Knowledge from Below: Case Studies in Historical and Political Epistemology: editorial

This special issue is situated at the intersection of a number of active discourses in the history and philosophy of science, including historical epistemology, the more recently emerged political epistemology, and the various versions and offspring of 'science studies' including STS, social epistemology, and social history of science overall. We seek in this special issue to tie together the turn towards the study of vernacular knowledge and the ambitions of historical epistemology. The studies presented here examine specific 'forms of knowledge', and seek to operationalize the concept of knowledge from below with theoretically informed historical case studies. Pietro Daniel Omodeo's essay on labor law and environmental management in the context of early modern Venetian fishermen opens the issue. He seeks to describe the way in which embedded, practical ichthyological knowledge was integrated into the environmental management of the Venice laguna, as an instance both of political epistemology (a study of the political context of knowledge-formation) and of knowledge from below (the official magistrature's decisions and bylaws for managing resources, diverting waters, etc. were explicitly taken in light of these practices and local expertise). A similar dual application of political epistemology and knowledge from below, but focusing on subcontinental mathematical traditions, is at work in Senthil Babu's essay "Texts, Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India," focusing on accounting practices in early modern India as part of routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations; the examination of such practices provides us with a spectrum of computational activities, which controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. Ana Simões explores the observation by four groups of scientists of the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, which confirmed the light bending prediction by Albert Einstein, one of the three astronomical predictions put forward by general relativity theory. She demonstrates how the experience of war and