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Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar and Workshop: Catalogues and Registers as Evidence in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology: 20 July — 24 July

EBSW Poster

From 20 July to 24 July 2026 at the University of Edinburgh.

This interdisciplinary seminar aims to investigate the significant potential of historical registers of commodities, books, and borrowing as sources for the study of the history of mathematics, science, and technology, as well as intellectual history. Beyond their practical applications, catalogues and registers of books can reveal the intellectual landscape of a particular time and place. They can show which books were available, what was considered important, and how knowledge was organised and categorised. By examining these registers, catalogues, and records, we can track the circulation of ideas across disciplines and regions. This examination can provide context for understanding the development of scientific and mathematical thought. As the Books and Borrowings, 1750-1830, project has demonstrated, careful attention to the social context of registers of borrowing can thicken our descriptions and enrich our understanding of how knowledge has been used. Linked to the vision of the great or universal library, the concept of secular universalism has long been thought to spread its legitimisation through the globalisation of modern mathematics. Building on Kant, universalist logicians and philosophers lay claim to a secular universal mode of reasoning that is common to all minds, displacing previous evangelical universalist modes such as those associated with Leibniz, and non-universal epistemes. Becoming widespread from the globalisation of curricular reforms like William Whewell’s or the Madras system, this secular universal conception demanded a way to address the accumulated knowledge and traditions of the past to clear space for its own epistemic break. That is, modern, global mathematics is a site where ideas must somehow contend with the past before secular universalism can become universal.

Brief Schedule

Monday 20 July
1300h/1600h Orientation at the Signet Library
1800h Opening lecture: Adrian Johns “Registers and the Dream of Universal Information: A Selective History”
Tuesday 21 July – 20th century catalogues Wednesday 22 July – 16/17th century Thursday 23 July – 18th/19th century Friday 24 July
900h CRC: Workshop 1 CRC: Workshop 3 CRC: Workshop 5 CRC: Revisiting materials
1100h CRC: Workshop 2 CRC: Workshop 4 CRC: Workshop 6 CRC: Closing discussion
1300h Lunch Lunch Lunch
1400h Seminar 1: Translation, Mathematics, and Heterolinguality Seminar 3: Methods and Techniques Seminar 5: Evidence of the Protocols of Natural Observation
1600h Seminar 2: Establishing Bookish Ways of Knowing Seminar 4: Expanding Our Sources and Evidence Seminar 6: Catalogues Contextualising Individual Thinkers
1800h

Travel and housing information

University Accommodations

Edinburgh can be quite expensive, but the University of Edinburgh has a number of inexpensive options:

Pricing is per night with 24 hour cancellation per room, this also includes breakfast.

Reserve a room as soon as possible, as they can fill up quickly. Write to reservations@ed.ac.uk and reference the “EBSW workshop.”

UK ETA and Visas

If you are traveling to Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom from outside the UK or if you do not meet circumstances listed at https://www.gov.uk/eta/when-not-need-eta, you will need to get an electronic travel authorization (ETA). Visit https://www.gov.uk/eta/apply for more information and to apply.

If you need a letter of invitation or other paperwork in support of a visa, please write to J.P. at jascher@ed.ac.uk or Dani at danielle.fox@ed.ac.uk

Detailed Schedule

Monday 20 July
1300h — 1600h Signet Library visit and orientation
1900h Opening lecture
Tuesday 21 July – 20th century catalogues Wednesday 22 July – 16/17th century Thursday 23 July – 18th/19th century Friday 24 July
900h CRC: Workshop 1 CRC: Workshop 3 CRC: Workshop 5 CRC: Revisiting materials
1100h CRC: Workshop 2 CRC: Workshop 4 CRC: Workshop 6 CRC: Closing discussion
1300h Lunch Lunch Lunch
1400h Seminar 1: Translation, Mathematics, and Heterolinguality Seminar 3: Methods and Techniques Seminar 5: Evidence of the Protocols of Natural Observation
1600h Seminar 2: Establishing Bookish Ways of Knowing Seminar 4: Expanding Our Sources and Evidence Seminar 6: Catalogues Contextualising Individual Thinkers
1800h

Location

The workshops and seminars will be at the Centre for Research Collections (CRC) on the 6th floor of the Main University Library on George Square in Teaching Room 1. The room does not allow food or drink, but participants will be able to get refreshments as they need them at the nearby library cafes courtesy of the UKRI.

Papers and Participants

Pre-circulated papers (password protected)

The papers cluster around five themes: Translation, Mathematics, and Heterolinguality; Establishing Bookish Ways of Knowing; Expanding Our Sources and Evidence; Evidence of the Protocols of Natural Observation; and Catalogues Contextualising Individual Thinkers. Each theme has three separate papers, except Catalogues Contextualising Individual Thinkers where one paper is joint. Each seminar will either be a traditional panel or a roundtable.

Each group will decide between a roundtable panel or traditional panel format. In a roundtable, people generally speak for around five minutes each, and then just have a long, organic discussion. However, a roundtable requires that most participants pre-circulate a fairly complete paper that each of them read in advance.

In a traditional panel, each person presents for 15-20 minutes and there’s 15-20 minutes of discussion for each presentation. The only real choice is whether discussion comes after each paper or at the end.

Translation, Mathematics, and Heterolinguality

The papers in this cluster think about translation, transmission, mathematics, and heterolinguality. The seek to understand and address the ways that mathematics move across cultures while moving between languages. They interogate failures of translation, but also successes, and creative misunderstandings along with disruptive confusions.

Beyond the “imaginary geographies” of Mathematics: Tracking the circulation of Arabic Mathematical Knowledge through the University of Edinburgh Catalogues / Patricia Rogers progers@ed.ac.uk

This proposal investigates the use of library catalogues and registers as a method to generate evidence of the process of “imaginary geography” described by Edward Said. This process socially constructs a historical and cultural separation between the Orient and the Occident. As a research assistant for the project Situating International and Global Mathematics (SIGMA), I focus on Arabic mathematicians, building on the work of scholars like Berggren (1986) and O’Connor & Robertson (1999). These scholars have demonstrated how mathematical achievements previously attributed to European mathematics were, in fact, developed much earlier by Arabic mathematicians, challenging the misguided notion that they merely reproduced Greek science through translation. Through two specific examples within the conglomerate of Arabic mathematics, I intend to study the tracks of circulation and categorization of specific author collections from the 16th century to the present. By analysing how these works have been understood and valued through time, I focus on: 1.The “Astrolabe Scholars” (including Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi, Abu Nasr Mansur, and Ibrahim ibn Sinan). 2.The foundational work of the Abbasid House of Wisdom, who engaged in translation not as a passive act, but as an active research effort engaging with Greek science. The central challenges this project addresses are: •The Problem of Language: How to describe these contributions without falling into anachronistic, “universalized” modern categories that have relegated Islamic mathematics to a static, outdated, and exoticized past. •The Power and Dynamism of the Registers: By analysing the evolution of categorization and shelving practices in the University of Edinburgh Library, this study reveals “schemas of authority” and the prioritization of specific knowledge. It demonstrates how certain knowledge is moved in or out of the “Orient” category. By examining which authors these scholars were shelved with and how their authority was ascribed over time, this project seeks to uncover the “modern gaze” that continues to shape our understanding of global intellectual history. In a contemporary climate where ideas of “the Orient” are motivated by bellicose conflicts and discussed in terms of erasure, it is vital to reconstruct a more accurate, interconnected history of science and mathematics.

I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS). My doctoral research focuses on the intersections between gender and colonial power in the tropical research conducted in Panama during the 20th century. Currently, I am a Research Assistant in the project Situating International and Global Mathematics (SIGMA), where I am working on epistemic communities and the different ways in which they can be traced materially.

The Editions of Archimedes / E.A. Hunter eahunter@uchicago.edu

Heiberg’s nineteenth-century edition of the Archimedean corpus is treated as the standard text, yet this stability obscures the numerous early modern printings between it and the editio princeps, each of which differ substantially in form, organization, and editorial approach. These editions did not transmit an established corpus; they shaped the conditions under which the Archimedean corpus could be read and rendered intelligible. Access to the text was therefore mediated not only by the fragmentary survival of the Greek tradition but also by successive layers of editorial intervention and interpretative strategies that reorganized and reframed it. Drawing on marginalia and archival evidence, I show that different editions structured distinct modes of engagement. At the same time, readers frequently worked across multiple editions in parallel, suggesting that no single version of the corpus was considered sufficient on its own. Such practices complicate assumptions of textual stability and redirects attention to the composite and situational character of mathematical reading. A library’s holdings, in this sense, does not simply reflect what was available on the market at a given moment or what was given by a donor; it can also index intended readerships and patterns of actual use. In this presentation, I outline the principal editions in circulation and the patterns of their documented use, before turning to examples from Edinburgh and Glasgow.

E. A. Hunter is a PhD student at the University of Chicago in the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the rare book assistant for the John Crerar Library.

The Catalogue Is the Archive: Reconstructing Thomas Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections and Translations (1661, 1665) / Constance Hardesty Constance.Hardesty@mansfield.ox.ac.uk

Catalogues and registers capture moments of ownership, ambition, circulation, and classification. When read in conversation with one another, these resources permit scholars to reconstruct otherwise inaccessible intellectual networks and activities. This paper argues that catalogues and registers can be fruitfully employed not only as finding aids but as primary archives for reconstructing poorly documented books and actors in the history of mathematics. As a case study, it examines Thomas Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections and Translations (1661, 1665), an ambitious anthology of works by ancient and contemporary writers, including Galileo, Archimedes, Descartes, and Fermat. A commercial failure on publication, the book has remained marginal in both history of mathematics and history of the book. This is so despite the first volume’s presence in several private collections and institutional libraries, including the University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections. Conventionally, we expect that where correspondence, diaries, institutional minutes, or authorial papers are lacking, historical recovery must also be slight. In the case of the Mathematical Collections, the lack of common documentary evidence forces novel use of other resources. This paper shows how two catalogues and two registers can be jointly interpreted to fill gaps in the biography of an obscure translator and to reconstruct his book’s tortuous path through funding, production, circulation, and reception. Each resource captures some aspect of its subject obliquely, and the historical account develops through triangulation. Drawn from a corpus of nine registers and catalogues, the four sources highlighted in this paper include the Stationers’ Register, which preserves booksellers’ claims to “Galileus his mathematical works” and thus its commercial framing; the Calendar of State Papers, which situates the project within Restoration patronage and Royal Society networks; an auction catalogue whose bibliographical description enables a surprising discovery; and Salusbury’s manuscript catalogue of the Marquess of Dorchester’s library, which reveals the continental sources that may have been available to him. Interpreted together, these sources render the Mathematical Collections visible as a node in Restoration mathematics, patronage, and print commerce. The history of the Mathematical Collections suggests that obscurity reflects the limits of historiography. Certain books and individuals disappear not because they lacked contemporary or historical importance, but because their evidence survives in forms that scholars may easily overlook.

Constance Hardesty is author of “Thomas Salusbury’s Lesser Half: The First Volume of Mathematical Collections and Translations (1661, 1665)’, in Mathematical Book Histories, ed. Philip Beeley and Ciarán Mac an Bhaird (2024). She is curator of a related exhibit, ‘The Ghost in the Library,’ at the Royal College of Physicians. A doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, she researches the material production of early modern mathematical books.

Establishing Bookish Ways of Knowing

These papers consider how we establish ways of knowing centred on the book. Why is the book a site of knowledge and how do we think of the book developing or contending as a site of knowledge? Is this process of establishing a way of knowing a kind of politics or related to politics? Or, asked another way, is it possible for establishing bookish ways of knowing to not be political and tactical? Furthermore, these papers consider books as read in different forms and sites crossing different cultures of knowing.

Registers of Time: Panchangams and Predictive Knowledge in Early India / Dr Bharti Chhibber bharti.chhibber@gmail.com

This paper examines the role of Panchangams, Hindu calendrical almanacs as registers that encode predictive knowledge at the intersection of cosmology, divination, and proto-scientific practice in early India. Panchangams tabulate planetary positions, lunar phases, nakshatras, eclipses, and seasonal markers, serving both ritual and practical purposes. Drawing on early textual foundations such as the Rigveda and their systematisation in Jyotiṣha, the study demonstrates how these registers structured knowledge of cyclical time, linking cosmological concepts such as Yugas, kalpas, and cosmic dissolution to socially and practically meaningful predictions. Far from serving solely ritual functions, Panchang forecasting guided communities in agriculture, ritual timing, and environmental adaptation, including the timing and variability of the monsoon. For example, a 17th-century Panchang from Rajasthan predicts the onset of the rainy season based on lunar and nakshatra calculations, illustrating the practical utility of these registers. By situating Panchangams at the intersection of observation, calculation, and textual authority, the paper highlights how Jyotiṣha practitioners cultivated recognized expertise through systematic computation and sustained observation. Engaging directly with the seminar’s focus on catalogues and registers, the study draws on digitized Panchangams via the Digital South Asia Library and Internet Archive, complemented by planned examination of manuscripts, printed almanacs, and library catalogues at the University of Edinburgh, including early modern Indian astronomical texts and records of South Asian collections. This dual approach allows analysis of textual content alongside physical evidence, revealing patterns of knowledge organization, circulation, provenance, and social legitimacy. By foregrounding the productive interaction between cosmological thought and empirical practice, this study positions early Indian calendrical forecasting as a significant and globally relevant contribution to the history of mathematics, science, and technology. It demonstrates how registers can encode complex predictive knowledge with both practical and social impact, enriching our understanding of early modern scientific and cultural epistemes.

Dr. Bharti Chhibber is teaching in University of Delhi, India. She is an author, socio-political analyst and an environmentalist. She is working in international relations, Europe, US, historical studies, gender, art, museum studies, culture, indigenous knowledge system, technology and climate change. Dr. Chhibber has published widely and has been honoured with international & national awards. She is honorary National Coordinator-Sustainability Education, India. She is an invited media expert and visiting scholar in the US and Europe.

Robert Sibbald’s Museum Catalogue / Rene Winkler rene.winkler@gmail.com

How can a private collection become an institution? What role does a museum catalogue play in a collector’s didactic vision? What models of collecting were available to the early modern naturalist? To explore these questions, I examine the late-seventeenth-century Scottish collection of Sir Andrew Balfour (1630–1694) and the catalogue of the Auctarium Musaei Balfouriani (1697), written by Balfour’s friend Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722). After Balfour’s death in 1694, the Edinburgh town council acquired his substantial collection in 1695 with the aim of establishing a museum at the Town College. Following a series of unsuccessful keeperships and cataloguing attempts, Sibbald augmented the collection with his own natural history specimens and produced a printed catalogue, the first of its kind in Scotland. The catalogue employs an ambitious five-tiered classification system that progresses from simple to complex natural forms and aims to provide a flexible yet universal organisation of natural knowledge. Furthermore, it functioned as a manuductio—a leading by the hand—in the absence of a skilled naturalist. Like many projects of institutionalisation and classification, Sibbald’s endeavour ultimately faltered because of inadequate funding and limited political support. Nevertheless, examination of the Auctarium catalogue reveals important shifts in the organisation of knowledge during the early phase of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Rene Winkler recently completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and this paper is part of an unpublished chapter of his thesis “’The Best of the Antients and Moderns’: Robert Sibbald, natural history, medicine and collecting in Scotland (c.1650-1710).” He continues to work on the history of natural history, collecting, medicine and museums. His latest project – jointly with Dr Richard Oosterhoff – is the digitisation of the letters of the phrenologist George Combe.

Transforming Catalogues: The Religious Motives of the Hartlib Circle in the Management of Knowledge / Bo van Broekhoven s1971641@ed.ac.uk

The Hartlib Circle was a seventeenth-century pan-European community that pursued the universal reform of society, including the processes of making and disseminating knowledge. This community centred around the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib and his extraordinary Ephemerides. One strand of scholarship on the Hartlib Circle has looked at science, medicine, and the role of the network in founding the Royal Society of London. Another important strand focuses on the Hartlib Circle as a Republic of Letters and as a group of intelligencers with an eye to politics. This paper looks at the connection between religious motives and the management of knowledge, drawing on writings and notes by Hartlib and his closest associate, the Scottish divine John Dury. I argue that cataloguing known and desired sources of information was an ongoing practice that served not only to refine knowledge but also to reaffirm its significance for the transformation of minds and souls. The knowledge that Hartlib and Dury pursued was encyclopaedic in scope, and included but was not limited to science, mathematics, and technology. Complicating what catalogues are and which formats they can take, I include in my examination wish lists and queries as well as communications on personal and public libraries and other infrastructures for the ordering and systematic sharing of knowledge. In complement to the well-documented centrality of method as a topic of discussion for the Hartlib Circle, this paper analyses how Hartlib and Dury’s manner of handling information integrates these concerns of method with the religious aims motivating their work. Reframing this history in spiritual terms points to the implicit role of care in the management and dissemination of knowledge.

Bo van Broekhoven is a PhD student in History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the various activities of the Hartlib Circle in seventeenth-century Britain and Germany, specifically on the role of the care of souls in projects for the universal reform of society. In addition to this, Bo is a research associate with the project Situating International and Global Mathematics (SIGMA), led by Dr Michael Barany, and a tutor at the Writing Centre of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology.

Methods and Techniques

Half way through the seminar and workshop, this panel examines some initial ideas and observations about the methods and techniques we’ve seen so far. Thinking both chronologically and by discipline, the three presenters here introduce their own scholarship in the context of responding to the work done so far. The discussion-driven session should begin to introduce terminology, key ideas, and methods that have been used and will be used across the week.

“Data” as Catalogue: From Babylonia, through Antiquity, to the Medieval Period / Erica L. Meszaros e.l.meszaros@gmail.com

“Data” is/are a crucial component of modern research projects, particularly those embedded in the digital humanities. Advances in computer-aided research have provided scholars with new methods for data storage, categorization, and sharing that interrogate and innovate on ideas of metadata and paradata. However, whether these terms apply to ancient collections remains an open question. For example, a Babylonian tablet that collects information on the moon necessary for indigenous lunar theory could easily be considered a catalogue of “data” in a modern context, but to what extent are these data, to what extent is their compilation a catalogue, and to what extent do these answers matter? Contending with these questions requires modern scholars to interrogate what it means for information to “be data” and whether this category could exist in any emic sense in the ancient world. It also invites them to consider what aspects of meta- and para-data may also be present in antiquity. Through examples from Babylonian mathematical astronomy, this presentation intends to investigate modern conceptions of the label “data,” whether and how these apply in Mesopotamian “catalogues,” and how scholars can use the ideas of metadata and paradata as a lens for novel investigation.

This presentation will also endeavor to explicitly respond to the first two themes of the conference, namely Theme 1: Translation, Mathematics, and Heterolinguality and Theme 2: Establishing Bookish Ways of Knowing. Drawing on examples from Babylonian astronomy and mathematics, this presentation will expand on the arguments of previous speakers by exploring their placement and realization in the ancient and medieval history of mathematics.

Perspectives on Early Modern to Modern Catalogues, Registers, and Indices TBA

TBA will respond to the papers thus far thinking about early modern to modern catalogues, registers, and indices while considering the developing methodologies.

Global and Modern Mathematics: Perspectives and Responses / Jan Vrhovski j.vrhovski@ed.ac.uk

Jan will respond to the papers thus far thinking about how they shed light on global modern mathematics and shared methods and techniques.

Dr Vrohvski is Research Fellow at the department of Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies, School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include intellectual history of modern China, history of analytic philosophy, mathematical logic, history and philosophy of science in China, and international history of mathematics.

Evidence of the Protocols of Natural Observation

From previous work on the history of the Wunderkammer, we know that the catalogue of books is related to the cabinet of curiosity and collecting in general. These papers think particularly about observations in catalogues as well as catalogues of observations. What are the objects of inquiry for catalogues and what do strategic decisions about these objects do to the way we can know things? Are flora, instruments, and testimony the same class of object as books when considered in the history of ideas? These papers examine both what book catalogues can learn from non-book sources and present what non-book sources can learn from catalogues.

Enlisting the Catalog: A Local Flora and the Invention of Tradition / Ron McColl rmccoll@wcupa.edu

Though it surveyed only the flowering plants within the immediate environs of the small town of West Chester, Pennsylvania, William Darlington’s Florula Cestrica (1826) outstripped the limits of geography, authority, and genre. The man Asa Gray would decades later declare “our botanical Nestor” distributed his “humble flora,” and first botanical publication, to the leading practitioners in America and Europe, including Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in Geneva, James Edward Smith in London, William Jackson Hooker in Glasgow, and several others with whom he had never previously corresponded. The audacious strategy worked. Florula Cestrica’s discerning descriptions coupled with Darlington’s frequent citation of highly regarded local collaborators impressed the botanical community and provided its author entrée to the field’s highest orders. In previous research, I located more than 80 extant copies of Darlington’s first flora to reconstruct its distribution and use over the past two centuries. I subsequently studied tensions in some of the catalog’s dichotomies, including appeals to readers both local and international, amateur and professional; the presence of both indigenous and metropolitan systems of knowledge; and the author’s blend of provincial, even colloquial, language with cosmopolitan discourse. My current project outlines how Florula Cestrica exceeded the normative bounds of the catalog and consequently belied the purported objectivity of the genre. Serving primarily as a catalog, and more specifically as a local flora, the text conveyed Darlington’s reasoned determinations and orderly arrangement in the Linnaean system of classification. In numerous authorial intrusions, however, Darlington abandons the objective tone typical of the genre to interject commentary ranging from inspirational to reverential, patronizing to condescending. Such moments reveal the multivalent forces, including the discursive power of amateurs like Darlington, that impacted botanical culture before the advent of professionalization. In this porous and liminal text, Darlington did much more than catalog the flowering plants of his hometown—he took rhetorical liberty to prefigure the narrative of American botanical history he later codified in works such as Reliquiae Baldwinianae (1843) and Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall (1849). By tracing the slippage in Darlington’s text, I hope to model how similar catalogs may be read for evidence of much more than their apparent contents.

Ron McColl is associate professor, Special Collections Librarian, and Curator of the Darlington Herbarium (DWC) at West Chester University of Pennsylvania (U.S.). His research on William Darlington’s Florula Cestrica has appeared in Archives of Natural History and will be included in the forthcoming issue of Bartonia.

Collecting Animal Singularities in Vernacular Print: The Curation of Indigenous Knowledge in André Thevet’s Cosmography / Seán Thomas Kane sthosdkane@gmail.com

André Thevet’s (1516–1590) cosmography sits at a critical juncture between eyewitness observers in the field and studio naturalists curating knowledge. Thevet was a central and often less well regarded collector and curator of Indigenous knowledge in his three cosmographies––the “Cosmographie de Levant” (1554), “Singularitez de la France Antarctique” (1557), and “Cosmographie Universelle” (1575). Thevet sought to strike a balance between his eyewitness testimony of the Eastern Mediterranean and Brazil with the sources he collected from personal interviews and books he read in order to craft a fuller cosmography of the Atlantic World as it existed in the middle of the sixteenth century. Thevet’s observations are undervalued contributions to the collected knowledge of animals in the middle and later decades of the sixteenth century. He often contributed new information all his own which supplemented and at times rewrote existing animal narratives inherited from Aristotle and Pliny. Thevet’s cosmographies acted as catalogues of these American animals and often are among the earliest printed sources for their natural histories. This paper is an early piece of my first monograph on Thevet and will benefit from access to the University of Edinburgh’s copies of Belon, Clusius, Gessner, and Rondelet’s books in the university library’s special collections. The study of cosmography relies on similar sources and theories to the history of mathematics and classical reception. I hope my writing will benefit from the perspectives of fellow experts. New knowledge collected from the Americas challenged early modern thought such that it became necessary to develop new forms of classification and collecting to understand the broad diversity of animal life around the globe.

Seán Thomas Kane anticipates earning his Ph.D. in History from Binghamton University in 2026. His dissertation is titled “Understanding the ‘Sauvage’ in André Thevet’s Brazil: 1555-1590.” Kane has published new research in the history of animals in sixteenth-century French Brazil and translated Thevet’s 1557 book “Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique” into English. He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in January 2025.

Mind, Body and Medicine: Using Graduate Medical Theses to Explore the Changing Conception of the Mind-Body Relationship in Eighteenth-Century Scotland / Hannah Lytollis s1903773@ed.ac.uk

The University of Edinburgh’s vast collection of records pertaining to eighteenth-century medicine offers the opportunity to analyse the scientific, theological and philosophical factors shaping the changing conceptualisation of the mind-body relationship. Edinburgh’s medical community played a significant role in the intercontinental discourse on nosology, which developed and refined classificatory systems for the medical field in the style of Carl Linnaeus’ (1707-1778) botanical classifications. The focus on nosology from Scottish physicians such as William Cullen (1710-1790) reflected the continuously evolving relationship between medicine and philosophy within the Enlightenment period, as Cartesian theories of the material and the immaterial were reconsidered from the perspective of the medical mind-body relationship. While the work of Cullen and his contemporaries are known and discussed within the field of the history of science, the University’s collection of student theses remain relatively untouched in a research context. Medical training in Scotland was increasingly formalised over the course of the eighteenth-century, with final theses being a requirement for graduation as an MD. These theses move beyond the changing views of an individual physician, instead encompassing and displaying contemporary views of medicine and disease as taught within a specific year. The bibliographical information within this collection allows historians to see the adoption and rejection of medical theories at yearly intervals, across almost the entire eighteenth-century. Similarly, by looking at the thematic classification of each thesis, it is possible to trace the topics and conditions which were of most interest, or which were considered to offer the greatest reputational prospects to young physicians across different periods. By looking specifically at the mind-body relationship in eighteenth-century Scottish medicine, this study will explore the methodological techniques and opportunities offered by the collection of student theses as a tool for intellectual historians and historians of science to accurately appreciate how the medical field of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries were shaped by the intellectual backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Hannah Lytollis is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, using intellectual history to trace the conceptualisation of diseases of the mind in 18th and early 19th century Scotland. She has spoken previously at workshops on the History of Emotions, and co-chaired a talk by Dr Esme Cleall on the history of disability in the British Empire.

Expanding Our Sources and Evidence

The library catalogue is site of myth and imagination, but remains stubbornly attached to the idea of books on shelves, indexed by a knowledge worker, and accessed by readers. These papers challenge this commonplace for library catalogues. They ask what other sorts of information can be represented, studied, or analyzed in the same or different ways. They promise to expand how we think of the library catalogue not as a distinctive entity, but as a representation of a broader category of entities.

Necrodata and Catalogues of Death / Nechama Brodie Nechama.Brodie@wits.ac.za

Formal death records are considered a relatively modern artefact, but the data of death in modern times extends far beyond simple parish or state registers. Applying a framework of ‘necrodata’ (which explicitly considers quant and narrative hierarchies of meaning through multiple forms of the enumeration of death, including pre-, peri- and post-mortem features) allows us to extend the exploration of [the existence, creation and impacts of] death data through multiple additional forms and formats within the University of Edinburgh libraries (and beyond). This extends from the notebooks and catalogues of both Sirs Henry Littlejohn (postmortem case notes, including photograph albums which may be considered visual catalogues) to mortuary books (catalogues of the dead?) and the notes and site plans related to the construction of new mortuary facilities. Many of these records are already open to public access, with others restricted under relevant laws related to the protection of information (but which can be accessed by application to Lothian Health Services Archives). These texts, addressing the emerging and changing functions of identifying and managing death as a medico-legal phenomenon in particular, can be considered as potentially significant sources of information about the intersections of processes of medicine, science, statistics and also law. These can be read together with other local archive documents – such as the “Descriptive catalogue of the anatomical and pathological specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh” (Cathcart, 1893) – but will also have relevance to extended readings of similar ‘Catalogues of the Dead’ in other regions, including in the Global South, particularly countries with shared colonial and legislative histories (e.g., South Africa) where death records and autopsy and mortuary practices followed those developed and implemented under the United Kingdom. For example, researchers in South Africa (Fourie and Jayes, 2021) retrospectively analysed nearly 40,000 death certificates from the 1918 Spanish Flu to explore inequalities in health outcomes. This current proposed work would seek to first explore and identify catalogues, registers and other “records of records” relating to medico-legal practices (not only within the University of Edinburgh, but perhaps also in Glasgow), and then to discuss and expand on how the creation and keeping of records intersects with the development of related practices and artefacts, from Edinburgh’s well-documented role in both the emergence and specialisation of both autopsies/post-mortems and surgery and surgical skills (which enable different explorations and understandings of causes of death), but specifically delve into how this technical practices intersects with the technologies of public health, and demography (which, further, intersect with statistics, and management of/by the state). Through discussion of how or whether these constitute catalogues of the dead, and death, improved frameworks can be suggested for the identification, annotation and analysis of similar death records in other locations – something that would create a foundation for solid and more systematic research, given the increased digitisation of records. (If there is an opportunity to also attend the preceding week’s meetings of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science, this would also potentially be of incredible value – it’s not always possible to attend such events, based in Johannesburg!)

Dr Nechama Brodie is an author and academic based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her work focuses on building longitudinal data about fatal violence in the global south, and she is the author of three monographs exploring types of murder in South Africa. Her most recent project is the development of the framework of ’necrodata’ which hopes to more closely integrate different disciplinary approaches to the enumeration or quantification of death and dying. She is a recent IASH African fellow. https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/profile/%C2%A0dr-nechama-brodie

n-Categorifying the Wiki: nLab in the Rewriting of Modern Mathematics / Aiden Sagerman aidensagerman@g.harvard.edu

For working mathematicians and students of mathematics, the website nLab sits somewhere between a useful tool and a curiosity. Founded by the mathematician and theoretical physicist Urs Schreiber in 2008, nLab promises to document topics in “mathematics, physics and philosophy from the higher structures point of view of homotopy theory/algebraic topology, homotopy type theory, higher category theory and higher categorical algebra.” While it offers perhaps the most comprehensive mathematics wiki available on the internet, users also complain that the website goes so deep into the category-theoretic weeds as to at times be unusable. Beyond a sometimes-useful encyclopedia, however, nLab has been the site of a long history of experiments in mathematical form, including a forum, multiple textbooks, and an abortive attempt at remaking mathematical publishing. My interest in this paper is in considering the history of nLab as one stage in a longer history of modernist practices of rewriting frequently termed “mathematical modernism” by historians. Much as nLab’s definitions offer n-categorifications of classical definitions, I wish to consider nLab as a media object as the n-categorification of mathematical knowledge organization. I want to ask: how have the affordances of digital media—particularly hyperlinking, discussion forums, and low-friction editability—transformed how modernist mathematics conceptualizes its project and objects of study? What are the continuities and discontinuities between nLab and other projects of collective, modernist mathematical writing, such as the Bourbaki collective’s Éléments de mathématique or the classification of finite simple groups? More broadly, how can digital media objects such as nLab—objects that efficiently organize information but raise questions of archival stability—be used as sources in writing the histories of modern science and mathematics?

Aiden Sagerman is a PhD student in the history of science at Harvard interested in histories of modern mathematics, quantification, and race science and eugenics. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge scholar.

Exploring a Catalogue of Catalogues: A Data-Driven Approach to the History of Scientific Instrument Making / Boris Jardine borisjardine@gmail.com

The SIMON database (Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes), compiled by Dr Gloria Clifton and others over a 40 year period, contains trade data on more than 10,000 individual scientific instrument makers. This digital resource was recently analysed as part of the AHRC ‘Tools of Knowledge’ project, on which I was a Co-Investigator. SIMON began with early-modern Guild records, which can be used to trace master-apprentice relationships from c.1550 well into the 18th century. But the bulk of Clifton’s subsequent work – bringing the data-set to c.1900 – involved analysis of trade directories, instrument makers’ catalogues, and the records of museums. These seemingly dry documents in fact allow an incredibly rich story to be told, ranging in scale from individuals working in particular buildings and streets to regional and national patterns of development. This is all the more significant given the exceptional scarcity of traditional archival material relating to craftsmen and women. Amidst the wealth of data in SIMON, one field stands out for its historiographic potential: ‘Advertised Trade’, which emerges directly from the records of makers’ catalogues, and contains an ‘actors’ category’ assessment of trade identity, often running to many terms (‘Mathematical Instrument Maker’, ‘Philosophical Instrument Maker’, ‘Optician’ – but also, e.g., ‘Artists’ Colourman’, ‘Gunsmith’, and even ‘Tartan Ware Seller’). In this talk I explain the background and nature of the SIMON data, illustrating how this ‘catalogue of catalogues’ was put together and what it contains, before presenting preliminary results of quantitative studies that combine regional information with the ‘Advertised trade’ field. From mere lists of wares for sale, it is possible to gain new insights on the rise and develoment of technical expertise, the spread of experimental knowledge, and the relationship between science and industry.

Boris Jardine is a rare book dealer and historian of science. He began his studies while working at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, and has a long-standing interest in scientific instrumentation and the material culture of science (collections, architecture, ‘paper technologies’, bibliography). Previous projects include: The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to Big Data (conference and publications); The Lost Museums of Cambridge Science, 1865–1936 (Leverhulme post-doctoral project); and Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550–1914 (AHRC research project).

Catalogues Contextualising Individual Thinkers

While the catalogue as imaginary might appear to be about universalised knowledge, they also represent particular people doing particular things in a particular place in time. These papers challenge the universalist potentiality of catalogues as evidence by returning us to the particularity of individual thinkers. Moving from institutions collecting materials to people and back, they aim to think about how the catalogue is always a tool for people doing things, and thus can tell us about what those people were doing and why.

Dismantling the Ptolemaic Hegemony: Al-Idrisi’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq as an Epistemic Rupture and Cultural Catalyst for Renaissance Cartography / Mohamed Oussama Benatallah benatallah.medouss@gmail.com

This paper advances a distinct epistemological perspective, positioning the 1592 publication of al-Idrisi’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq by the Medici Oriental Press as more than a mere act of historical preservation; rather, it constitutes a fundamental “epistemic rupture” that enabled the European Renaissance to transcend the geographical stagnation imposed by Greco-Roman antiquity. While the Ptolemaic model—largely dogmatized by the Church as a rigid cosmological tenet—viewed the world through the lens of theoretical symmetry and enclosed oceans, al-Idrisi facilitated a radical cultural shift by prioritizing the “authority of empirical observation” over “classical textual authority,” a shift manifested in his systematic dismantling of three foundational pillars of ancient thought. Al-Idrisi inaugurated this rupture by refuting the theory of the enclosed ocean, proving the interconnectedness of the seas and thereby culturally redefining the Earth from a “land-locked prison” to an “open navigational field,” which psychologically paved the way for the Age of Discovery. This was followed by a decisive refutation of the uninhabitable “Zone of Combustion” myth through his meticulous documentation of sub-Saharan African societies, effectively “humanizing geography” and expanding the theological boundaries of the known world. Furthermore, he replaced the symbolic and religious cartography of the Middle Ages with maps grounded in mathematical coordinates and inductive observation, providing the computational tools essential for the emergence of geography as an independent scientific discipline. By analyzing the Medici Press registers as “bibliographical” and material evidence, this study demonstrates that al-Idrisi’s work functioned as the critical “corrective instrument” that allowed European thinkers to reconcile classical knowledge with the physical reality of the Earth. The paper concludes that the formation of modern geography as a rigorous, secular discipline was contingent upon the absorption of this Islamic scientific intervention, which provided the empirical leverage necessary to shatter the Ptolemaic grip on the European mind and usher in the era of modern universalism.

Mohamed Oussama Benatallah is a professional educator and academic researcher holding a PhD in historical and comparative studies. His research focuses on the phenomenology of science, the history of research methodologies, and the ethics of technology, with a particular interest in the cross-cultural circulation of scientific ideas between the Islamic world and Europe.

Hortus Conclusus - James Stirling’s (1692-1770) books at Garden / John Sibbald 106300.457@compuserve.com

James Stirling’s library survived until the 23th October 2025 when it was sold by auction in Edinburgh. My paper would attempt to give an account of some of the highlights in the collection and attempt to set them in the context of the various stages of his life, and in the context of what occupied the thoughts of James Stirling and other mathematicians who were his contemporaries, many of whom were in correspondence with and sent him copies of their own works. The paper would begin by setting Stirling’s move to Oxford in the context of the fall out from the Revolution, and the network of Scottish Tory Episcopalian Newtonians for whom claims have been made to be the true fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment.

John Sibbald is a former librarian of the Advocates Library who has also had experience of the rare book business both in the book trade as well as that of the auction world. He is on the Advisory Board of the St Andrews University USTC project at whose conferences he has delivered papers on the sale of the books of Nicolaus Heinsius in 1683, The Reverend Thomas Frognal Dibdin, and the publication of books by subscription in England in the 17th century.

The Crawford Collection / Richard Oosterhoff richard.oosterhoff@ed.ac.uk

The printed Crawford Collection catalogue of 1890 presents a synoptic view of a famous bibliophile’s collection combined with technical materials from Charles Babbage’s collection and working tools for the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh. As an object, it develops novel approaches to classification, problems of accession, and the layering of archives. The book presents the heroic Crawford accession, collection by the Royal Observatory, and the collection by Babbage and other collectors in a thickly woven tapestry of glosses, notes, comments, and structure. These structures imply a distinctive approach to knowledge, astronomy, and science that considers the labour of collection alongside the labour of observation and maintenance. Based on new research with Lorna Mitchell, librarian of the Royal Observatory, this paper starts to think about how the printed catalogue presents this unusual acquisition in the context of a working observatory and its library of tool books alongside its treasure books.

After a degree in biology at Redeemer University College, Richard Oosterhoff was seduced by optional courses in history, and completed a PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame, IN (2013). For some years he was a member of the ERC project Genius before Romanticism: Genius in Early Modern Art and Science, based at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. At Cambridge he was also a JRF and then Fellow and Tutor at St Edmund’s College. Among the fellowships he’s held, some are from the Warburg Institute (University of London), the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Huntington Library, and the Houghton Library (Harvard University). At Edinburgh, he has served as the Director of Undergraduate Teaching for History (Pre-Honours); he has also been an elected member of the Senatus Academicus (2020–26).

Sponsors and Support

This workshop and seminar is co-organised by the UKRI-ERC Horizon funded Situating International and Global Mathematics project and the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society with support from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the Heritage Collections, the network for the History of Science and Medicine in Edinburgh (HoSMEd), EDITION, the Albertus Institute, and Blackie House Library and Museum.

Call for papers, now closed