World knowledge is not a single subject. Connected approaches have reshaped the histories of mathematics and science, architecture and art, music and literature, and medicine and natural history.
The resources below combine broad surveys with more focused studies. Together they show how disciplinary knowledge has been formed through translation, travel, collecting, comparison, institutional exchange and encounters among different intellectual traditions.
A Cultural History of Mathematics
Six-volume reference work | General editor David E. Rowe
A large-scale history of mathematical practices, institutions and ideas across six historical periods. The series gives sustained attention to different mathematical cultures and to the social settings in which mathematics has been made and used.
History of Mathematics: A Global Cultural Approach
Open-access Oberwolfach workshop report
A concise report on the international project that developed A Cultural History of Mathematics. It gives a useful overview of the questions, periods and themes involved in constructing a global cultural history of the subject.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics
Edited reference work | Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall
Covers approximately five thousand years of mathematical activity. Particularly useful is its attention to practitioners, sources, institutions and contexts rather than only to a sequence of famous discoveries.
The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam: A Sourcebook
Sourcebook | Edited by Victor J. Katz
Brings together English translations of important mathematical texts from five major traditions, accompanied by historical commentary. It allows readers to encounter primary sources alongside modern interpretation.
Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World
A project funded by the European Research Council dedicated to mathematical sources that have come down to us from the ancient world and specifically, though not exclusively, dedicated to the sources produced in Mesopotamia, China, and the Indian sub-continent.
A Global History of Architecture
Online course | MITx and edX
An online course presenting architectural history through a shared global chronology. It places buildings and traditions from different regions alongside one another, making comparison and connection central to the narrative.
A Global History of Architecture
Book | Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash
A broad survey of architecture across regions and periods, organised through a global timeline. The third edition is the most recent version of the book associated with the MIT course.
Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative
Open teaching platform and scholarly network
A substantial collection of freely available lectures and teaching materials designed to support transregional architectural history. Its courses offer alternatives to histories organised only by nations, styles or separate civilisations.
Circulations in the Global History of Art
Edited book | Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Applies the idea of circulation to artists, images, objects, styles and institutions. It offers methodological approaches for studying how art changes as it moves between places and communities.
The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World
Edited book | Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello
Uses the biographies of objects to reconstruct connections across the early modern world. The essays show how an artefact can change meaning, value and function as it moves between societies.
Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project
Edited book | Reinhard Strohm
Brings together studies developed through the Balzan Global History of Music project. The volume explores musical connections, transfers and encounters while resisting the assumption that global history must take the form of a single universal narrative.
Global History of Music Study Group
International Musicological Society study group
An active scholarly network concerned with transcontinental musical exchanges, movements and mixtures. Its website provides information about meetings, publications and continuing research activity.
The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries
Book | Anna Maria Busse Berger
A focused study of relationships among German musicology, missionary activity and African musicians in East Africa. It also examines the colonial conditions under which supposedly universal knowledge about music was produced.
Book | David Damrosch
Treats world literature not as a fixed canon but as works that circulate beyond their culture of origin and acquire new meanings in translation and reception. The book offers an accessible theoretical starting point for thinking about literature as a form of cultural movement.
An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day
Book | Alexander Beecroft
Develops a comparative account of the environments in which literature is produced and circulated, from local and cosmopolitan systems to vernacular, national and global formations. It is especially useful for relating literary history to languages, political structures and institutions.
Edited book | Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman and Ku-ming Kevin Chang
Compares traditions of textual scholarship across regions and periods. It presents philology - the preservation, interpretation and criticism of texts - as a family of practices with many histories rather than a uniquely European discipline.
The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India
Book | Sheldon Pollock
Traces the emergence of Sanskrit as a transregional language of literary and political expression across South and Southeast Asia, and compares this history with Latin and the rise of European vernacular literatures. It is a major study of the relations among language, literature, cultural prestige and political power.
Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean
Book | Karla Mallette
Compares Arabic and Latin as cosmopolitan languages of learning and literature around the medieval Mediterranean. Through writers, translators, commentators and copyists, it reconstructs textual transmission before the modern system of national languages.
A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History
Edited book | Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette
Reconstructs the medieval Mediterranean as a multilingual literary field in which Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and European vernaculars interacted. It offers an alternative to literary histories organised solely by modern national languages.
Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation
Book | Rebecca C. Johnson
Shows how translation and mistranslation shaped the emergence of the novel in Arabic. It treats the novel not as a European form simply exported intact, but as a transnational genre remade through Arabic literary practice.
The Institute for World Literature
International summer institute, seminars and lectures | Harvard University
An international programme devoted to the study of literature in a global context. Its annual sessions bring together scholars and students for seminars, plenary lectures and colloquia on translation, multilingualism, circulation and comparative literary history.
Peer-reviewed journal | Brill
A journal devoted to literary traditions beyond national frameworks, with particular attention to translation, circulation, multilingualism and transnational literary networks. Its issues provide an ongoing record of current research in the field.
Astronomy, Ṭupšarrūtu, and Knowledge in the Cuneiform World, by Francesca Rochberg
Open-access chapter. The most direct treatment of the problem. Rochberg critiques histories that take Greek science as exemplary, explains how Babylonian astronomy entered the history of science largely through its relevance to Greece, and argues for understanding cuneiform scholarly knowledge on its own terms.
Hellenophilia versus the History of Science, by David Pingree
Research article. A forceful critique of the assumption that the Greeks invented science and its proper method. Pingree asks how definitions built from Greek and modern European examples have excluded or subordinated other intellectual traditions.
Affinities and Elisions: Helen and Hellenocentrism, by Heinrich von Staden
Research article. Examines how historians construct affinities between ancient Greece and modern Western science while eliding bodies of knowledge that do not fit this genealogy. It is especially useful on the ways that historical framing produces ideas of origin, continuity and transmission.
Methods and Problems in the History of Ancient Science: The Greek Case, by G. E. R. Lloyd
Research article. A comparative and carefully qualified account of the Greek case. Lloyd rejects miraculous or autonomous origins while asking how distinctive Greek argumentative and demonstrative practices can be described without turning them into universal criteria for science.
The Cultures of Ancient Science, special section of Isis, volume 83, number 4
Scholarly special section. A concentrated debate bringing together Francesca Rochberg, David Pingree, G. E. R. Lloyd, Heinrich von Staden and Martin Bernal. The essays examine the origins, plurality and historiography of ancient science from contrasting perspectives.
Demystifying the Greek Miracle, by G. E. R. Lloyd
Open-access book chapter. Traces the history of the idea that Greece marked an inexplicable birth of rationality and rejects both miraculous and ethnically grounded explanations. Lloyd recognises earlier non-Greek achievements while carefully assessing particular forms of deduction and explicit argument developed in Greek traditions.
Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective, by Kathryn Stevens
Book. Moves beyond cataloguing isolated cases of borrowing or influence. Stevens treats Greek and Babylonian intellectual life as parts of a multipolar Hellenistic world shaped by common imperial structures, parallel institutions, direct contacts and shared problems.
Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science, by Francesca Rochberg
Book. Questions the use of categories such as nature and science, derived from later Greek and European philosophy, to judge Mesopotamian knowledge. It reconstructs Assyro-Babylonian practices of observation, prediction, classification and explanation on their own conceptual terms.
Globalizing Physics: One Hundred Years of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, edited by Roberto Lalli and Jaume Navarro
Open-access edited book. A centenary history of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, examining the institutions, standards, conferences, educational programmes and forms of scientific diplomacy through which physicists constructed an international discipline. Its chapters also address war, the Cold War, political exclusion and the difficulties of maintaining an ideal of universal science under unequal geopolitical conditions.
Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851-1887, by Josep Simon
Book. Follows Adolphe Ganot's influential physics textbooks as they were produced in France and England, translated into more than ten languages and used in places extending from Europe to North America, Australia, India and Japan. It makes publishing, illustration, translation, commerce and classroom practice central to the formation of an international physics.
Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India, by Robert S. Anderson
Book. Reconstructs the institutional and personal networks behind twentieth-century nuclear science and engineering in India, with particular attention to Meghnad Saha, Shanti Bhatnagar, Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. It places physics within decolonisation, nationalism, industrialisation and India's pursuit of scientific autonomy.
Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India, by Amit Prasad
Book. Uses magnetic resonance imaging to tell an entangled history spanning physics, chemistry and medicine in the United States, Britain and India. By following universities, hospitals, government institutions and industry together, it questions simple divisions between scientific centres and supposedly passive peripheries.
Another Global History of Science: Making Space for India and China, by Asif Siddiqi
Open-access article. Uses rocket programmes in India and China to demonstrate how apparently national technological projects were produced through connected sites in the United States, India, China and Ukraine. It is also a concise methodological statement on writing global histories through movement, place and shared technical networks.
Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, edited by Naomi Oreskes and John Krige
Edited book. Examines how Cold War institutions, military patronage and political priorities reshaped scientific practice. Its studies compare several political systems, including the United States, Soviet Union, France and China, and show how international science remained inseparable from national ambitions and geopolitical competition.
The Networks of Early Quantum Theory
Research project and publication series. Reconstructs early quantum theory as a communal achievement rather than the work of a few isolated geniuses. Drawing on correspondence, manuscripts and notebooks, the project maps collaborations among physicists, chemists and mathematicians, as well as the institutional connections among centres such as Munich, Berlin, Copenhagen and Göttingen.
Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, edited by Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun
Edited reference work. Brings together studies of Islamic, Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, African, Indigenous American, Aboriginal Australian, Polynesian and other astronomical traditions. Its subtitle employs the older category "non-Western," and the chapters generally survey traditions individually rather than constructing a fully connected history, but its geographical and bibliographical range remains valuable.
Overlapping Cosmologies in Asia: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Bill M. Mak and Eric Huntington
Edited book. Approaches Asian cosmologies through transcultural and interdisciplinary study rather than treating religious and intellectual traditions as self-contained. Published in Brill's series on interactions across the Silk Routes, it is particularly pertinent to the movement, overlap and transformation of cosmological knowledge.
Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, by George Saliba
Book. Presents an influential and deliberately revisionist account of Islamic astronomy and its relationship to Renaissance Europe. Saliba uses astronomy to demonstrate the originality of mathematical work produced in Arabic and to argue for possible paths by which this work became relevant to the development of Copernican astronomy.
The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt, by Daniel A. Stolz
Book. Links astronomy in late Ottoman Egypt to imperial bureaucracy, Muslim scholarship, Arabic print, mechanical timekeeping and religious reform. It shows how imported astronomical tables, clocks and instruments were translated into local practices of authority, worship and state administration.
The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, edited by David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg and H. Otto Sibum
Edited book. Studies observatories not as isolated places of pure research but as institutions embedded in cities, states, empires and international networks. Its cases extend from European capitals to Australia, Russia, Thailand and the United States, revealing connections among astronomy, geodesy, meteorology, military interests and political prestige.
Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia
Research group, colloquia and public lectures. This Max Planck research group, running from 2024 to 2029, studies the transmission, relocation and creative transformation of astronomy, cosmology, divination and related astral sciences across Asia. Its working groups and colloquium series provide a continuing source of current scholarship and announcements.
Digital edition and research project. Studies the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological writings, together with commentaries and related works. Its searchable records of manuscripts, early printed books, texts and images offer a particularly concrete picture of translation, adaptation and reception through approximately 1700.
Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative
Open scholarly database. Provides structured information about Islamicate authors, works and manuscript witnesses in astronomy and the other exact sciences, including mathematics, optics, geography, mechanics and music. Users can browse people, works, codices, repositories and, where available, digitised manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages.
Exploring Global History through the Lens of History of Chemistry: Materials, Identities and Governance, by Lissa Roberts
Article. A useful methodological introduction to the subject. Roberts argues that a global history of chemistry should follow substances, expertise and systems of governance while taking indigenous knowledge, industrialisation, environmental change and pollution seriously.
AlchemEast: Alchemy in the Making
Research project and online resource. Traces alchemical theory and practice from ancient Babylonia through Graeco-Roman Egypt and Byzantium into Syriac and Arabic traditions. The project combines philological research with laboratory reconstruction, following techniques involving metals, artificial gemstones, coloured glass, textiles and chemical compounds across languages and regions.
Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China, by Fabrizio Pregadio
Book. A major study of Chinese alchemy in relation to Daoist ritual, revelation, cosmology and religious practice during the early medieval period. It is valuable precisely because it resists the retroactive separation of material techniques from medicine, religion and spiritual cultivation.
Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts, by Dagmar Wujastyk
Book. Provides a broad introduction to South Asian alchemy through important Sanskrit works dating principally from the tenth to the seventeenth century. It examines both the material methods developed by Indian alchemists and their larger medical, religious and bodily aims, including transmutation, therapeutic preparation and the perfection of the human body.
Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840, edited by Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett
Open-access edited book. Places chemistry at the intersection of material production, consumption, government and environmental change. Its studies follow coal, heat, gases, fumigation, poisons, pharmaceuticals and industrial education across Britain, France, Spain and the Dutch imperial world.
The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru, by Orlando Bentancor
Book. Examines mining and metallurgy in colonial Peru as part of the intellectual and material machinery of the Spanish Empire. By connecting ideas about matter with extraction, the mines of Potosí, Indigenous labour and environmental transformation, it shows how natural philosophy was produced within an unequal imperial system.
Research and teaching project with an open digital edition. Its edition of the sixteenth-century manuscript "Secrets of Craft and Nature" combines textual scholarship, multimedia essays, historical reconstruction and hands-on experimentation. The project is especially useful for understanding the shared territory of art, craft, technical practice and chemical knowledge.
Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Scholarly society, journal, meetings and seminars. The Society supports research extending from ancient alchemy to modern chemistry through the peer-reviewed journal Ambix, international meetings, webinars, prizes and research grants. Both the Society and the journal cover a wide range of periods and geographical regions.
Science History Institute Digital Collections
Open digital archive. Provides primary sources for the history of chemistry, materials science, biotechnology and the chemical industries, including rare books, archival papers, photographs, films, advertisements and oral histories. It is particularly useful for linking general historical accounts to original textual and visual evidence.
The Mixed Mathematical Sciences: Optics and Mechanics in the Islamic Middle Ages, by Elaheh Kheirandish
Scholarly overview. A concise introduction to optics and mechanics in the medieval Islamic world, treating them as disciplines between mathematics and natural philosophy. It also follows their development across Greek, Arabic, Persian and Latin traditions.
The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam, by A. I. Sabra
Open-access article. A foundational methodological essay arguing that scholars in Islamic societies did not merely preserve Greek science. They appropriated, reorganised and naturalised it within new intellectual and religious settings.
Mathematics and Physics in Classical Islam: Comparative Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science, edited by Giovanna Lelli
Edited book. A recent collection on the relationship between mathematics and physical inquiry in classical Islamic scholarship. Its studies include Ibn al-Haytham and the application of mathematical reasoning to problems in natural philosophy.
Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, edited by Roshdi Rashed and Régis Morelon
Three-volume scholarly reference work. A major reference work on Arabic mathematics, science and medicine. Volume II contains substantial treatments of optics, statics, mechanics, astronomy and related physical sciences.
Arabic and Islamic Natural Philosophy and Natural Science, by Jon McGinnis
Open-access scholarly introduction. An accessible guide to natural philosophy in both falsafa and kalām. It introduces Arabic debates about atomism, causation, motion, matter, space and time.
The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books I-III: On Direct Vision, translated with introduction and commentary by A. I. Sabra
Open-access primary source and critical translation. An English translation of the first three books of Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics. The work treats light, the eye, geometrical radiation, visual perception, error and illusion.
Optics, Astronomy and Logic: Studies in Arabic Science and Philosophy, by A. I. Sabra
Collected studies. A collection of influential essays on Ibn al-Haytham, Arabic optics, astronomy and scientific reasoning. It is especially useful for a more technical account of the mathematical and physical innovations of Arabic optical science.
From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics, by A. Mark Smith
Book. A detailed history extending from Greek optics through Arabic and medieval Latin traditions to Kepler. It explains both the transmission of optical knowledge and the conceptual breaks that helped produce early modern optics.
The Arabic Version of Euclid's Optics, edited and translated by Elaheh Kheirandish
Critical edition, translation and historical study. A study of the Arabic versions of Euclid's Optics and the scholarly tradition around them. It shows how Greek scientific texts were translated, compared, corrected and incorporated into new research traditions.
The Elements of Avicenna's Physics: Greek Sources and Arabic Innovations, by Andreas Lammer
Book. A rigorous reconstruction of Avicenna's theories of body, matter, form, motion and natural change. The study carefully distinguishes his Greek sources from his own innovations.
Aristotle's Physics and Its Reception in the Arabic World, by Paul Lettinck
Book and critical textual study. A survey of the interpretation of Aristotle's Physics by Arabic philosophers, including Ibn Bājja and Averroes. It helps distinguish the inherited Greek text from the new physical arguments developed by Arabic commentators.
The Physical Theory of Kalām: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Muʿtazilī Cosmology, by Alnoor Dhanani
Book. A major reconstruction of Basrian Muʿtazilī atomism. It examines theories of indivisible atoms, bodies, space, void, motion and continuity that differed sharply from Aristotelian physics.
Averroes' Physics: A Turning Point in Medieval Natural Philosophy, by Ruth Glasner
Book. Reconstructs Averroes' changing ideas about corporeal reality, continuity and motion from Arabic, Latin and Hebrew evidence. Glasner argues that he developed a distinctive physical system.
Greek Mechanics in Arabic Context: Thābit ibn Qurra, al-Isfizārī and the Arabic Traditions of Aristotelian and Euclidean Mechanics, by Mohammed Abattouy
Research article. A substantial study of how Greek mechanical traditions were translated and transformed in Arabic. It examines the lever, equilibrium and weight, and the interaction between mathematical mechanics and Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Al-Qūhī versus Aristotle: On Motion, by Roshdi Rashed
Research article. A focused study of the tenth-century mathematician al-Qūhī's engagement with Aristotelian theories of motion. It illustrates how geometrical reasoning could be used to challenge established physical doctrine.
Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West, by Dag Nikolaus Hasse
Open-access scholarly survey. A clear account of Arabic-Latin translation and intellectual influence. It traces the reception of Arabic work on motion, matter, time, cosmology, elemental composition and causation while emphasising selective adoption and transformation rather than simple transmission.
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy
Peer-reviewed scholarly journal. A leading international journal on Arabic mathematics, science and philosophy, their development within Islamic societies and their later reception. Its archive is a central source for specialised research in the field.
Digital scholarly corpus. Places Greek philosophical and scientific texts alongside their Syriac and Arabic translations. It is especially useful for studying the role of Syriac-speaking Christian translators and the ways concepts changed as they moved between languages.
Open research database. A specialised database for the vocabulary of medieval Arabic translations from Greek. Its large collection of digitised lexical records allows researchers to trace the creation and stabilisation of Arabic philosophical and scientific terminology.
Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950
Book | Marwa Elshakry
A study of translation, interpretation and controversy surrounding evolutionary thought in Arabic. It shows how a scientific theory acquires new meanings as it enters different linguistic, religious and political settings.
Life Science and Medicine
Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age
Book | Harold J. Cook
Connects the development of empirical science and medicine with global commerce, travel, collecting and colonial exchange. It is especially strong on the movement of material objects and practical information.
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
Book | Londa Schiebinger
Examines the movement - and sometimes deliberate non-movement - of botanical and medical knowledge between the Caribbean and Europe. It raises questions about power, extraction and the silencing of local knowledge.
ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Roads, by Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim
Book. One of the best introductions to premodern medical exchange across Eurasia. Using manuscripts from Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Genizah and Tabriz, it follows contact zones, myrobalans, moxa-cautery and Buddhist medicine in Iran.
Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus
Edited book. Examines how medicinal substances, objects and therapeutic commodities moved around the Indian Ocean world. Its case studies link health to trade, natural history, empire, local expertise and changing regimes of value.
A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine, by C. Pierce Salguero
Book. A synthetic history of the medical ideas and practices carried by Buddhism across Asia and beyond. The book is organised around circulation, translation, localisation and modernisation rather than treating Buddhist medicine as a single fixed system.
Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources, edited by C. Pierce Salguero
Primary-source anthology. Brings together translated medical materials from many Buddhist regions and languages, with substantial scholarly introductions. It allows readers to compare how healing knowledge changed as Buddhism moved through South, Central, East and Southeast Asia.
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, edited by Vivienne Lo, Dolly Yang and Michael Stanley-Baker
Open-access reference work. A broad scholarly guide to Chinese medicine from antiquity to the present. Its chapters treat textual traditions, drugs, food, religion, institutions, colonial encounters and the circulation of Chinese medical knowledge within Asia and globally.
Medieval Islamic Medicine, by Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith
Book. A reliable overview of medicine in medieval Islamic societies, explicitly attentive to cross-pollination with Greek, Syriac, Persian, Indian and later Latin traditions. It also covers hospitals, practitioners, pharmacology, surgery and medical ethics.
Galen in Arabic: More Than a Translation
Completed research project. Studies the Arabic Galenic corpus as a site of intellectual production rather than a transparent copy of Greek medicine. The project examines translation, commentary and cross-pollination among philosophical, medical and theological traditions in the ninth-century Islamicate world.
Completed research project and digital manuscript resource. Uses multispectral imaging to recover a Syriac translation of Galen's On Simple Drugs from an erased manuscript. It offers unusually concrete evidence for the Greek-Syriac stages through which pharmacological knowledge entered later Arabic traditions.
A Literary History of Medicine, by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah
Open scholarly edition and translation. Presents the earliest comprehensive history of medicine in a parallel Arabic edition and English translation. Its more than four hundred physician biographies connect Greek, Syriac, Islamic, Christian and Jewish medical worlds through careers, books and institutions.
Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500, by Nancy G. Siraisi
Book. Traces the continued study of Avicenna's Arabic Canon in Renaissance Italian universities. Through curricula, commentaries and teaching practices, it shows how an Islamicate medical text was repeatedly reinterpreted within changing European institutions.
Avicenna among Medieval Jews: The Reception of Avicenna's Philosophical, Scientific and Medical Writings in Jewish Cultures, East and West, by Gad Freudenthal and Mauro Zonta
Research article. Surveys the reception of Avicenna in medieval Jewish cultures through both Arabic and Hebrew writings. It makes visible Jewish scholars as readers, translators and intellectual intermediaries linking Islamicate, Hebrew and Latin medical worlds.
Arabic Medicine in China: Tradition, Innovation, and Change, by Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson
Book. Examines the arrival and transformation of Arabic and Persianate medicine in China, especially under Mongol rule. It reconstructs materia medica, foods, recipes and medical theory while showing how imported knowledge was assimilated into Chinese settings.
Indian Medicine and Ayurveda, by Philipp A. Maas
Scholarly overview. A concise introduction to the formation and development of Indian learned medicine and Ayurveda. It provides essential orientation for understanding the Sanskrit materials subsequently translated, adapted or debated in Persian, Tibetan and Chinese contexts.
Culture persane et médecine ayurvédique en Asie du Sud, by Fabrizio Speziale
Book. A major study of Persian engagement with Ayurvedic medicine in South Asia. It traces translations, adaptations and new Persian medical genres from the medieval into the early modern period, showing sustained collaboration by Muslim and Hindu scholars.
Persian Treatises on Āyurveda: The Shaping of a Genre, by Fabrizio Speziale
Open-access article. Compares a group of Persian works on Ayurveda and asks how translated Indian materials were reorganised into a recognisable Persian medical genre. It is especially useful for seeing translation as selection and conceptual reconstruction.
Rasāyana and Rasaśāstra in the Persian Medical Culture of South Asia, by Fabrizio Speziale
Open-access article. Follows the incorporation of Sanskrit rejuvenation and alchemical medicine into Persian texts produced in South Asia. The study reveals a long-lived plural medical culture in which Muslim and Hindu authors created new fields from translated materials.
Perso-Indica: The Persianisation of Indian Learning
Completed research and publishing project. Surveys Persian works on Indian learned traditions from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, including medicine. Its emphasis on the translation, adaptation and Persianisation of individual texts makes it a valuable map of Indo-Persian knowledge exchange.
Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China, by C. Pierce Salguero
Book. Studies how Indian medical ideas entered China through Buddhist translation and writing. Rather than judging translations only by accuracy, it shows how Chinese authors negotiated, rewrote and popularised foreign accounts of the body, illness and healing.
Unani Medicine in the Making: Practices and Representations in 21st-Century India, by Kira Schmidt-Stiedenroth
Book. An ethnographic study of Graeco-Islamic medicine in contemporary India. It shows Unani medicine continually incorporating biomedical terminology, diagnostics, institutions and new religious meanings rather than surviving as an unchanged inherited system.
Rethinking the History of Medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine, by Joseph S. Alter
Research article. Uses a 1963 Pakistani medical delegation to China to examine a deliberately trans-Asian vision of medical history. Hakim Mohammed Said sought connections among Unani, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and biomedicine that exceeded colonial and nationalist frameworks.
Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts, edited by Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen
Edited book and source study. Examines medical manuscripts from Dunhuang, a multilingual Silk Road centre. The volume places Chinese medicine alongside religious healing, popular recipes and knowledge moving between China, Tibet, India and Central Asia.
The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule, by Reiko Shinno
Book. Studies how conquest and institutional reform changed Chinese medicine under the Yuan. It highlights interactions among Chinese physicians, Mongol rulers and Central and West Asian specialists rather than treating medical change as an internal Chinese sequence.
A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Sihui's Yinshan Zhengyao, by Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson
Translation and historical study. Presents a major Yuan dietary and medical text shaped by the Mongol imperial world. The commentary identifies Central and West Asian ingredients, recipes and concepts incorporated into Chinese court medicine.
Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, by Janet Gyatso
Book. A major study of Tibetan medical scholarship, illustration and institution building. It shows physicians adapting Buddhist ethical and epistemological categories while also developing empirical and professional forms of medical authority.
Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine, edited by William A. McGrath
Edited book. Explores how Tibetan medical knowledge was interpreted in different textual, institutional and regional settings. The collection is useful for understanding Tibetan medicine as a historically changing field formed through several intellectual and practical traditions.
Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age, edited by Harold J. Cook
Edited book. Uses connected histories to follow Chinese medical texts, drugs, images and techniques into Japan and Europe. The contributors treat translation as practical and creative work that altered both the imported materials and the settings in which they were received.
Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe, by Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata
Research article. Shows how the medical recipe or formula provided a partially shared format through which Chinese pharmacological knowledge could be translated into Latin. It identifies both the possibilities and the limits of comparison across different learned traditions.
Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity, by Sean Hsiang-lin Lei
Book. Explains how modern Chinese medicine coevolved with biomedicine, public health and the Chinese state. Rather than describing an old tradition displaced by a Western import, it reconstructs the institutional and conceptual production of a deliberately hybrid medicine.
Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century, by Pratik Chakrabarti
Book. Connects eighteenth-century medicine to the movement of plants, minerals, texts and experts through commerce and conquest. It pays particular attention to India and to the unequal colonial networks through which therapeutic knowledge was collected and remade.
Book. Follows a medicinal substance from Tibetan use into Chinese materia medica and then through wider global markets and scientific classifications. The microhistory reveals how drugs, identities and claims to expertise changed together as they travelled.
True Rhubarb? Trading Eurasian Botanical and Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century, by Matthew P. Romaniello
Research article. Uses the rhubarb trade to connect China, Russia and Europe. It shows Russia acting not merely as a corridor for an Asian drug but as an intermediary that gathered, tested and reframed botanical and medical knowledge.
International Dunhuang Programme
International digital collection and research programme. Brings together manuscripts, paintings and artefacts from the Eastern Silk Roads held in collections around the world. Its multilingual materials include medical texts and provide direct evidence for the mobility of recipes, images and healing practices.
Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine
Open digital catalogue and scholarly introduction. Provides historical essays, biographies, images and a detailed catalogue of roughly three hundred Arabic and Persian manuscripts. The collection covers medicine, pharmacy, dietetics, surgery, alchemy and the later reception of European chemical medicine.