This book is the first step towards the development of a comparative history of the humanities. Specialists in philology, musicology, art history, linguistics, literary theory, and other disciplines highlight the intertwining of the various fields and their impact on the sciences. This first volume in the series The Making of the Humanities focuses on the early modern period. Different perspectives reveal how the humanities developed from the 'liberal arts', via the curriculum of ...

Three essays highlight the worldliness of the humanities in this short book edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen, a Danish Professor of Comparative Literature. "We need a better account of what the humanities are, what humanist scholars do and how they do it, what is done with the knowledge they produce, and how this knowledge seeps into society and other institutions and sciences through multiple channels to shape our common world."

A comprehensive account of the methods of knowledge production throughout human history and across the globe.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 huma...

This much-awaited second volume investigates the changes in subject, method and institutional context of the humanistic disciplines around 1800, offering a wealth of insights for specialists and students alike. Point of departure is the pivotal question whether there was a paradigm shift in the humanities around 1800 or whether these changes were part of a much longer process. The authors provide an overarching perspective including philology, musicology, art history, linguistics, historio...

This comprehensive history of the humanities focuses on the modern period (1850-2000). The contributors, including Floris Cohen, Lorraine Daston and Ingrid Rowland, survey the rise of the humanities in interaction with the natural and social sciences, offering new perspectives on the interaction between disciplines in Europe and Asia and new insights generated by digital humanities.