, and developed a mathematical model for understanding muscle contraction—discoveries that were fundamental to the fields of anatomy and physiology.
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This Special Issue gathers studies from ten scholars who discuss the relationship between Buddhism, Science, and Technology, focusing on the challenges that Buddhism faces in the processes of modernization and digitization.
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As the territory of Qing China expanded, so evolved the ways in which birds, beasts, fish, trees, and flowers came to be known in the multilingual empire. The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China is the first systematic study of how the Qing court sought to codify Manchu and Chinese words for animals and plants throughout the eighteenth century.
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La découverte au tournant du xxe siècle de milliers de documents dans l’oasis centrasiatique de Dunhuang fut comparable, par son retentissement scientifique, à celle des manuscrits de la mer Morte ou de la Genizah du Caire.
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This publication brings together perspectives from art history, visual science studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology to encounter watercol- ors, sculpture, comics, advertising, and infographics.
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In 1405, a family left their home in the Mongolian steppe and moved to China. This daring decision, taken at a time of dramatic change in eastern Eurasia, paved the way for 250 years of unlikely success at the Ming court.
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The story of a unique and controversial wartime study of pilot fatigue
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Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue unveils how these two vast empires, separated by thousands of miles, developed comparable systems to gather, order, and wield knowledge about their local worlds
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Technology, Power and Society: Critical Perspectives on the Global Digital Transformation offers a critical exploration of how digitalization, datafication, and automation impact societies worldwide, with a particular focus on underrepresented and understudied contexts.
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With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues is “a breathtaking journey through the intertwined histories of contagions and systemic inequities that have shaped our history” (Uché Blackstock, New York Times bestselling author).
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Im Sommer 1925 ist es Werner Heisenberg, der mit einer kurzen, kryptischen Arbeit, „Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen“, eine neue Quantenmechanik begründet, die im Mikroskopischen an die Stelle der Newtonschen Mechanik tritt.
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