Practices and Narratives of Experience in Premodern Eurasia

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space and time. We move from the medieval cloister and university to the early modern marketplace, we journey to the republic of letters that included early modern scholars from Constantinople to London, and we delve into the engagement of early modern scholars with texts and ideas from centuries earlier. Each paper examines a different set of narratives around experience: how Scholastic philosophers interested in metacognition influenced later work in the life sciences; how competing narratives of experience and authority were employed by different healers in the medical marketplace in sixteenth-century Germany and Italy; how stories about experience and experiment became central to the legend of Roger Bacon, and to later narratives about the development of modern science; and, finally, how natural philosophers and physicians from the Ottoman Empire and the Latin Christian West used experience as a basis for creating universal natural knowledge. Taken together, all four papers portray the robust, complex, and contingent ways in which experience presented a path to natural knowledge, either alongside text-based authority, or in spite of it.