The House of Wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons

  17. Adelard of Bath, On the Use of the Astrolabe, quoted in Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 98 (see chap.2, n. 4).

  18. Adelard of Bath, On the Use of the Astrolabe, quoted in Dickey, “Adelard of Bath,” 11–12.

  19. Dickey, “Adelard of Bath,” 8.

  20. Haskins, Studies, 28.

  21. Dickey, “Adelard of Bath,” 27.

  22. Ibid., 13.

  23. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 98.

  24. Dickey, “Adelard of Bath,” 19–20.

  25. Plato, Timaeus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. and ed. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 3: 719.

  26. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 29–38.

  27. Ibid., 45–48.

  28. Ibid., 55–59.

  29. Ibid., 70.

  30. Tester, Western Astrology, 153 (see chap. 5, n. 14).

  31. Emmanuel Poulle, “Le Traite de l’Astrolabe d’Adelard de Bath,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist, 121.

  32. Chartularium universitatis Paresiensis, quoted in Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 26–27.

  33. Ibid., 78–79.

  34. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 17.

  35. Fernand van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism, trans. Leonard Johnston (Louvain, Belgium: E. Nauwelaerts, 1955), 32–39.

  36. For a discussion of the limited impact of Aristotle’s natural philosophy in the early twelfth century, see John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 54–56.

  37. Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, 63 (see Prologue, n. 9).

  38. Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, 109.

  39. Burnett, “Antioch as a Link,” 3–4 (see chap. 5, n. 2).

  40. Abu Mashar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology: Together with the Medieval Translation of Adelard of Bath, trans. and ed. Charles Burnett, Keiji Yamamoto, and Michio Yano (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1994), 13.

  41. Richard Joseph Lemay, Abu Mashar and Latin Aristotelianism in the 12th Century (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1962), xxxvii.

  42. Albertus Magnus, De vegetabilis et plantis, quoted in Thorndike, “True Place of Astrology,” 275 (see chap. 3, n. 40).

  43. Thorndike, “True Place of Astrology,” 277.

  44. Adelard of Bath, quoted in Abbreviation of the Introduction, 15.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Lemay, Abu Mashar, 3–4.

  47. Lemay, “True Place of Astrology,” 68 (see chap. 5, n. 8).

  48. Abu Mashar on Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), trans. and ed. Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2000), 3.

  49. Lemay, “True Place of Astrology,” 57.

  50. Ibid., 58–59.

  51. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89.

  52. Lemay, “True Place of Astrology,” 58–59.

  53. Tester, Western Astrology, 153.

  54. J. D. Lipton, “The Rational Evaluation of Astrology in the Period of the Arabo-Latin Translations, ca.1126–1187 A.D.” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, LosAngeles, 1978), 211–17. See also J. D. North, “Some Norman Horoscopes,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, 149.

  55. For a detailed analysis of the horoscopes and estimates of their dates and locales, see North, “Some Norman Horoscopes” (147–61), on which this account is based. North proposes Robert of Ketton, the prominent translator and scientist, as the only other possible candidate but quickly dismisses him for his lack of known connections to the throne.

  56. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 46.

  Chapter 7: “The Wisest Philosophers of the World”

  1. Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24.

  2. Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2000), 48.

  3. Abd al-Rahman, “The Palm Tree,” trans. in D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 42.

  4. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, An Introduction to History, trans. and ed. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 1: 303.

  5. Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 92.

  6. Ibid., 80–84.

  7. Ibid., 70–71.

  8. The respective terms are asdad, saqiya, naura, and saniya. See Expiración García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1994), 996.

  9. J. Vernet, “Natural and Technical Sciences in al-Andalus,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 939.

  10. Alvaro, quoted in Robert Hillenbrand, “The Ornament of the World: Medieval Cordoba as a Cultural Center,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 115.

  11. Menocal, Ornament of the World, 42–43 (see chap. 6, n. 8).

  12. Al-Jahiz, “Epistle on Singing Girls,” quoted in Roger Boase, “Arab Influences on European Love Poetry,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 466.

  13. Menocal, Ornament of the World, 124–25.

  14. Roger Boase, “Arab Influences,” 466–73. For a detailed analysis of the extent of Arab influence on the troubadours, which remains controversial in scholarly circles, see also María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

  15. Ibn Hawqal, quoted in Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 65.

  16. Luce López-Baralt, “The Legacy of Islam in Spanish Literature,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 511–12.

  17. Miquel Forcada, “Books of Anwa in al-Andalus,” trans. Michael Kennedy, in The Formation of al~Andalus: Language, Religion, Culture and the Sciences, ed. Maribel Fierro and Julio Samsó (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 311.

  18. Calendar of Cordoba, quoted in McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 166–68 (see chap. 2, n. 7).

  19. García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 997.

  20. Ibn Idhari, al-Bayan al-mughrib, quoted in Robert Hillenbrand, “Ornament of the World,” 127.

  21. W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 92.

  22. García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain,” 990.

  23. Ibid., 992–93.

  24. Rafael Valencia, “Islamic Seville,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, 145. See also García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain,” 997.

  25. Watson, Agricultural Innovation, 82–83.

  26. Ibid., 83.

  27. Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Translations and Translators,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 440.

  28. Hermann of Carinthia, De essentiis, trans. and ed. Charles Burnett (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1982), 70.

  29. Robert of Ketton, quoted in Charles Burnett, “A Group of Arabic-Latin Translators Working in Northern Spain in the Mid-Twelfth Century,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 63, no. 14 (1977): 63, n. 14. The Latin original is in Haskins, Studies, 121 (see chap. 5, n. 3).

  30. James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1964), 3.

  31. Peter the Venerable, Patrologia Latina, 671c, quoted in James Kritzeck, “Peter the Venerable and the Toledan Collection,” in Petrus Venerabilis
1156–1956: Studies and Texts Commemorating the Eighth Centenary of his Death, ed. Giles Constable and James Kritzeck (Rome: Herder, 1956), 180. For a more recent study, see Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

  32. Ibid., 177.

  33. Peter the Venerable, Liber contra sectum sive haeresim saracenorum, quoted in Jolivet, “Arabic Inheritance,” 113 (see chap. 5, n. 38).

  34. Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable, 137–44.

  35. Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 16.

  36. Robert of Ketton, quoted in Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable, 62.

  37. Pym, Negotiating the Frontier, 52.

  38. Ptolemy’s Almagest, trans. and ed. G. J. Toomer (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), 3.

  39. Eulogy quoted in David C. Lindberg, “Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 66, n. 61. The eulogy was attached to Gerard’s translation of Galen’s Tegni. For the full eulogy text, see A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 35.

  40. D’Alverny, “Translations and Translators,” 453.

  41. Avendauth, De anima, quoted in Jolivet, “Arabic Inheritance,” 141.

  42. Daniel of Morley, Philosophia, quoted in Pym, Negotiating the Frontier, 41.

  43. Theodore Silverstein, “Daniel of Morley, English Cosmologist and Student of Arabic Science,” Mediaeval Studies 10 (1948): 179.

  44. Ibid., 185–89.

  45. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 63 (see chap. 2, n. 18).

  46. Daniel of Morley, Philosophia, quoted in Pym, Negotiating the Frontier, 52.

  47. Hugh of Santalla, quoted in Burnett, “Group of Arabic-Latin Translators,” 90.

  48. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 60.

  49. Oliverus Brito, Philosophia, quoted in McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 191.

  50. For the few sketchy details of Michael Scot’s background, see Haskins, Studies, 272–73, and Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot, 11–12 (see chap. 2, n. 34).

  51. Michael Scot, Liber particularis, quoted in Thorndike, Michael Scot, 15.

  52. Thorndike, Michael Scot, 72.

  53. J. Wood Brown, An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1897), 154.

  54. Thorndike, Michael Scot, 39.

  55. Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (New York: C. S. Francis and Co.: 1845), 68.

  56. Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 34.

  57. Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 1957), 9. See also Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 34.

  58. Le Goff, Intellectuals, 5–6.

  59. Haskins, Rise of Universities, 82–83.

  60. Thorndike, Michael Scot, 12.

  Chapter 8: On the Eternity of the World

  1. Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second: 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer (London: Constable and Co., 1931), 4–5.

  2. Menocal, Ornament of the World, 192 (see chap. 6, n. 8).

  3. Thomas Curtis van Cleve, The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: Immutator Mundi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 225.

  4. Ibid., 224–25.

  5. Charles Homer Haskins, “Science at the Court of the Emperor Frederick II,” American Historical Review 27, no. 4 (1922), 680.

  6. Quoted in van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, xxx.

  7. Van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, 217.

  8. Al-Maqrizi, quoted in van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, 219.

  9. Van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, 158–60.

  10. Haskins, Studies, 251 (see chap. 5, n. 3).

  11. David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 257.

  12. Ibid., 263.

  13. Haskins, “Science at the Court,” 672.

  14. Thorndike, Michael Scot, 1 and 28 (see chap. 2, n. 34).

  15. Haskins, “Science at the Court,” 672.

  16. Michael Scot, Secrets of Nature, quoted in Thorndike, Michael Scot, 3.

  17. Frank J. Swetz, Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Mathematics of the 15th Century (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 12–13.

  18. Charles King, “Leonardo Fibonacci,” in From Five Fingers to Infinity: A Journey Through the History of Mathematics, ed. Frank J. Swetz (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 252. See also R. B. McClenan, “Leonardo of Pisa and His Liber quadratorium,” in From Five Fingers, Swetz, 255.

  19. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci: A Translation into Modern English of Leonardo Pisano’s Book of Calculation, trans. and ed. L. E. Sigler (New York: Springer, 2002), 17.

  20. Ibid., 15.

  21. See King, “Leonardo Fibonacci,” 252–54, and Swetz, Capitalism and Arithmetic, 234.

  22. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci, 291.

  23. Ibid., 404–05.

  24. Haskins, Studies, 268.

  25. Charles Homer Haskins, “The ‘De arte venandi cum avibus’ of the Emperor Frederick II,” English Historical Review 36, no. 143 (1921), 342.

  26. Charles Homer Haskins, “Some Early Treatises on Falconry,” Romanic Review 13, no. 1 (1922), 18–22.

  27. Van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, 304.

  28. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 69.

  29. Haskins, Studies, 268.

  30. Michael Scot, Liber particularis quoted in Haskins, Studies, 266.

  31. Haskins, “Science at the Court,” 688.

  32. Confessions of St. Augustine, 241 (see chap. 2, n. 45).

  33. Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990), 18.

  34. Al-Kindi, Metaphysics, quoted in Richard Walzer, “Arabic Transmission of Greek Thought to Medieval Europe,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 29 (1945–46), 175–76.

  35. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Thomas Taylor (Frome, UK: Prometheus Trust, 2003), 238.

  36. Dales, Medieval Discussions, 35–36.

  37. Richard C. Dales, “The Origin of the Doctrine of the Double Truth,” Viator 15 (1984), 170.

  38. Confessions of St. Augustine, 242.

  39. Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300 (London: Warburg Institute, 2000), I.

  40. Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 57 (see chap. 6, n. 36).

  41. Avicenna, “The Autobiography,” in Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Dimitri Gutas (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988), 28.

  42. Avicenna, “The Autobiography,” Avicenna, 252.

  43. Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 34.

  44. Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima, 29.

  45. A. C. Crombie, Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 100–03.

  46. Ibid., 92–93.

  47. Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 60–62.

  48. Oliver Leaman, A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 4.

  49. Dales, Medieval Discussions, 43.

  50. Averroes: On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. and ed. George F. Hourani (London: Luzac, 1967), 12.

  51. Ibid., 7.

  52. Ibid., 9.

  53. Leaman, Brief Introduction, 21. See also Majid Fakhry, Averroes (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works and Influence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), xii–xiv.

  54. Averroes, On the Harmony, 13.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Harry A. Wolfson, “Revised Plan for Publication of a Corpus Commentariorum Averrois in Aristotelem,” Speculum 38 (1963): 90ff.

  57. Leaman, Brief Introduction, 154–55.

  58. Alfred L. Ivry, “Averroes and the West,” in A Straight Path: Studies in Med
ieval Philosophy and Culture, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger and others (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 153.

  59. Averroes, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, trans. and ed. Simon van den Bergh (London: Luzac, 1964), 319.

  60. Ibid., 468.

  61. Ibid., 425.

  62. Fakhry, Averroes, xvi.

  63. Averroes, On the Harmony, 23.

  64. The full Arabic title has been translated as The book of the decision [or distinction] of the discourse, and a determination of what there is of connection between religion and philosophy. See Averroes, On the Harmony, I.

  65. Averroes, On the Harmony, 44.

  66. Ibid., 22.

  67. Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 52.

  68. Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, 82(see chap. 6, n. 35).

  69. Frederick II, quoted in van Cleve, Emperor Frederick II, 303. Some scholars have attributed this letter to Frederick’s son, Manfred. For the view that the letter was almost certainly written by Frederick, see van Cleve, 303, n. 2.

  Chapter 9: The Invention of the West

  1. Edward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 49–53.

  2. Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, 79–80 (see chap. 6, n. 35).

  3. Chartularium universitatis Paresiensis, in Thorndike, University Records, 34 (see chap. 6, n. 32).

  4. French and Cunningham, Before Science, 63 (see chap. 5, n. 44).

  5. Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 54 (see chap. 7, n. I). See also Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 64 (see chap. 6, n. 36).

  6. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe, 1100–1350, trans. Janet Sondheimer (New York: World Publishing Company, 1961), 200.

  7. Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 37.

  8. John of Fidanza, Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti quoted in Tony Dodd, The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant, Twelfth-century Parisian Philosopher (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 71.

  9. William of Baglione, De Aeternitate Mundi, quoted in Dales, Medieval Discussions, 112(see chap. 8, n. 33).

  10. On Thomas’s teacher, see Jean-Pierre Tarrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996), 7. On Michael’s translations, see Thorndike, Michael Scot, 28 (see chap. 2, n. 34).