“Observing the Unseen: Curiosity and Common Knowledge in Early Modern China” by Andrew Schonebaum

Observing the Unseen explores how literate and marginally literate people in China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries investigated the invisible, the ubiquitous, and the inexplicable. Whether through medical encyclopedias, daily-use almanacs, or novels and anecdotes, readers pursued knowledge of the natural world with curiosity shaped as much by wonder as by empiricism.

Rather than privileging science as courtly or Western, Andrew Schonebaum shows how ordinary readers made sense of the cosmos in an age of expanding literacy and print culture. His book challenges assumptions about what Chinese literature was and how it was read, offering a nuanced picture of everyday life in early modern China.

Observing the Unseen: Curiosity and Common Knowledge in Early Modern China
by Andrew Schonebaum
Univ of Washington Press (April 2026)