dept1_brentjes–book_on_teaching

Explanation of lunar phases by Abu l-Rayhan al-Biruni (d. after 1048) for Lady Rayhana from Khwarazm, MS London, British Library, Or. 3849, f. 31b; al-Biruni, Book of the Stars, copied in 1435.

Working Group (2017-2025)

Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE)

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Contact: Stamatina Mastorakou

This working group, consisting of an international team of researchers, examines the visual representations of different aspects of the heavens from deities to demons and from stars to weather phenomena on diverse material objects and media like paintings, sculptures, instruments, stone tablets, coins, textiles, manuscripts, murals, or books.

The working group’s goal is to investigate the roles of and relationships between texts, visual specimens, iconographic forms, and material objects in the production, reproduction, and crosscultural movements of astral knowledge over almost 6000 years. It aims at offering a rich and broad array of possibilities for interdisciplinary studying contacts, commonalities, overlaps, differences, and ruptures across different territories, time periods, social organizations, and linguistic communities. The materiality of such visual representations unveils movements of concepts, values, and lifestyles across social strata within a given society as well as the stability or fluidity of their subsets and thus provides access to sociocultural complexities of individual, communal, societal, and cross-cultural modes of knowledge practices, organizing relations and human interactions with natural phenomena and the celestial realm on different sociocultural levels.

An annotated image database has been created, which currently consists of a collection of more than 2500 images and objects of the heavens or of celestial phenomena covering both the spatial and temporal breadth envisioned in the project and documenting the multiple materials employed for those visualizations. The growing database serves as a central research tool and reflects the collaborative endeavor to investigate processes of knowledge formation, exchange, appropriation, and transformation in Eurasia and North Africa with regard to astronomy, astrology, meteorology, the formation of myths, political and religious rituals, healing and medical theories, and the organization of time and everyday life.

In the beginning of 2021, the working group entered its second phase by implementing two new, long-term individual research projects focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome and early modern Western Europe. Further new research projects related to the themes and goals of the working group are intended to broaden the international team of scholars through different formats of collaboration and cooperation. A lecture series, Visualizations of the Heavens, is running in Spring 2022 and a reading group in 2022-2023.

Upcoming Events

Tombs and Astral Knowledge from Egypt to China (1000 BCE–1000 CE)

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Past Events

Thematic Cluster: Visualizing Cosmologies

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Visualization of Heavens I

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Visualization of Heavens II

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Visualization Project Meeting

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The Book of Felicity: Time and Fortune at the Ottoman Court

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Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGart)

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The Chinese Reception of Islamic and European Astronomy: Starmaps Produced by Jesuits in China

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The Unicorn-Lion Law: Affirming the Correct Standard of Comparison for Scholarship in the Humanities

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Sound & Science: Digital Histories—a Database in the History of Acoustics

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Diagram Diversity in the Light of Digital Humanities: Types and Ambiguous Cases

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Imagining the Stars in Premodern Eurasia: Intercultural Comparisons Between East and West Asia

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The Grand Zodiacal Tablets and the Papyri Graecae Magicae: Which Connection between Magic and Astrology?

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Science in Practice: Astronomical Instruments in the Islamic World

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Orientation and Organization of the Zodiacal Image in the Roman Empire

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Constellations and Celestial Globes from the Islamic World: The Use of Virtual Reality Technology as a New Interpretative Tool

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Visualizations of the Heavens—The Database as a Research Tool

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A Globalised Visual Culture?: Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art

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Publications

Brentjes, Sonja and Dagmar Schäfer, eds. (2020). Imagining the Heavens: Historiographical Challenges and Eurasian Perspectives. Special issue, NTM 28 (3). Basel: Birkhäuser. https://link.springer.com/journal/48/volumes-and-issues/28-3.

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Brentjes, Sonja (2018). “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa.” In Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935–2018, ed. S. Schmidtke, 134–153. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.

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Brentjes, Sonja (2014). “Safavid art, science, and courtly education in the seventeenth century.” In From Alexandria, through Baghdad : surveys and studies in the ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic mathematical sciences in honor of J. L. Berggren, ed. N. Sidoli and G. Van Brummelen, 487–502. Berlin [u.a.]: Springer.

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Brentjes, Sonja (2009). “The Interplay of Science, Art and Literature in Islamic Societies before 1700.” In Science, Literature and Aesthetics, ed. A. Dev and P. Bhadury, 453–484. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations.

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Projects