by This book launch is sponsored by Sabine Schmidtke and Myles Jackson, IAS, School of Historical Studies, Princeton.
Imagining the Heavens Across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity
Edited by Rana Brentjes, Sonja Brentjes and Stamatina Mastorakou
Mimesis, 2024
25 October 2024, 12:00‐1:00 pm EST
Pre‐registration required https://bit.ly/Imagining‐Heavens
Welcome, Sabine Schmidtke, IAS School of Historical Studies
Book introduction, Sonja Brentjes, Bergische Universität, IZWT, and Rana Brentjes, independent scholar
Chapter presentations:
John Steele, Brown University, The Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian
Studies: Astral Imagery in Ancient Mesopotamia
Fabio Spadini, Université de Lausanne, Institute of Archeology and Classical Studies:
Power, Politics, and Astrology in Rome
Dieter Blume, emeritus, Friedrich‐Schiller‐University:
History of Art, Images of the constellations and the planets in Latin Europe
Anna Caiozzo, University of Orleans, PU Histoire médiévale:
Astrological Images as the Key to the Cosmology of the Medieval Islamicate World
Günther Oestmann, Technical University Berlin, FG Wissenschaftsgeschichte:
Astronomical Clocks in the Baltic Sea Region
Aida Alavi, École de Louvre, Islamic Art History:
Dancing in the Sky: The Story of a Performing Goat in the Safavid Heaven
Author’s Bios:
Aida Alavi earned her PhD in Islamic Art History from Bordeaux Montaigne University
(AUSONIUS) in 2023, under the supervision of Anna Caiozzo. Her research specializes in the material culture of early modern Iran, with a par cular focus on Safavid magical objects and occult manuscripts. She is currently a lecturer at the École du Louvre in Paris. She is affiliated to the University of Bordeaux (AUSONIUS), and was a cooperation partner of the project Visualization of the Heavens from 2019 to 2022.
Dieter Blume was from 1994 to 2018 professor for History of Art at the Friedrich‐Schiller University in Jena/Germany. He held guest‐professorships at John Hopkins University in Baltimore/USA, Bibliotheca Hertziana/Max‐Planck‐Institute in Rome/Italy and Kunsthistorisches Institut/Max Planck Institute in Florence/Italy. He published extensively on the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, among others on astrological images and the images of constellations.
Rana Brentjes is an art historian, curator, and historian of contemporary German History. Until September 2024, she was the Digital Content Curator of the research project “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She co‐edited the Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (Routledge, 2023) and co‐authored “The scientific environment in Samarkand around Ulugh Beg and the Zīj‐iGūrgānī” in Commentaires du fac‐simile du Livre des étoiles fixes d’‘Abd al‐Raḥmān al‐Ṣū Manuscrit BnF Arabe 5036 edited by Anna Caiozzo.
Sonja Brentjes is a historian of science specializing in Islamicate societies and the Mediterranean from the eighth to the seventeenth century. Currently, she is a guest scholar at the Interdisziplinäre Zentrum für Wissenschafts‐ und Technikforschung (IZWT) of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and president of the International Academy for the History of Science. She has extensively published on history of mathematics, mapmaking, patronage, schools, and historiographical questions.
Anna Caiozzo is Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Orléans (France). She is working on illustrated manuscripts from the Islamized Medieval worlds. Her research focused on images as tesmonies of imagination and cultural practises along the Silk Road and mainly on the rela onship between images and knowledge from the 12th c to the 15th c. She has worked on astronomical, astrological and magical images; and her thesis habilitation deals with the political uses of the corpus of the Shāh nāmeh in the Timurid period.
Günther Oestmann is extraordinary professor for history of science at Technical University Berlin. Trained as a clockmaker, he received a PhD (1992) with a study on the astronomical and astrological significance of the clock in Strasbourg Cathedral. In 2013 the Musée international d’horlogerie (La Chaux‐de‐Fonds) awarded the “Prix Gaïa” to him, and in 2014 he was elected as corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science (Paris). Fields of research: History of scientific instruments and clocks, history of astronomy/astrology and mathematical geography, maritime history.
Fabio Spadini is a SNSF (Swiss National Science Founda on) senior researcher in archeology at the Université de Lausanne (Ins tute of Archeology and Classical Studies). His current project has the title: Sous le ciel de Pompéi. Le rôle du catastérisme dans l’art pompéien. He is also an associate member of the ERC Advanced Grant ZODIAC‐Ancient Astral Science in Transforma on. His research area concerns ancient glyptic, magic and the history of science (alchemy and astrology) from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
John Steele is Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, RI. He holds an honorary Professorship at Shanghai in the School of History and Culture of Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and is a senior fellow of the Ins tute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. He specializes in the history of astronomy, with a particular focus on Babylonian astronomy. He is editor of the book series Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World.
