The project sets out to write a history of knowledge that takes the interaction between disciplines as its primary subject. The project’s historical framework is the postformative period, 1200-1800 CE, which saw the rise of new institutions of learning, the proliferation of libraries, the formation and integration of disciplines and curricular texts, and an increase in academic travel, facilitating interdisciplinary cooperation, competition and conflict. The project promises to transform our understanding of the intellectual dynamics of this period by applying the lens of polymathy and interdisciplinarity. Previous scholarship has focused on intellectual products (i.e., doctrines and texts) and has tended to project our contemporary disciplinary divisions onto the premodern period (e.g., humanities v. sciences; religious v. secular). This project departs from these approaches by focusing on epistemic processes and practices rather than products and artefacts. The PI will be supported by an interdisciplinary team of researchers covering, together, the intersections between philology, theology, exegesis, law, medicine, logic, algebra, and geometry in premodern Islamic epistemic cultures. Know will make significant contributions to interdisciplinarity and polymathy studies, as well as the history of knowledge.
This project is generously funded by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council.