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.

Across six sections, a group of subject experts discuss and analyze scientific practices across a wide range of Islamicate societies. The authors take into consideration several contexts in which science was practiced, ranging from intellectual traditions and persuasions to institutions, such as courts, schools, hospitals, and observatories, to the materiality of scientific practices, including the arts and craftsmanship. Chapters also devote attention to scientific practices of minority communities in Muslim majority societies, and Muslim minority groups in societies outside the Islamicate world, thereby allowing readers to better understand the opportunities and constraints of scientific practices under varying local conditions.

Through replacing Islam with Islamicate societies, the book opens up ways to explain similarities and differences between diverse societies ruled by Muslim dynasties. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for both established academics and students looking for an introduction to the field. It will appeal to those involved in the study of the history of science, the history of ideas, intellectual history, social or cultural history, Islamic studies, Middle East and African studies including history, and studies of Muslim communities in Europe and South and East Asia.

Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science in Islamicate societies and Christian Europe; she is an affiliated scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her research includes the history of the mathematical sciences, mapmaking, institutions, cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and the involvement of the arts in the sciences. Among her recent publications are Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies, 800-1700 (2018); Brentjes, S., Edis, T. and Richter-Bernburg, L. 1001 Distortions: How (Not) to Narrate the History of Science, Medicine and Technology in Non-Western Cultures (2016) and Brentjes, S. ＂MS Paris, Bibliothèque des Missions Étrangères 1069: The French-Arabic Dictionary of François Pétis de la Croix (1653-1713)?＂ Mediterranea. International journal on the transfer of knowledge, 6 (2021), 57-84.

Peter Barker (Associate Editor) is Professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma, USA. His research includes applying insights from cognitive psychology to conceptual change, and historical studies of the positive role of religion in early modern science and the cultural settings of major figures from the Scientific Revolution. Since learning Persian, he has begun work on knowledge exchanges between Safavid Persia and Mughal India. His recent publications include: ＂The Social Structure of Islamicate Science,＂ Journal of World Philosophies, 3 (2017): 37-47; ＂The Copernican Revolution since Kuhn,＂ in Wray K. B. (ed.) Interpreting Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 145-64, and ＂East-West Passages: European Interest in Islamicate Astronomy during the Scientific Revolution,＂ in Mehl, É. et Pantin, I. (eds.), De mundi recentioribus phænomenis: Cosmologie et science dans l’Europe des Temps modernes, XVe-XVIIe siècles. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.

Rana Brentjes (Assistant Editor) is a photo designer and curator with a MA in contemporary art history and has submitted her PhD thesis in contemporary German history at Goldsmith College, London. She has curated art exhibitions in Berlin and Brandenburg, written on Palestinian cinematography and co-edits Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity (2023). Currently, she is digital content curator of the research group ＂Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens＂ in Department III at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.