Sonja Brentjes

This book surveys teaching and learning of the mathematical and occult sciences, medicine and natural philosophy in various Islamicate societies between 800 and 1700. It focuses in particular on Egypt and Syria between 1200 and 1600, but looks up also developments in Iran, India, Anatolia, and Iraq. It talks about institutions of teaching and learning such a house and court teachers, madrasas, hospitals, in-family teaching and travelling in search of knowledge and the content of the various sciences taught by or at them. Methods of teaching and learning, teaching bestsellers and their geographical and temporal dissemination, as well as encyclopaedias and literature on the classification of the sciences will be discussed in further chapters.

Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800-1700)

Jürgen Renn

The contributions to this volume enter into a dialogue about the routes, modes and institutions that transferred and transformed knowledge across the late antique Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Each contribution not only presents a different case study but also investigates a different type of question, ranging from how history-writing drew on cross-culturally constructed stories and shared sets of skills and values, to how an ancient warlord was transformed into the iconic hero of a newly created monotheistic religion. Between these two poles, the emergence of a new, knowledge-related, but market-based profession in Baghdad is discussed, alongside the long-distance transfer of texts, doctrines and values within a religious minority community from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The authors also investigate the outsourcing of military units and skills across religious and political boundaries, the construction of cross-cultural knowledge of the balance through networks of scholars, patrons, merchants and craftsmen, as well as differences in linguistic and pharmaceutical practices in mixed cultural environments for shared corpora of texts, drugs and plants.

Sonja Brentjes

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