20190725T133020190725T1530Europe/AmsterdamArticulations and Disarticulations: Translation, Medicine, and Knowledge in the Premodern World, Session I
Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.
Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab
Drift 13, Rm. 004History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.
Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab
Female Authority in Translation: Medieval Catalan Texts on Women’s HealthView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 11:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 12:00:00 UTC
My paper intends to explore the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular tradition. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine articulated its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting and erasing Latin ideas while translators, adaptors and compilers were working to bring medical literature over to new audiences. It intends to analyze through a focused case-study the gendered effects of a broad cultural process of mediation that has not been explored from this perspective. The Catalan corpus of medical texts is a relevant instance as it belongs to a particularly rich and geographically widespread linguistic tradition in the late middle ages. With the determined political concourse of the Aragonese crown, Catalan became a medical language from the late thirteenth century on, and the ongoing project Sciencia.cat provides a detailed body of evidence for both extant and missing texts allowing for a solid reconstruction of the healthcare corpus. A significant number of texts were produced during the 14th and 15th centuries and extant translations date from as early as 1305, when laywomen and men as well as emerging new groups of healthcare practitioners were involved in commissioning, producing and consuming translations in the vernacular. This essay explores globally 14th and 15th century Catalan medical texts, but it considers especially a mid-fifteenth century translation of the De curis mulierum that I have recently identified in an anonymous surgeon’s handbook.
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
Translation and the Making of a Scientific Archive: The Case of the Islamic “Translation Movement”View Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 12:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 12:30:00 UTC
Translation plays a central role in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. Two episodes of translation bookend the “Golden Age”: the translation from Greek to Arabic, and that from Arabic to Latin. In both processes, translation is understood as a mode of acquisition and/or loss where knowledge moves across a linguistic divide in a process that begins (or ends) a particular historical episode. However, this translation-as-transition paradigm fails to capture the linguistic diversity that existed on both sides of this seeming divide, and the production and consumption of this translated knowledge and its diffusion beyond the spheres of learned scientific and medical practice. Moreover, translation-as-transition paradigm foregrounds the fixity and “foreignness” of Greek knowledge rendering Islamic sciences derivative and secondary—a science-in-waiting for European Renaissance. In this paper, I look at translation in the history of Islamic medicine not as a transition but rather as a part of a larger and more comprehensive process of archive-making. Through following the works of translators and historians, I investigate how translation contributed to the production of a particular form of learned medicine, and to the making of specific socio-professional identities. I argue that understanding translations as part of the production of knowledge is key to pushing a more accurate, innovative and comprehensive global history of science in the pre-modern world.
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
Translating, Printing, and Reading the Art of DistillationView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 12:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 13:00:00 UTC
In 1651, John French (1616-1657) offered the English reading public a new handbook: The Art of Distillation. The work represents the fruits of French’s wide-ranging reading and translating practices and includes large sections (with images) extracted from Johann Rudolph Glauber’s (1604-1670) Furni novi philosophici, a series of five German tracts on distilling published in Amsterdam in the 1640s. In the mid-1730s, the Devon-based Tallamy family obtained a copy of The Art of Distillation. Lead by Rebecca Tallamy, they wrote a cornucopia of annotations into their treasured copy of French’s book, including hundreds of additional recipes and personalised selections from other contemporary medical books including the works of Nicholas Culpeper and William Salmon. The printed medical book, then, is at once a conduit and a receptacle for medical knowledge - a personal archive of know-how strategically assembled to suit the needs of the family. Taking this curious volume as a starting point, this talk explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England. I examine the intertwined practices of translation, reading and writing as ongoing, collective, and collaborative projects embedded within practices and local contexts, taking meaning both from its creators and its users. By situating the case study within analytical frameworks developed by historians of archives, I also emphasise how processes of translation, reading and note-taking were all deliberately employed to create an eighteenth-century home-based archive of everyday knowledge.
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
Commentary: Articulations and Disarticulations: Translation, Medicine, and Knowledge in the Premodern World, Session IView Abstract Organized Session03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 13:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 13:30:00 UTC
