Biography

Katharine Park is a historian of early science and medicine. She holds a doctorate in the History of Science from Harvard University, where she taught until she retired in 2015. She is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985); Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, coauthored with Lorraine Daston (Zone Books, 1998); and Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006).

Project Summary

Park’s book-in-progress, Sea of Knowledge: Science in the Medieval Mediterranean, 800-1500, is based on two premises. The first is that during the period covered by the book, detailed and systematic inquiry into the natural world, and knowledge concerning it, was primarily embodied in objects and practices rather than in texts, the diffusion of which was slow and halting across linguistic boundaries and confined to the literate, who represented a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of the region in question. The creators and transmitters of this broader kind of knowledge included men and women with a wide range of backgrounds and interests, many of them non-literate but versed in the observation of natural phenomena and the manipulation of materials, living and non-living, for ends both practical and intellectual. The second premise is that “western science” in the period in question should be conceived broadly to embrace science in western Eurasia, including traditions that used to be defined by linguistic difference, specifically Greek, Arabic, and Latin science. These three traditions were in unbroken conversation with one another throughout the period in question, and the Mediterranean basin was where they overlapped. The book is organized around a chronological series of “objects” that instantiated various kinds of natural knowledge that spanned all three traditions, beginning with the elephant sent by Hārūn al-Rashīd to Charlemagne and ending with the ship-form known as the galley, the latter being the focus of Park’s work at I Tatti. In addition to Elephant and Galley, the other chapters are March, Astrolabe, Map, Hospital, Abacus, Falcon, and Nature.