Handbook on Cultural Astronomies in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe

Editors

Josefina Rodríguez-Arribas (L. & A. Birkenmajer Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Nicholas Campion (University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter)
Henrique Leitão (Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia, Lisbon)

We kindly invite abstract submissions to contribute to a proposed edited handbook on Cultural Astronomies in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe from the 13th through the 17th centuries, intended for publication by Brill.

All medieval and early modern astronomy existed within a cultural context encompassing conceptual and philosophical frameworks, institutions, religion, medicine, agriculture, social and political structures, magic, divination, music, astrology, mysticism, literacy, visual culture, technical practices and instruments, knowledge production, and the built environment.

The book will present as complete an overview as possible of the different forms the practice and understanding of astronomy took in the diverse cultures of Europe (from the Iberian Peninsula to Russia, from Italy and Greece to the Nordic countries and Netherlands, including Eastern and Central Europe), from the 13th through the 17th century. The approach is interdisciplinary, and the editors are eager to challenge the well-established separation of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Thus, we welcome contributions from any discipline where stellar sciences emerge as a cultural, social, political, artistic, intellectual, and linguistic phenomenon, and may focus on intellectual or religious culture, as well as the transmission between cultures. We would like to consider the various cultural dimensions of the stellar sciences in medieval and early-modern European countries (including the Ottoman Empire in its European context).

The aim is to create a reference book which includes a range of contributions across expressions of astronomy in culture and cultural applications of astronomy in Europe in these centuries. All contributions must include research which has not previously been published.

We ask contributors to place their contribution within the wider state of the art of their corresponding field, and to address the cultural dimensions of astronomy from their specific disciplinary and methodological approach (which must be explicit in the introductory section of their contributions).

Please submit abstracts (300-400 words) by November 30, 2023. Those invited to submit full chapters will be notified by December 15, 2023. Deadline for the submission of the complete chapters: November 30, 2024