Workshop Description
Beginning in the eleventh century, tabulated manuscripts proliferated in Arabic scientific communities, filling works on geometry and astronomy in addition to medical texts, cosmologies, and biographies. This workshop explores the formal qualities of tables and diagrams and their representational potential. Geometry served as the material and procedural meeting ground for artist-intellectuals in a dialogue that spanned strata of makers in the medieval Islamic world.
Read the pre-circulated paper here!
Meet the Speaker
Meekyung MacMurdie, SIFK Graduate Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in Art History
Meekyung MacMurdie is the recipient of the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship for 2017-18. Her dissertation, entitled "Geometric Medicine: aniconism and medieval Arab painting," interrogates the role of tables, diagrams, and other schemata in manuscript culture. The research tackles the stakes of pre-modern databases, such as tabulated medical synopses, which were considered revolutionary in the 11th century, and its invention challenged established knowledge systems, causing robust debate. Working across disciplines, MacMurdie argues that medieval tables, circular diagrams, squares of opposition, and arboreal charts transgressed knowledge frameworks.
The Comparing Practices of Knowledge Workshop launched in the 2016-17 academic year. Presentations range across historical and disciplinary boundaries and provide a major component of SIFK's inquiry into the process of knowledge formation and transmittal from antiquity to present day. Research-in-progress is welcomed and will receive constructive feedback. This workshop will take the format of 20-minute presentation, followed by a 30-40 minute discussion and Q+A. Lunch will be provided to those who RSVP.