A long history of diagrammatization in the astral sciences
Third International EIDA Conference
Org. Matthieu Husson, Samuel Gessner, Divna Manolova, Stefan Zieme, Florence Somer
Practical aspects
Observatoire de Paris, Salle du Conseil,
15 – 17 April, 2025
It will be possible to attend the conference in remotly using this link
We encourage in person participation, for this, registration is mandatory through the following form to be completed at latest on April 14, 2025 12.00 a.m.
Rationale
In recent decades, scholarship on the history of science has increasingly focused on the role of images, with diagrams being a significant subset. Their historical importance is evident in both their epistemic dimension, where diagrams function as scientific tools for historical actors, and their documentary dimension, where they are regarded as written artifacts within specific manuscripts or prints. Over time, both the epistemic and documentary aspects of these visual practices have been studied through various methodologies. Drawing on these approaches from diverse fields, including the history of mathematics and art history, EIDA utilizes recent advancements in computer vision to examine the epistemic and documentary roles of astronomical diagrams on a cross-cultural scale encompassing Afro-Asiatic and European contexts. The project develops a specialized critique of astronomical diagrams, materialized in a web platform that facilitates their digital edition and supports collective research on the circulation and transformation of these diagrams within and across cultures over the longue durée.
EIDA’s yearly conference series aims in the long run to shape a collective volume to be published at the end of the project. While the scope and variety of EIDA’s diagram corpus were at the centre of our first conference in 2023, the second conference questioned the practice of diagramming through the notion of graphical idioms and their uses in a variety of representations. In this third conference, we wish to interrogate the pertinence of considering different diagrams ‘families’ as an historiographical tool. These families could be conceived as developing around characteristic types of knowledge, types of questions or types of practices. For instance a large family of diagrams, often derived from the Almagest, can be characterized as ‘mathematical’ and rely on specific uses of the idiom of lines and circles, and the idiom of lettered labels. This family of diagrams differs markedly from others also present in sources of the astral sciences like astrological diagrams that rely on a quite different use of the idiom of lines and circles and very often employ other graphical idioms as well (word labels, pictorial elements, among many others). We might also want to distinguish other important families of diagrams like ‘instrument diagrams’ which would feature more often graduations and numbers, and possibly also use the idiom of lines and circle in a more ‘metrical’ way. We can also consider a family of diagrams presenting cosmological structure and phenomena that use the idiom of colors and textures more often than others. While conveying different bodies of knowledge, often circulating in different texts and possibly being the subject of different reading and transmission processes resulting in distinct historical trajectories, these ‘families’ are not to be conceived as silos. First, many diagrams serve as bridges between traditions and can be considered, depending on their particular instantiation, as belonging to one or the other ‘family’. The texts within and around which these diagrams circulated are often grouped within the same corpora or even manuscripts, and the associated bodies of knowledge are deeply interconnected. Thus, studying the interactions and relationships between these families, as well as their internal transformations, may provide deeper insights into the dynamics of diagrammatization within the astral sciences.
Program
Tuesday, April 15
9.15-9.30 Welcome
9.30-10.30 JI Chen (University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei), Stars in Hand: The Simplified Planar Instrument 簡平儀 Made by Ferdinand Verbiest for the Kangxi Emperor.
10.30-11.30 Hamid BOHLOUL (MPIWG, Berlin),
Equatoria and Equatoria-Like Diagrams in Arabic and Persian Sources.
Coffee Break
11.45-12.45 ZHANG Nan 张楠 (University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei),
Illustrating a Different Cosmos: Images, Instruments, and Texts on the Celestial-Earth Structure in 16th–17th Century China.
Lunch
14-15 Josefina RODRIGUEZ ARRIBAS (Institut für Jüdische Philosophie und Religion, Universität Hamburg),
The New Quadrant in Medieval and Early-Modern Manuscripts.
15-16 Jeanne NUECHTERLEIN (York University),
Diagram, Instrument, Illustration: European Printed Images of Armillary Spheres and Ptolemy’s Third Projection.
Coffee Break
16.15-17.15 Samuel GESSNER (University of Lisbon),
Construction, blueprint, tool – the shifting status of instrument diagrams in manuscript and early print
17.15-18.15 Divna MANOLOVA (Department of Literary Studies – Greek Section, Ghent University),
Interrogating Aspects of Diagrammatisation in the Manuscript Tradition of Cleomedes’ The Heavens: Focusing on Its Late Medieval Readers and Its Postmedieval Translators.
Wednesday, April 16
9.30-10.30 Gaye DANIŞAN (Istanbul University, Department of the History of Science) & Florence SOMER (LTE PSL-Observatoire de Paris), Exploring Astronomical and Astrological Diagrams in Ottoman Calen-dars: A Digital Approach to Historical Context and Methodological Challenges.
10.30-11.30 Luís RIBEIRO (University of Lisbon), Tables and Support Diagrams in Early Modern Astrological Practices: Visual Culture and Transmission.
Coffee Break
11.45-12.45 Jeffrey KOTYK (MPIWG, Berlin), Ephemerides and Horoscopes in Premodern China and Japan: Mapping Out the Heavens on Paper.
Lunch
14-15 Hao Hao ZHU (Department of the History of Science and Scientific Archaeology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei), Sources, Approaches and Cases: the Study on Astrological Charts from Tang 唐 to Qing 清 China.
15-16 Alexandre TUR (Bibliothèque nationale de France),
Horoscopes as astrological diagrams in medieval European sources.
Coffee Break
16.15-17.15 Anne-Laurence CAUDANO (University of Winnipeg),
Locating meteorological phenomena on Byzantine astrological diagrams.
17.15-18.15 Ioanna SKOURA (independent scholar, Athens),
Some observations on Theon of Alexandria’s practice connected with the assignment of letters to the points of his diagrams.
Thursday, april 17
9.30-10.30 Stefan ZIEME (Humboldt University, Berlin),
EIDA in Action: Diagram Transformations in George of Trebizond’s Translation of the Almagest.
10.30-11.30 Richard KREMER (Dartmouth College),
Reinhold’s autograph diagrams in the first commentary on De revolutionibus.
Coffee Break
11.45-12.45 Scott TRIGG (LTE PSL-Observatoire de Paris),
Diagramming Planetary Theory in ʿIlm al-Hayʾa: Between Cosmology and Mathematics.
Lunch
14-15 Christián CARMAN (CONICET – National University of Quilmes) & Diego PELEGRIN (National University of Luján),
From Scribes to Printers: The Unchanging Fate of Diagram Errors in the Transmission of De Revolutionibus.
15-16 Christine ROUGHAN (Princeton University),
Diagram Adaptations across the ʿIlm al-Hayʾa Tradition.Coffee Break
16.15-17.45 Jade NORINDR (LTE PSL-Observatoire de Paris),
News about the EIDA platform.
17.45-18.00 Conclusion