Studies in Premodern Sciences in Memory of Noel M. Swerdlow: Antiquity to the Renaissance(74 Archimedes)

This book, in memory of Noel M. Swerdlow, brings together new work by prominent historians of the ancient Near Eastern, Indian, Arabic, Hebrew, Classical, Hellenistic, Medieval and Renaissance traditions of astronomy, astrology, philosophy and chronology to expand our knowledge and understanding of the plurality of early sciences from Babylonia to Greece, the Greco-Roman world, India and Europe. Premodern sciences are becoming ever more important to a broader narrative of the history of science and the astronomical sciences play a particularly significant role in this history. The chapters in this work offer in-depth studies of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in the history of the astronomical sciences and related fields, such as chronology. It is unique in its range of subjects, historical periods, and primary texts, treating Babylonian Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Latin sources. It represents cutting-edge research from preeminent scholars in their fields and is therefore of great interest to both historians as well as philosophers of science.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Babylonia.- 1 Early Babylonian Astronomy: Observations and Numerical Fits (Lis Brack-Bernsen).- 2 Neo-Assyrian Investigations into the Prediction of Eclipses (John Steele).- 3 Babylonian Horoscopy and Genethlialogy (Francesca Rochberg).- Part II: Greece.- 4 What Plato Meant by Saying That God Is Always Doing Geometry: Responses to the Question Posed by Plutarch in Table-Talk 8.2 (Liba Taub).- 5 Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Philosophical Schools of the Second Century CE: Apuleius of Madaura (Alan C. Bowen).- Part III: India.- 6 Visual Representations and Intertextualities in Second Millennium Sanskrit Eclipse Reckoning (Clemency Montelle).- Part IV: Europe.- 7 Levi ben Gerson’s Models for the Latitudes of Saturn and Jupiter (Robert Morrison).- 8 Calculating the Length of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Arabic Astrology and Humanist Reforms (Margaret Gaida).- 9 Albertus Magnus’s First Lunar Model (Betsey Price).- 10 Historical Chronology before Joseph Scaliger: Jean Bodin and His Discussion Partners (Anthony Grafton).- 11 Writing “Celestial History” in Early Modern Europe (Florence Hsia).

About the Author :

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Office for the History of Science and Technology. She is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and winner of the John Frederick Lewis Award for Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998). Recent publications are Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016, 2020), Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts (co-edited with Alan C. Bowen, Brill, 2020), which received the Choice Award as Outstanding Academic Title 2020), and Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Rochberg is an Assyriologist and historian of science. Her work has consistently brought a cultural-historical perspective to the analysis of ancient science, culminating in her proposal to add the anthropology of science to currently existing history, philosophy, and sociology of science methods.