Working Group on Using Normative Knowledge from the Past

The working group “Using Normative Knowledge from the Past” discusses the concepts we use, want to use, or should perhaps revisit, in order to understand how normative knowledge was produced in historical times and places. Tradition, materiality, information management, practical versus theoretical knowledge and ‘using the past’ are some key examples. The aim of the working group is to identify and understand those concepts that can be used as analytical tools for this perspective, but also that can expose the various selection and transformation processes of normative knowledge through time. In order to assemble such a toolbox, we take a ground up approach and mind-map relevant concepts as they have been considered in selected texts.

For more information please contact Fupeng Li and Alexandra Woods.

Working group sessions


10.03.2021
Resources of scientific knowledge production

Valleriani, M., Kräutli, F., Zamani, M., Tejedor, A., Sander, C., Vogl, M., Bertram, S., Funke, G., & Kantz, H. (2019). The Emergence of Epistemic Communities in the Sphaera Corpus: Mechanisms of Knowledge Evolution. Journal of Historical Network Research, 3, 50–91; and Zamani, M., Tejedor, A., Vogl, M., Kräutli, F., Valleriani, M., & Kantz, H. (2020). Evolution and Transformation of Early Modern Cosmological Knowledge: A Network Study. Scientific Reports - Nature.


23.09.2020
Working papers for Using Normative Knowledge from the Past

Fupeng Li, “Multi-temporality and Communities of Time Encounters between China and the Iberian World in the Making of Calendar Book” (unpublished draft)
Alexandra Woods, “Using Normative Knowledge from the Past: A Survey” (unpublished draft)


10.09.2020
Using the Past

Tamar Herzog, “Germanic or Roman? Western European Narratives of Legal Origins” (paper to the conference on “The Dawn of the Hispanic Legal Tradition A Conference on the Liber Iudiciorum”, Yale Law School, May 11-12, 2020).


19.05.2020
Information management

Ann Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven (CT): Yale University Press 2010).


30.04.2020
Memory (Memorial) Laws

Alina Cherviatsova, “Memory (Memorial) Laws” (unpublished draft). Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” in: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1979).


04.03.2020
Knowledge production from the history of science

Jürgen Renn and Malcolm Hyman, “Survey: From Technology Transfer to the Origins of Science” in: Jürgen Renn (ed.), The Globalization of Knowledge in History (Berlin: Edition Open Access 2012).


31.01.2020
Legal traditions

H. Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World. Sustainable Diversity in Law (5th ed, Oxford University Press 2014).


Teaser Image: "Vacheron & Constantin pocket watch 1918" by kitchener.lord

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