One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]

This chapter analyses the image production practices of the Goettingen university anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and the Berlin artis Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) when they collaborated on Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach wanted Chodowiecki to produce family scences for each of…[Read more]

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville was one of the most widely read works of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the number of surviving manuscripts. August Eduard Anspach’s handlist from the 1940s puts their number at almost 1,200, of which approximately 300 were estimated to have been copied before the year 1000. This article, based on a…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

The genesis and growth of minerals, as well as the existence in ore veins of such organic features as ‘seeds’, ‘matrices’, and ‘nourishment’, remained central and recurrent issues for natural philosophers, technicians, alchemists and practitioners throughout early modern Europe. By providing an overview of the main themes, voices, and concurrent…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and o…[Read more]

The chapter argues that disciplinary memory claims in US American communication research have become smaller, more parochial, and less potent, as their underlying referent—the discipline—has splintered in the wake of the digital in the mid-1990s. For decades after its institutionalization in the 1950s, US communication research had relied on gra…[Read more]

NASA’s Viking probes were launched in 1975. Six years earlier an International Planetary Patrol Network of telescopes was set up to observe Martian surface conditions. Sites were chosen to provide continuous observing, and were located in Hawaii, eastern Australia, India, South Africa, Chile, and central USA. Negotiations for a facility to be s…[Read more]

Focussing the Nasa’s Opportunity Rover, the essay claims the field of creativity as definitively human, supported by Vilém Flusser’s understanding the the “apparatus”.

This article analyzes the famous tenth-century Greek alchemical codex Marcianus graecus 299, and in particular its first quire, considering the structure and significance of the manuscript as a whole.

Writing a factual or fictional dream is a difficult task as its ›otherness‹ will challenge all of our accustomed modes of narration. So the existence of established cultural and textual patterns is a welcome help. This collection of essays describes these patterns, their historical and individual modifications and their relation to the dre…[Read more]

This chapter analyzes administrative efforts to control epizootic disease in eighteenth-century Schleswig-Holstein as disaster management. It points to the importance of quarantine, slaughter, and the control of trade as the principal methods adopted by governments and draws links with the methods used to control plague in humans. The chapter…[Read more]

Ritual-magical divination in manuscript Hs. 3227a of the Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg

The tomb of Sunan Kudus is one of the walisongo monuments. The development of tourism caused a shift in the function and value of the tomb. The purpose of the study was conducted to explain the commodification of religious tourism in the Sunan Kudus Grave with research problems including: (1) the causes of commodification of the Sunan Kudus tomb,…[Read more]

This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth century Caucasus with a view to clarifying the relevance of these legacies today. I focus in particular on the polymath writer ʿAbbās Qulī Āghā Bākīkhānūf (1794–1847). As I explore Bākīkhānūf’s historical writing, I consider how the Persianate liter…[Read more]

Liste der Neuerscheinungen zur deutschsprachigen historischen Wissens- und Gebrauchsliteratur 2019.

On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments, and academic malpractices in Italy – and how someone disagreed (Isis, Vol. 110, n. S1, pp. 15-17 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/707594)