This volume is a comparative study of the practice of impagination across different ages and civilizations. By impagination we mean the act of placing and arranging spatially textual and other information onto a material bearer that could be made of a variety of materials (papyrus, bamboo slips, palm leaf, parchment, paper, and the computer screen). This volume investigates three levels of impagination: what is the page or other unit of the material bearer, what is written or printed on it, and how is writing or print placed on it. It also examines the interrelations of two or all three of these levels. Collectively it examines the material and materiality of the page, the variety of imprints, cultural and historical conventions for impagination, interlinguistic encounters, the control of editors, scribes, publishers and readers over the page, inheritance, borrowing and innovation, economics, aesthetics and socialities of imprints and impagination, and the relationship of impagination to philology. This volume supplements studies on mise en page and layout - an important subject of codicology - first by including non-codex writings, second by taking a closer look at the page or other unit than at the codex (or book), and third by its aspiration to adopt a globally comparative approach. This volume brings together for comparison vast geographical realms of learning, including Europe, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan and the Near Eastern and European communities in which the Hebrew Bible was transmitted. This comparison is significant, for Europe, China, and India all developed great traditions of learning which came into intensive contact. The contributions to this volume are firmly rooted in local cultures and together address global, comparative themes that are significant for multiple disciplines, such as intellectual and cultural history of knowledge (both humanistic and scientific), global history, literary and media studies, aesthetics, and studies of material culture, among other fields.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. History of Universities XXXIV/1 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a global history of research education in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume compares the training of scholars in different disciplines and countries across the globe in a century that laid the foundation for modern academia. The articles in this volume examine the different training "instruments" and methods for text-based disciplines (history and philology), laboratory sciences (such as chemistry), theoretical sciences (mathematics, for instance), fieldwork disciplines (linguistics and paleontology), and clinical science (medicine). They consider countries or societies in Europe, North America, South and East Asia, and Latin America, and analyze the roles of the state, nationalism and internationalism that shaped the institutions and policies for research education. Some of these articles are comparative, while the others are in-depth case studies of individual disciplines in specific countries at different stages of scientific developments. The introduction and conclusion of this volume bring together the important themes that run across the article and make necessary supplements to present a synthetic picture of the global history of research education.

Philology the discipline of making sense of texts is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology" charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding.

Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read.

Covering a wide range of cultures Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European World Philology "lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline."