ABSTRACT
How did people learn and what did they know? This chapter first examines the spread of Persian, its connection to changes in educational curricula, and its limits – including the especially important place of orality. The second section looks at the growing knowledge of the self and selfhood evident in early modern times, not to mention changes in bodily and medical knowledge, as well as the vast proportion (and kinds) of knowledge that remained embodied. An increasing proportion of knowledge was being textualised and codified, however, not to mention stored in libraries or circulating via scholar households, which is described in section three. Attention then turns, in sections four and five, to knowledges about space (viz. navigation, cartography, geography) and about time (viz. mathematics, astronomy, horology). The conclusion considers whether literacy and learning were an all-male preserve and how we can bring women into the picture, at the same time demonstrating the contributions of Indian knowledges and knowledgeable Indians to the intellectual upsurge across the globe.
