This essay proposes an exercise of 'global microhistory' centered on Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591-1655), an itinerant Jewish alchemist and inventor, born in Candia, who was one of the student-lodgers at Casa Galileo in Padua between 1606 and 1613. Instead of asking primarily if or why this scholar was the first Jewish Copernican, Delmedigo's experience is framed against a stable background of trade, antiquarianism, and astronomical interests spanning from Padua to the Eastern Mediterranean. In light of this network of scholarly intermediation, which is also foreshadowed by the information system generated by Gianfrancesco Sagredo in his consular years in Syria, the managing of Galileo's experimental household is spatially de-centered; as a main result , the lone theoretician, or homo clausus, gives way to the artisanal epistemology of a homo faber.

How do we exchange things? Or what does it take to have a transmission and reception of natural philosophy? We certainly need to have a two-sided connection - either two cultures or two languages or even two historical epochs. This could be the cultural medium through which natural philosophy propagates across civilizations. But ideas of natural philosophy are not divine and they do not exist out there until someone (or simultaneously some people) discovers them. Natural philosophy is the conceptualization of cultural practices, theological premises, particular socio-political structures, tacit knowledge and various values of trust into a coherent world-view of nature. These epistemic objects, in turn, are articulated in scientific objects or textual objects that carry mathematical models, observational data and autobiographical insertions. But to put these objects in motion across cultures we need an agency - a force by which scientific objects move. Usually, we identify the agency with the people who, acting on particular and often peculiar agendas, put those objects in motion. this paper aims to show that Jewish Salonikian astronomers played a crucial role in bridging European and Muslim scientific networks of trust. In the late sixteenth century, European and Islamic practitioners of natural philosophy were experiencing a shift in the cultural hegemony in the field of astronomy. The medieval Arabic astronomical texts were cultivated in Europe and generated new theories and observations. Sacrobosco in the late thirteenth century, Peuerbach and Regiomontanus in the late fifteenth century and then Copernicus in the early sixteenth, shifted the centers of astronomy from East to the West. In the Islamic world, practitioners of astronomy distrusted and ignored these new astronomical writings and kept fidelity to their medieval traditions. Two separate networks of trust, Islamic and European, became an obstacle for the exchange of theories and observational data. However, in late 16th-century Salonika, Jews who had fled the persecutions of the inquisition in Spain and Italy, and who were versed in Latin and European natural philosophical writings, bridged this cultural gap by translating the works of Sacrobosco and Peuerbach from Latin into Hebrew. I hope that my paper shows that the translators were not only versed in intellectual trends, but were also in close connection to the Ottoman chief astronomer and high officials. I, therefore, argue that these seemingly insurmountable cultural gaps of trust could be bridged by a third party and by personal connections that made these “culturally untrustworthy” texts available to Islamic practitioners of astronomy.

Encyclopaedias and other reference works have always been an important tool for the dissemination of scientifically verified and consolidated information and as such they have formed an important part of the didactic infrastructure. Their role is even more underlined with the emergence of online open access encyclopaedias, as they enable a systemic orientation within the ever-increasing amount of data and information, thus becoming means to deal with information overload. This paper will discuss the role of online encylopaedias as a specific component of the scientific infrastructure. The hypothesis is that online encyclopaedias, thanks to their role in synthesis, networking and generation of knowledge, could be applied to the history of science research, to which multilayered, interdisciplinary approach is obligatory. An epistemic and historiographic evaluation of this new methodological approach will be given, with special emphasis on innovations introduced by digital technologies. Due to the knowledge organisation and comprehensiveness, the encyclopaedia itself acts as a semantic network, which by connecting already known facts together enables new insights. Thanks to the properties of the digital media, online encyclopaedias could achieve even higher levels of internal and external knowledge networking by linking to the digital data from various sources (eg. libraries, museums, archives, social networks). Several encyclopaedias that are concerned with the history of science will be analysed, with the special emphasis on the recently initiated open access Croatian encyclopaedia of technology. It will serve as a platform for knowledge networking and sharing, thus enabling the exchange of information on the development of technology at international level, as well as the positioning of Croatian technology in the global context.

The story of astronomy’s relationship to Islamic law has often been told in terms of a disjunction: astronomers developed sophisticated techniques capable of being employed for purposes of ritual, but which jurists disregarded in favor of “folk” methods. Though this characterization remains a fair one in broad strokes, delving into the fiqh literature at its margins provides an important view into variant approaches to evidence, revealing in turn the pliancy and malleability of even the most historically unshakeable evidentiary regimes. Though the Sunni madhhabs (juristic schools), the sophisticated apparatuses of canonical authority that governed Islamic legal thought and practice for centuries, clearly delineated dominant positions that constituted the school doctrine on a given issue, they also functioned as sites of reasoning, discourse, and intellectual heritage that provided for creative and opportunistic departures from the doctrine. The question of making use of astronomical calculations to determine the months of the hijri calendar is a particularly resilient example of the fiqh’s tendency to set aside the findings of astronomers for ritual purposes. Nevertheless, this regime did not stamp out the existence and periodic assertion of positions that were friendlier to calculations, alternatives that were able to exploit pressure points in the edifice of the juristic school to allow for complicated and variant understandings of the evidence. These positions were framed not as direct contradictions of school doctrine, but as negotiations with it that made greater room for the role of astronomers within the law. Key to their mode of argumentation, then, is that the master regime structured the nature of the departure. Equally importantly, these variant opinions were interlinked, with later attempts at asserting calculations relying heavily on earlier efforts, recruiting their authority to push the argumentation further or in new directions. Taken together, this sequence of interventions constituted a minoritarian trend within the corpus of fiqh. Focusing on the trajectory of this minoritarian trend in the Hanafi and Shafi‘i schools, I consider three particular approaches toward astronomy in Islamic legal writing that made room for calculations— what I call correspondence, constructivism, and representation— to demonstrate that the long-standing and far-reaching tradition of discourse and debate that is fiqh does not offer a singular approach to astronomical evidence, but rather encompasses a range of attitudes.