Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science)

How do Documents Become Sources? Perspectives from Asia and Science Florence Bretelle-Establet From Documents to Sources in Historiography The present volume develops a specific type of critical analysis of the written documents that have become historians’ sources. For reasons that will be explained later, the history of science in Asia has been taken as a framework. However, the issue addressed is general in scope. It emerged from reflections on a problem that may seem common to historians: why, among the huge mass of written documents available to historians, some have been well studied while others have been dismissed or ignored? The question of historical sources and their (unequal) use in historiography is not new. Which documents have been used and favored as historical sources by historians has been a key historiographical issue that has occupied a large space in the historical production of the last four decades, in France at least. I. Modalities of access to documents and artifacts of the past. I.1 The ancient collections of texts. I.2 Western actors of the past and collections of texts.- II. Reshaping a corpus. II.1 Reuniting collections of texts of the past: Classics and commentaries. II.2 Reuniting archives from the past. II.3 Focusing on margins. II.4 Politics of language of the past and historiography.