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Historians have long been interested in knowledge, its nature and origin, and the circumstances under which it was created, but it has only been in recent years that the history of knowledge has emerged as an academic field in its own right. 'Circulation of Knowledge', a group of Nordic scholars explore a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to this new and exciting area of historical research. The question of knowledge in motion is central to their investigations, and especially how knowledge is transformed when it circulates between different societal arenas, literary genres, or forms of media. Reflecting on twelve empirical studies, from sixteenth-century cartography to sexology in the 1970s, the authors make a significant contribution to the growing international research on the history of knowledge

In contributing to this symposium on book history, I was asked to reflect on my A Social History of Knowledge (hereafter SHK), which was published in 2000, describing how I came to write it and what has happened to the field since, and considering the question of whether I might write my essay differently if I were beginning it today. Following this, I shall devote the remainder of the article to a sketch for a future project on the history of knowledge.

This article focuses on 20th-century terrorist phenomena as gendered objects of knowledge produced and disseminated through history books, mass media and state institutions. By taking 1970s West German terrorism as my field of inquiry, this article will critically discuss how a bourgeois understanding of violence as fundamentally masculine has shaped the way terrorism has been represented, conceptualized and historicized thus far. I will go on to problematize the mas-culine gaze of mass media and state institutions and their tendency to objectify the terrorist. Last but not least, I will delineate how mass media and historiog-raphy of terrorism have relied on a narrative structure that pits rebellious sons and masculine daughters against figural and literal fathers, a frame that is overtly masculine and familial. In so doing I will point to blind spots in the study of 1970s terrorism, namely masculinity and the gender of state institutions. My goal is thus to show how not just individual and symbolic, but also institutional facets of the bourgeois gender order influence the way terrorism has been conceptualized and historicized thus far.

The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge.

Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.

In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Paper, Gender, and the History of Knowledge - Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine von Oertzen -- Part I. Beyond the Page: The Sociomaterial History of Paper -- One. Letter Writing and Paper Connoisseurship in Elite Households in Early Modern England - Heather Wolfe -- Two. Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes, and Everyday Technologies in Early Modern England - Elaine Leong -- Three. The Sociomateriality of Waste and Scrap Paper in Eighteenth-Century England - Simon Werrett -- Four. Paper Trials, Multiple Masculinities, and the Oeconomy of Honor - Gabriella Szalay -- Part II. Transcending Boundaries: Tools and Technologies -- Five. Bookkeeping for Caring: Notebooks, Parchment Slips, and Enlightened Medical Arithmetic in Madrid's Foundling House - Elena Serrano -- Six. Unpacking the Phrenological Toolkit: Knowledge and Identity in Antebellum America - Carla Bittel -- Seven. Keeping Prussia's House in Order: Census Cards, Housewifery, and the State's Data Compilation - Christine von Oertzen -- Eight. Tracing Paper, the Posture Sciences, and the Mapping of the Female Body - Beth Linker -- Part III. Knowledge, Power, and the Everyday -- Nine. A Letter Is a Paper House: Home, Family, and Natural Knowledge - Elizabeth Yale -- Ten. Family Notebooks, Mnemotechnics, and the Rational Education of Margaret Monro - Matthew Daniel Eddy -- Eleven. Papier-Mâché Anatomical Models: The Making of Reform and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France and Beyond - Anna Maerker -- Twelve. Women Who Worked with Documents to Rationalize Reproduction - Dan Bouk -- Afterword: Making and Using Paper in Late Imperial China: Comparative Reflections on Working and Knowing beyond the Page - Jacob Eyferth -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- List of Contributors -- Index.

"In the history of science and knowledge, materiality and space have until now frequently been studied separately. This introduction to the HSR Focus 'Spaces-Objects-Knowledge' argues that approaches that combine these aspects offer new perspectives on processes of knowledge production. Knowledge is produced, this introduction argues, in the interaction of humans, objects, and the spaces they are situated in. The tie that brings these elements together is the notion of practice. Three exemplary constellations in which humans, objects, and spaces are brought into interplay are discussed: objects producing spaces, objects circulating through different spaces, and musealized objects." (author's abstract)