Science and Society in the Sanskrit World contains seventeen essays that cover a kaleidoscopic array of classical Sanskrit scientific disciplines, such as the astral sciences, grammar, jurisprudence, theology, and hermeneutics. The volume foregrounds a unifying theme to Christopher Z. Minkowski’s intellectual oeuvre: that scholars’ scientific endeavors are inseparable from the social worlds that shaped those scholars’ lives. Contributors are: Anne Blackburn, Johannes Bronkhorst, Jonathan Duquette, Robert Goldman, Setsuro Ikeyama, Stephanie Jamison, Takanori Kusuba, John Lowe, Clemency Montelle, Valters Negribs, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Patrick Olivelle, Deven Patel, Kim Plofker, Frederick Smith, Barbora Sojkova, Thomas Trautmann, Elizabeth Tucker, Anand Venkatkrishnan, and Dominik Wujastyk.

The 17th-century Brahmatulyasarani is a rich repository of information about Indian mathematical astronomy and its genres of scientific writing in Sanskrit. This painstaking critical edition, translation, and technical analysis of the work includes detailed technical background about its content and relation to the seminal 12th-century astronomical handbook Karanakutuhala. This book explores important contextual information about the role and study of numerical tables in pre-modern astronomy, as well as the many challenges arising from critically editing numerical data in the Indian astral sciences.

This book provides, for the first time, a critical edition and an English translation of the chapter on spheres (goladhyaya) from Nityananda's Sarvasiddhantaraja, a Sanskrit astronomical text written in seventeenth-century Mughal India.