Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World

Agathe Keller is senior research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), within the SPHere (Science, Philosophy, History) research lab. Her work centers on the history of mathematics as found in Sanskrit sources, with a special focus on commentaries. She also studies the historiography of science in south Asia from the late 18th century to contemporary political discourses on traditional science in India. She has recently co-edited with K. Chemla and C. Proust, Cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world. (Springer, 2022).Karine Chemla, Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), research group SPHERE (Université Paris Cité & CNRS). Her work focuses, from a historical anthropology viewpoint, on the relationship between mathematics and the various cultures in the context of which it is practiced. Chemla co-edited, with Glenn Most, Mathematical Commentaries in theAncient World: A Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022); and, with A. Keller and C. Proust, Cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world. (Springer, 2022).

• Chapter 1. Introduction (Karine Chemla and Agathe Keller).- Part I: Ancient Editorial and Cross-Linguistic Practices.- Chapter 2. Before the Library of Babel: On some Very Early Philologers (Piotr Michalowski).- Chapter 3. A Theory of Philological Practice in Early Modern India (Sheldon Pollock).- Part II: What was at Issue in Returning to Ancient Texts in Early Modern and Modern Times?.- Chapter 4. Rethinking the Ancient Mathematical Text: Ming-Qing Scholars’ Critical Reflections on The Gnomon of Zhou [Dynasty] (Han Qi).- Chapter 5. The Asiatic Society, the Bibliotheca Indica and Devanāgarī Pinting in Bengal: The Historical Context of the Editio Princeps of the Nyāyabhāṣya (Alessandro Graheli).- Chapter 6. Editing a Foundational Work on Classical Indian Medicine: The Printed Editions of the Carakasaṃhitā in Context (Karin Preisendanz).- Part III: Shaping Specific Features of Scientific Texts.- Chapter 7. Representing numbers and quantities in editions of mathematical cuneiform texts (Christine Proust).- Chapter 8. Numbers and Quantities in Editions of Economic and Administrative Cuneiform Texts at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. The Case of the Capacity System (Cecile Michel).- Chapter 9. Reduction of Absurdity: Notes on the editorial Transformations of Greek Diagrams (Reviel Netz).- Chapter 10. Editing the Sumerians, How and Why? (Jerrold S. Cooper).- Part IV: Publishing Ancient Mathematical and Astronomical texts: Comparative Perspectives.- Chapter 11. The critical edition of the mathematical texts of Greek Antiquity: challenges and method (Micheline Decorps).- Chapter 12. Shaping a Mathematical text in Sanskrit: H. T. Colebrooke, Sudhākara Dvivedin, and Pṛthūdaka‘s commentary on the twelfth chapter of the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (Agathe Keller).- Chapter 13. On the First Printed Edition of the Mathematical Book in Nine Chapters (1842) (Yiwen Zhu & Cheng Zheng).- Chapter 14. Babylonian Astronomy: Editing and Interpreting an Ancient Science (Matthieu Ossendrijver).- Chapter 15. Postface (Glenn Most).- Annexure.- Index.