Science in Context 12, 3 (1999), pp. 381-384 SONJA BRENTJES Crossing Boundaries: New Approaches to the History of "Pre-Modern" Science and Technology The four papers published here originated as contributions to a symposium at the Twentieth International Congress for the History of Science, Liege, 1997, organ- ized by Nathan Sivin and me. The purpose of the symposium was to reconsider the types of boundaries claimed to have distinguished diverse Asian and European "pre-modern" scientific and technological cultures. Scholars of different discipli- nary affiliations were invited to explore the ways in which boundaries between various kinds of scholarly disciplines in "pre-modern" cultures have been erected, transformed, or erased, and to analyze instances of boundary-crossings and their legitimization by members of "pre-modern" as well as "modern" scientific and technological cultures. The participants were asked first to investigate the interdependence of "pre- modern,""modern,"and current narratives about such boundaries which separat- ed, or were perceived to separate, the various cultures from one another and to demarcate different scholarly communities within one culture. Secondly, they were asked to discuss those contextual elements that they thought contributed to erasing boundaries between different scholarly cultures by transforming local knowledge into cross-culturally accepted knowledge. Finally, they were asked to elucidate the impact of the different disciplinary methods applied to establish evidence and then to derive interpretation upon identifying which boundaries shaped the particular scholarly culture under study. The four papers published here address the first and the second questions with respect to Ming- and Qing-time China, the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, and early modern (Christian) Europe. The four papers selected for publication here — while addressing different cultures, different aspects of cross-cultural interactions, and different scholarly disciplines — share a common concern for encounters between West European and Asian proponents of scholarly knowledge and practices, their perceptions by contemporaries, and their portrayals in current historiography of science. They illustrate the fact that different members of each of the two broader communities involved in these meetings have developed narratives of their own which often available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889700003495 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 11 Mar 2019 at 11:04:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,