Abstract
The twelfth century witnessed a translation movement that invigorated medieval intellectual culture by making available Arabic scientific and philosophical works containing a ‘new’ perspective on the workings of nature without an overt materialism that sidelines the divine will.1 The earliest texts to be translated were medical and astrological,2 thus epis-temologically making knowable man and the heavens. The revival of Galenic medicine was initiated by Constantine the African (d. c. 1087) who brought from Qairouan an Arabic medical corpus to be translated in Salerno and the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino. It was part of the project in which the most influential medical text in the twelfth century was translated, the Pantegni by Haly Abbas (The Complete Book of Medical Art of ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majusi). A high number of astrological texts were being translated in Spain, especially Toledo. Gerard of Cremona (d. 1178) translated Ptolemy’s Almagest, and John of Seville translated al-Qabisi’s Introduction to Astrology and Abu Ma‘shar’s Great Introduction (1133). He translated many texts on astrology, magic and talismans including Pseudo-Aristotle’s Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), Mash’allah’s De rebus eclipsium (On Eclipses), al-Tabari’s De nativ-itatibus (On Nativities) and Thabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus. To John of Seville was attributed the translations of Abu Ma‘shar’s Flores (The Flowers; Kitab tahawil sini al-‘alam) and De magnis conjunctionibus (On the Great Conjunctions; Kitab al-qiranat).
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Notes
Charles Burnett, ‘Translation from Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages’, in Übersetzung: ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung, ed. Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner et al., 2 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), I, pp. 1231–7 (1231).
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Charles Burnett, ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century’, Science in Context, 14/1–2 (2001), pp. 249–88 (251, 259);
Charles Burnett, ‘John of Seville and John of Spain: A Mise au Point’, in Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2009), pp. 59–78 (59–61);
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This title refers to the text that contains introductory tables and the Liber de tribus generalibus iudiciis. The latter is often used as a label given to the second half. The title Liber de quatuor partibus de astronomice iudicandi also refers to the whole but is sometimes retained for the first half only. See Nicholas Whyte, ‘Roger of Hereford’s Liber de Astronomice iudicandi: A Twelfth-Century Astrologer’s Manual’ (unpublished MPhil dissertation, Clare College, 1991), pp. 3, 15, 25–6; French, ‘Foretelling the Future’, p. 466;
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Silvestris, The Cosmographia, p. 88: I revised here the translation of ‘natura elementans’ in the first instance from ‘the nature of the elemental qualities’ as translated by Wetherbee to ‘elementing nature’; Bernard Silvestris, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden: Brill, 1978), p. 118.
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Edward Grant, The Foundation of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 19; Steifel, The Intellectual Revolution, pp. 1–2;
Steifel, ‘The Heresy of Science: A Twelfth-Century Conceptual Revolution’, Isis, 68/3 (September, 1977), pp. 346–62 (348); Steifel, ‘Twelfth-Century Matter for Metaphor’, p. 170.
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Saif, L. (2015). Textual and Intellectual Reception of Arabic Astral Theories in the Twelfth Century. In: The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399472_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399472_4
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