ABSTRACT
In the premodern era, historical actors saw experience more as a processed and refined product of cognition than as a plain perceptual given. As such, experience was subject to interpretation by practitioners of science and translators alike. In a world of intense cross-cultural exchanges, experience was communicated between languages, between scientific systems and norms, and between verbal and visual systems (such as from language to symbol or from diagram to image). The epistemic processes of refinement, interpretation, and exchange of experience thus went hand in hand, to the extent that they cannot be separated. Together, they shaped scientific experience in its epistemic purpose and in its transformative force for the premodern sciences of the natural world. This raises three interrelated research questions: What counted as experience of the natural world in the premodern era? What impact did such processes of epistemic translation have upon the shape and purpose of experience in the premodern sciences of the natural world? And how did the individual and collective expertise of practitioners in science and translators transform the shape and purpose of experience within those sciences?
