Embryology, Cosmology, and Epistemic Ecology: Gestation in and Beyond the Myriad Treasures
Joan Judge, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; Professor, Department of History, York University, Toronto
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
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About the talk: When we enter the pages of a wanbao quanshu萬寶全書 (Comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures), we encounter a freeze frame in the transit of vernacular knowledge. Historians of the book, of knowledge, and of medicine have tended to disregard the non-canonical, crudely produced, and, to their mind, idiosyncratically organized genre of myriad treasures. But how inconsequential can its content be if it was repeatedly reprinted in countless editions and used by vast numbers of readers for centuries? How inconsequential can it be if it was indeed, knowledge in transit, knowledge that would make its way into other material forms, textual traditions, and communities of readers both within and outside of China?
Can the notion of epistemic ecologies move us beyond textual determinism and towards a fuller account of the interplay among artefacts of knowledge, physical processes of book production, and the cosmologies and preoccupations that govern those who make, read, view, or listen to specific texts across borders and time?
This lecture focuses on an illustrated entry on embryology that was featured in countless editions of myriad treasures over four centuries. It traces the itinerary of the entry backwards to its sources, forwards into new genres, and outwards into Japanese and Korean works. It questions why this particular artefact of medical knowledge traveled, with what alterations, and to what epistemic ends.
About our speaker: Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a professor in the Department of History at York University, Toronto. A cultural historian of print and knowledge in modern China, her most recent publication is The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894-1954.
She is currently leading an international collaborative project on “Vernacular Medicine and Modes of Knowing in China: Historical and Global Contexts.”