Notes
1 In the 17 volumes, Shen Gua (Shen Kuo) is mentioned 27 times in total, and Mengxi bitan is mentioned 20 times. Five of the books do not mention him or his work at all. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Kuo (accessed 30 June 2022).
2 Deng Xiaonan notes that Zu, for instance, should consider that Shen was first a scholar-official and not a scientist. Deng Xiaonan 邓小南, “Du Zu Hui zhuan Shen Gua pingzhuan” 读祖慧撰《沈括评传》, Zhongguoshi yanjiu dongtai 中国史研究动态 8 (2005): pp. 30–32. Neither does he appear anywhere prominently in her study of Song-era intellectuals and civil servants Songdai wenguan xuanren zhidu zhu cengmian 宋代文官选任制度诸层面 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu, 1993).
3 Ari Daniel Levine, Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Modern Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
4 Jonathan O’Pease, His Stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021–1086), Reformer and Poet (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 344.
5 Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chap. 7.
6 Nathan Sivin, “Shen Kua,” 1973, rev. ed., repr. in Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995), pt. III, pp. 1–55; Fu Daiwie, “The Flourishing of Biji or Pen-Notes Texts and Its Relations to History of Knowledge in Song China (960–1279),” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident, no. 1 (2007): 103–130.
7 For an overview of this field, see Sven Dupré and Geert Somsen, “The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 42 (2019), pp. 186–99, https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/44846780/The_History_of_Knowledge_and_the_Future_of_Knowledge_Societies.pdf