Astronomy, Ṭupšarrūtu, and Knowledge in the Cuneiform World, Francesca Rochberg
Open-access chapter.
Hellenophilia versus the History of Science, David Pingree
Research article.
Affinities and Elisions: Helen and Hellenocentrism, Heinrich von Staden
Research article.
Methods and Problems in the History of Ancient Science: The Greek Case, G. E. R. Lloyd
Research article.
Demystifying the Greek Miracle, G. E. R. Lloyd
Open-access book chapter.
Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Kathryn Stevens
Book.
Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science, Francesca Rochberg
Book. From “Western science” to connected and global histories
When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections, Marwa Elshakry
Research article.
Beyond Postcolonialism ... and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science, Kapil Raj
Research article.
Knowledge in Transit, James A. Secord
Research article.
Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory, Sujit Sivasundaram
Research article.
Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge, edited by Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller
Edited book.
Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China - or Didn’t It?, Nathan Sivin
Open-access essay.
Beyond Science and Civilization: A Post-Needham Critique, Roger Hart
Research article.
Imagined Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter, Roger Hart
Book.
Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; or, Is the History of Science Ready for the World?, Helen Tilley
Research article.
Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Research article.
Science and Technology in the European Periphery: Some Historiographical Reflections,
Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India, Dhruv Raina
Book.
1001 Distortions: How (Not) to Narrate History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Non-Western Cultures, edited by Sonja Brentjes, Taner Edis and Lutz Richter-Bernburg
Edited book.
Navigating the Sea of Histories of Mathematics, Agathe Keller
Open-access essay.
The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions, edited by Karine Chemla
Edited book.
Abstraction as a Value in the Historiography of Mathematics in Ancient Greece and China, Karine Chemla
Book chapter.
Anachronisms in the History of Mathematics, edited by Niccolò Guicciardini
Edited book.
Anachronism and Anachorism in the Study of Mathematics in India, Kim Plofker
Book chapter.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, edited by Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall
Edited reference work.
Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History, Eleanor Robson
Book.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution
University of Chicago Press
The clearest short introduction to the revisionist position.
Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700, 3rd ed.
Bloomsbury Academic
A balanced survey that retains the idea of major transformation without presenting it as one simple rupture.
H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry
University of Chicago Press
The most systematic guide to the competing explanations and historiographical schools.
Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science
Cambridge Core
The introductory chapter is especially useful for understanding why the editors prefer “early modern science” to a unitary revolution.
Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, “De-centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science”
Journal page and PDF, British Journal for the History of Science
The most radical conceptual critique of projecting the modern category “science” onto natural philosophy.
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages
Cambridge Core
The principal case for institutional and intellectual continuity from medieval scholasticism.
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 2nd ed.
University of Chicago Press
A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science, A.D. 400–1650
Internet Archive
An older but historically important continuity account; borrowing may require a free account.
Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages
Internet Archive
The classic detailed treatment of medieval statics, kinematics and dynamics.
David C. Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages
University of Chicago Press
A useful discipline-by-discipline collection, including translations, universities, mechanics, astronomy and optics.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
JSTOR book page
Princeton publisher page
The foundational study of how experimental facts, witnessing and social order were constructed together.
Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
University of Chicago Press
Shows how artisanal making, bodily skill and material practice fed into learned natural knowledge.
Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution
Yale University Press
JSTOR book page
Reconstructs a broad London community of healers, artisans, merchants, collectors and practical investigators.
William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution
University of Chicago Press
Challenges the conventional opposition between rational chemistry and irrational alchemy.
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth
University of Chicago Press
A fuller examination of gentlemanly credibility, trust and testimony in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy.
George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance
MIT Press
MIT Press electronic edition
The most directly relevant counterpoint to Huff’s account of Islamic astronomy and scientific decline.
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900
Springer/Palgrave
Develops “circulation” and intercultural encounter as alternatives to the model of European invention followed by global diffusion.
Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many?
Cambridge University Press
Compares Europe with Chinese and Islamic cultural revivals and challenges Europe’s privileged place in narratives of modernity.
Peter Burke, The Renaissance
Bloomsbury Academic
A very concise introduction that dismantles the strong Burckhardtian myth while preserving Renaissance humanism as an identifiable movement.
Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries
Wiley
Particularly good on diffusion, adaptation and regional variation within Europe.
Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
Harvard University Press
Public-domain full text
The classic work that pluralized “renaissance” by identifying a major medieval revival of learning.
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages
University of Chicago Press
Internet Archive
Presents the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the culmination of medieval culture rather than straightforwardly the birth of modernity.
Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation
Internet Archive
The classic historiography of how the Renaissance was constructed as a historical period.
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
Routledge
Internet Archive
Attempts to distinguish the Italian Renaissance from earlier medieval classical revivals without denying those earlier “renascences.”
Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”
Oxford Academic
The foundational feminist challenge to periodisations constructed from the experience of elite men.
Randolph Starn, “Renaissance Redux”
American Historical Review
A short, useful assessment of the category’s repeated rejection and survival.
Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
Oxford University Press
Internet Archive
Reconstructs the Renaissance through commercial, diplomatic and intellectual relations with the Islamic and Ottoman worlds.
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance
Google Books bibliographic page
Internet Archive
Emphasizes commodities, collecting, patronage and material desire instead of treating the Renaissance primarily as an abstract rebirth of ideas.