Institute's Bibliography (PuRe) Team

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Books

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.

 

 

2025
Book

Wuzhi, wuzhixing yu lishi shuxie: kexueshi de xin jiyu 物质, 物质性与历史书写: 科学史的新机遇 [Material, Materiality and Historiography: New Opportunities in the History of Science]

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Revisiting Premodern Islamic Science and Experience

This open access book takes a fresh look at the nature and place of experience in premodern Islamic science. It seeks to answer two questions: What kind of experience constituted premodern Islamic science? And in what ways did that experience constitute science?

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2024
Book

Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant

A sweeping intellectual biography that restores the Enlightenment polymath to the intellectual, scientific, and courtly worlds that shaped his early life and thought

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Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium

What type of exchanges occurred between West and East Asia in the first millennium CE? What sort of connections existed between Persia and China? What did the Chinese know of early Islam?

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Sozialgeschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: Personalentwicklung, Karrieren und Arbeitsbedingungen 1948–2005

Die sozialhistorische Studie untersucht die veränderten Bedingungen wissenschaftlicher Arbeit und die Transformationen beruflicher Kooperationsbeziehungen in der Grundlagenforschung am Beispiel der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts.

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Sea Level: A History

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

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Hierarchies: The Max Planck Society in Gender Trouble

The Max Planck Society (MPG), one of the most successful research institutions worldwide, serves as a prime example of the German science system, in which hierarchies and relations of dependency play a major role.

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The Social Drama of Daily Work: A Manual for Historians

Part manifesto, part manual, this book offers historians of all levels both subject and approach. The subject is work. In every place-time people made and sold objects – and struggled with annoying customers or government regulation.

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Edited Book

Imagining the Heavens Across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity

This book offers a richly illustrated kaleidoscope of astral knowledge in Eurasia to experts and lay people alike.

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Atlas of Petromodernity

The Atlas of Petromodernity is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. In forty-four short essays, inspired by an equal amount of pictorial findings, Klose and Steininger develop a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity.

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Edited Book

Albert the Great and His Arabic Sources: Medieval Science between Inheritance and Emergence

Explores the crucial role of Arabic sources in shaping Albert the Great’s work and their impact on his larger scientific programme and thus on the thirteenth-century Latin world.

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Edited Book

Globalizing Physics: One Hundred Years of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics

Following the centenary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, this volume features contributions from leading science historians from around the world on the changing roles of the institution in international affairs from its foundation in 1922 to the present.

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The Book of Disputation: A Mudejar Religious-Philosophical Treatise against Christians and Jews. A Study and Accompanying Text Edition

This is the first critical edition and study of a unique and important Muslim polemic against Christians and Jews. The Book of Disputation was written in Arabic by a Mudejar and offers new insight into the cultural and intellectual life of this Muslim minority.

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Book

Zhai zhong tu da: Zhu Yuanzhang yu Nanjing yingzao. 宅中图大: 朱元璋与南京营造

明初南京城的营建,以“墙”的建筑形态,诠释了都城作为“国之中土”的法统秩序,反映了朱元璋追求“宅中图大”的思想历程,以实现其大明开国都城传统意义上的“居于中心,谋划四方”。本书从理念、规划、建制、修筑等层面,对明初定都、建都诸问题作了系统梳理,尤其对两京制与中都的立废、城市布局与建筑等级、南京两次城建与“国之中土”的关系作了细致阐释;并通过释读南京城墙砖文,不仅明确了城墙营建的相关史实,且揭示出明初劳役组织形式以及基层社会的运行状态。

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Biological Motion: A History of Life

Biological Motion studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. To answer the question, “What is Life?,” prize-winning historian of science Janina Wellmann engages in a transdisciplinary investigation of motion as the most profound definition of living existence.

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Working Group Volume

The Planning Moment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories

The Planning Moment elaborates the myriad ways that plans and planning practices pervade recent global history.

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Beekeeping in the End Times

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change.

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The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor

This is the first book-length study of the roles played by the Manchu language at the center of the Qing empire at the height of its power in the eighteenth century.

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Contre-nature

Quelle que soit l’époque ou la culture, les humains se sont référés à la nature pour justifier les normes. Ainsi, depuis l’Antiquité, une action jugée contre-nature est, de ce fait, condamnée moralement.

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La evolución del conocimiento: repensando la ciencia para el antropoceno

Este libro presenta una nueva forma de pensar sobre la historia de la ciencia y la tecnología, ofreciendo una metanarrativa de la historia de la humanidad en la que el conocimiento constituye un factor decisivo en la evolución cultural.

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