Further Reading

I. F. McNeely and L. Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York, 2008) offers a short and lively introduction to the history of knowledge over the last two thousand years. For the last five hundred, P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge, 2000); A Social History of Knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge, 2012).

Some studies of knowledge made in other disciplines are essential for historians. J. Nagel, Knowledge (Oxford, 2014) offers a short and lucid introduction to problems of epistemology. K. Mannheim's Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (English trans. London 1952) are fundamental, especially chapter 4, ‘The problem of a sociology of knowledge’. In the case of Foucault, it might be best to read a collection of interviews with him: Power/Knowledge (Brighton, 1980) before turning to his ‘Archaeology of knowledge’ in the Order of Things (English trans. London 1970). D. Haraway's ‘Situated knowledge’ first appeared in Feminist Studies 14 (1988), 575–99. B. Latour's discussion of ‘centres of calculation’ can be found in his Science in Action (Milton Keynes, 1987). P. Bourdieu's final reflections on knowledge can be found in his Science of Science and Reflexivity (English trans. Cambridge 2004). For a lucid exposition of a geographical approach, see D. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (Chicago, 2003). For an anthropological point of view, see F. Barth, ‘An anthropology of knowledge’, Current Anthropology 43 (2002), 1–11.

The endnotes to this book offer suggestions for further reading on many topics.