In Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body, Xing Wang investigates the intellectual and technical contexts in which the knowledge of physiognomy ( xiangshu) was produced and transformed in Ming China (1368-1644 C.E.). Known as a fortune-telling technique via examining the human body and material objects, Xing Wang shows how the construction of the physiognomic body in many Ming texts represent a unique, unprecedented ‘somatic cosmology’. Applying an anthropological reading to these texts and providing detailed analysis of this technique, the author proves that this physiognomic cosmology in Ming China emerged as a part of a new body discourse which differs from the modern scholarly discourse on the body.

This volume, containing the revised and expanded versions of eight papers originally presented at a workshop held at the Warburg Institute in June 2012, addresses the question of uncertainty in early modern scholarship and thought. This and other related concepts conventionally assigned to the sceptical tradition are identified and explored in the activity of scholars and editors, whose varying degree of philosophical awareness does not detract from the significance of their ways of conceiving, or coping with, textual uncertainty. The methods of the history of ideas and of classical scholarship are combined in an effort to bring out the methodological assumptions of specific philological projects, editorial strategies and technical devices, as well as to track their possible overlap and interplay with patterns of thought revolving around notions such as uncertainty and conjectural knowledge. The eight papers confront an array of problems, texts, scholars and intellectual contexts, from introductory assessments of the nature of Greek scepticism, particularly in its relation to ancient grammar and medieval thought, to in-depth analyses of the semantic family of uncertainty, as well as of the notion of divination; from case studies of the textual transmission, and relevant editorial problems, of Seneca and Lucretius, to explorations of larger debates in the area of biblical philology, with special attention paid to key figures such as Patrick Young, Richard Bentley and Anthony Collins.