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  9. King, In Synchrony, 547.

  10. Ibid., xvii.

  11. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa, Ma’alim al-qurba, quoted in King, In Synchrony, 637–38.

  12. Zayn al-Din al-Dimyati, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS March 592, quoted in David A. King and Richard P. Lorch, “Qibla Charts, Qibla Maps, and Related Instruments,” in The History of Cartography, vol.2, bk.I, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 190.

  13. King and Lorch, “Qibla Charts, Qibla Maps,” 189, n. 3.

  14. A. J. Wensinck, “Kibla,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 5 (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1960), 87.

  15. Ibid., 189–93.

  16. David A. King, “The Sacred Direction in Islam: A Study of the Interaction of Religion and Science in the Middle Ages,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 10 (1985): 321.

  17. Suliman Bashear, “Qibla Musharriqa and Early Muslim Prayer in Churches,” The Muslim World 81, no. 3–4 (1991): 268.

  18. A. J. Wensinck, “Kibla,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 5 (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1960), 87.

  19. David A. King, Astronomy in the Service of Islam (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 257.

  20. Carl Schoy, “The Geography of the Muslims of the Middle Ages,” Geographical Review 14, no. 2 (1924): 261.

  21. Fuat Sezgin, Mathematical Geography and Cartography in Islam and Their Continuation on the Occident (Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 2005), 1: 159–60.

  22. Peter J. Lu and Paul K. Steinhardt, “Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture,” Science 315 (2007): 1106.

  23. Donald R. Hill, “Arabic Fine Technology and Its Influence on European Mechanical Engineering,” in Arab Influence, Agius and Hitchcock, 29–30 (see chap. 1, n. 42).

  24. Ibid., 27.

  25. A. Jon Kimerling, “Cartographic Methods for Determining the Qibla,” Journal of Geography 101 (2002): 20–22.

  26. Al-Masudi, Muruj al-dahab quoted in Donini, Arab Travelers and Geographers, 24 (see chap. 3, n. 2).

  27. Donini, Arab Travelers and Geographers, 30.

  28. Ibid., 31.

  29. Al-Masudi, Kitab al-Tanbih wa’l-israf, quoted in Sezgin, Mathematical Geography, 78.

  30. Abu Abdallah al-Zuhri, Kitab al-gughrafiyah, quoted in Sezgin, Mathematical Geography, 79.

  31. Donini, Arab Travelers and Geographers, 36.

  32. Sezgin, Mathematical Geography, 99.

  33. Nafis Ahmad, Muslims and the Science of Geography (Dacca: University Press, 1980), 4.

  34. Al-Muqaddasi, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, trans. and ed. Basil Anthony Collins (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994), 3.

  35. Ibid., xxv.

  36. Ibid., 45.

  37. Sayyid Maqbul Ahmad estimates the weight of the silver planispheric map based on alIdrisi’s own account. See Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” in History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, 159, n. 32.

  38. Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: J. Cape, 1952), 348.

  39. Hiroshi Takayama, “Law and Monarchy in the South,” in Italy in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1300, ed. David Abulafia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 64–67.

  40. Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler Between East and West, trans. Graham A. Lound and Diane Milburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18.

  41. Edmund Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016–1154 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 308.

  42. David Abulafia, “The Crown and the Economy Under Roger II and His Successors,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1993): 8.

  43. Houben, Roger II of Sicily, 107.

  44. Curtis, Roger of Sicily, 297.

  45. J. F. P. Hopkins, “Geographical and Navigational Literature,” in Religion, Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 318.

  46. Al-Safadi, quoted in Sayyid Maqbal Ahmad, History of Arab-Islamic Geography, 163.

  47. Al-Idrisi, Opus geographicum, quoted in Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” 163.

  48. Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” 167–69.

  49. George H. T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen and Co., 1938), 57.

  50. Curtis, Roger of Sicily, 316.

  51. “The Horizons of al-Idrisi in the Eleventh Century,” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, ed. Tabish Khair and others (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 86.

  52. Sezgin, Mathematical Geography, 342.

  53. Ibid., 541–42.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid., 309. Details of Vasco da Gama’s report on his journey to India can be found in Joao de Barros, Ásia (Lisbon: Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1988), 152.

  56. For a discussion of the Arab influence on Columbus, see J. H. Kramers, “Geography and Commerce,” in Religion, Learning and Science, 93–94. See also Donini, Arab Travelers and Geographers, 37.

  57. Smith and Karpinski, Hindu-Arabic Numerals, 139 (see chap. 3, n. 52).

  58. Curtis, Roger of Sicily, 309.

  59. Houben, Roger II of Sicily, 179.

  60. Al-Idrisi, Opus geographicum, quoted in Karla Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 146.

  61. Al-Idrisi, Opus geographicum, quoted in Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” 159.

  62. Ibid., 163.

  63. Kent Ljungquist, “Poe’s Nubian Geographer,” American Literature 48, no. 1 (1976): 73.

  64. Kramers, “Geography and Commerce,” 82.

  65. Houben, Roger II of Sicily, 179.

  66. Romuald of Salerno, ibid., 179.

  Chapter 5: The First Man of Science

  1. Allison Drew, “De Eodem et Diverso,” 20 (see chap. 2, n. 71).

  2. Stephen of Pisa, Haly filius abbas, quoted in Charles Burnett, “Antioch as a Link Between Arabic and Latin Culture in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in L’Occident and le Proch~Oriente au temps des crusades: actes du colloque de Louvain~la~Neuve, 24 et 25 mars 1997, ed. Isabelle Draelants and others (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 6.

  3. Stephen of Pisa, Haly filius abbas, quoted in Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 135.

  4. Burnett, “Antioch as a Link,” 6.

  5. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, 83 (see Prologue, n. 4).

  6. Ibid., 91.

  7. Charles Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy Among the Seven Liberal Arts,” in Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 7.

  8. For a full text in English and Latin, see Charles Burnett, “Magister Iohannes Hispalensis et Limiensis and Qusta ibn Luqa’s ‘De differentia spiritus et animae’: A Portuguese Contribution to the Arts Curriculum?,” in Mediaevalia, textos e estudos 7–8 (1995): 252–55. As Burnett notes, Richard Joseph Lemay first identified this “certain Antiochene” with Adelard of Bath. See Lemay, “The True Place of Astrology in Medieval Science and Philosophy: Towards a Definition,” in Astrology, Science, and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1987), 70.

  9. Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science?,” 13.

  10. Lynn Thorndike, “Traditional Medieval Tracts Concerning Engraved Astrological Images,” in Mélanges Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, Belgium: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 231.

  11. Adelard of Bath, Liber prestigiorum, quoted in Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 41 (see chap. 2, n. 18).

  12. Emilie Savage-Smith, ed., Magic and Divination in Early Islam (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), xxiii.

  13. Adelard of Bath, Liber presti
giorum, quoted in Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science,” 10.

  14. S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1987), 23.

  15. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 122.

  16. Cyril Stanley Smith and John G. Hawthorne, trans. and eds., Mappae Clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974), 9.

  17. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 37 (see chap. 2, n. 4).

  18. Charles Burnett and Louise Cochrane, “Adelard and the Mappae Clavicula,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1987), 29–31. See also Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 36–39.

  19. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 36–37.

  20. Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 11–12.

  21. For a discussion of the religious aspects of Islamic alchemy and its relationship to modern chemistry, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islamic Alchemy and the Birth of Chemistry,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 3, no. 1 (1979): 40–45.

  22. Nasr, “Islamic Alchemy,” 40–45.

  23. Roger Bacon, Opus Tertium, quoted in Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 69 (see chap. 2, n. 3).

  24. Moran, Distilling Knowledge, 33.

  25. Ibid., 32–33.

  26. Smith and Hawthorne, Mappae Clavicula, 4.

  27. Robert of Ketton, The Book of the Composition of Alchemy, quoted in Eric John Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 86. Robert was also known as Robert of Chester, among other names.

  28. William R. Newman, trans. and ed., The Summa perfectionis of Pseudo~Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1991), 5.

  29. Moran, Distilling Knowledge, 9.

  30. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 87 (see chap. 2, n. 16).

  31. Thomas L. Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 1: 365.

  32. Jeremy Gray, “Geometry,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas ( Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 3: 92.

  33. H. L. L. Busard, The First Latin Translation of Euclid’s Elements Commonly Ascribed to Adelard of Bath (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 3.

  34. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 120.

  35. Scholars of medieval science have identified at least three early Euclid texts, known by convention as Adelard I, Adelard II, and Adelard III. Textual analysis, cross-references, and other clues have fueled a lively debate that continues to run. Marshall Clagett first established the basic approach. See Clagett, “The Medieval Latin Translations from the Arabic of the Elements of Euclid, with Special Emphasis on the Versions of Adelard of Bath,” Isis 44 (1953): 16–42.

  For further studies and contrasting views, see Busard, First Latin Translation; Richard Lorch, “Some Remarks on the Arabic-Latin Euclid,” and Menso Folkerts, “Adelard’s Version of Euclid’s Elements,” both in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist, 45–54; and Busard and Folkerts, Robert of Chester’s (?) Redaction of Euclid’s Elements, the So~called Adelard II Version, 2vols. (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser Cerlag, 1992).

  36. Clagett, “Medieval Latin Translations,” 23.

  37. Haskins, Studies, 25.

  38. Jean Jolivet, “The Arabic Inheritance,” in A History of Twelfth~Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 122.

  39. For a comparative list of the use of technical terminology, see Busard, First Latin Translation, 391–96.

  40. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 42.

  41. Folkerts, “Adelard’s Version,” 58–59.

  42. A. C. Crombie, “Science,” in Medieval England, ed. Austin Lane Poole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 580.

  43. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, xi (see Prologue, n. 4).

  44. Herman the German, quoted in F. M. Powicke, “Robert Grosseteste and the Nichmachean Ethics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 16 (1930): 88. See also Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 231.

  45. French and Cunningham, Before Science, 232. French and Cunningham go on to argue that Robert’s interest in geometry with respect to nature is not about measuring and calculating, but about extending his neoplatonic view of nature. Nonetheless, the introduction of geometry to discussions of nature marked an important development in the emergence of scientific thinking. For more on Robert’s innovations in the early scientific method, see A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

  46. Jeremiah M. Hackett, “Adelard of Bath and Roger Bacon: Early English Natural Philosophers and Scientists,” Endeavour 26, no. 2 (2002): 73.

  47. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 65–66.

  48. John H. Harvey, The Medieval Architect (London: Wayland, 1972), 96.

  49. John H. Harvey, “Geometry and Gothic Design,” Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 30 (1986): 47–48.

  50. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 185–86.

  51. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, “Euclid and Medieval Architecture,” Archaeological Journal 136 (1979): 141–44.

  52. Cooke MS, British Museum MS 23198, 145–47, quoted in Bulmer-Thomas, “Euclid and Medieval Architecture,” 145.

  53. Jean Gimpel, The Cathedral Builders, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 82–84.

  54. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 81.

  55. Raymond Mercier, “Astronomical Tables in the 12th Century,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, 87.

  56. Margaret Gibson, “Adelard of Bath,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, 14.

  57. Mercier, “Astronomical Tables,” 88.

  58. Ibid. See also Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 3.

  59. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 2.

  60. Al-Andalusi, Science, 64 (see chap. 3, n. 24).

  61. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, 69.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Mercier, “Astronomical Tables,” 99–100.

  64. John of Worcester, Chronicon Iohannis Wigornensis, trans. and ed. Patrick McGurk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 3: 259–60.

  65. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 2, quoted in Gibson, “Adelard of Bath,” 16.

  66. Adelard of Bath, Questions on Natural Science, 99.

  67. Ibid., 225.

  68. Ibid., 227.

  69. Ibid., 91.

  70. Ibid., 227.

  71. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, xxxi–xxxii.

  72. Mercier, “Astronomical Tables,” 89.

  73. Charles Burnett has suggested that perhaps Adelard’s level of Arabic was very low or virtually nil and that he relied on Arab informants and teachers rather than Arabic texts. This is difficult to square with some of the translations ascribed to Adelard, which Burnett and others generally accept, although it might have been possible with the help of reliable intermediaries. Still, the case “against” Adelard relies heavily on the absence of written Arabic material in some of his surviving works. Adelard’s crucial role as a transmitter of Arabic learning, as well as his revolutionary stance on the importance of direct experience and reason over written authority, remains untouched by any debate over his level of linguistic skill. See Burnett, “Adelard of Bath and the Arabs,” in Rencontres de cultures dans la philosophie medievale (Louvain-la-Neuve: Cassino, 1990): 89–107. For the opposite view, see the classic work of Haskins, Studies, 5–42.

  74. Adelard of Bath, Questions on Natural Science, 105.

  75. Ibid., 83.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Ibid., 103.

  78. Adelard of Bath, Questions on Natural Science, quoted in C
ochrane, Adelard of Bath, 45.

  Chapter 6: “What Is Said of the Sphere …”

  1. Charles Homer Haskins, “The Reception of Arabic Science in England,” English Historical Review 30, no. 117 (1915): 56–57.

  2. Richard W. Southern, Medieval Humanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 167, n. 1.

  3. Walcher of Malvern, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. F. 1. 9, f. 90, quoted in Southern, Medieval Humanism, 167.

  4. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 163–64.

  5. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 15–16 (see chap. 2, n. 18).

  6. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 169.

  7. Mercier, “Astronomical Tables,” 99–100.

  8. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 151.

  9. For example, see Bernard Septimus, “Petrus Alfonsi on the Cult at Mecca,” Speculum 56, no. 3 (1981): 517–33.

  10. Paul Kunitzsch, “Al-Khwarizmi as a Source for the Sententie astrolabii,” in From Deferent to Equant, eds. David A. King and George Saliba (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1987), 227–36.

  11. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 16.

  12. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 186–87 (see chap. 2, n. 7).

  13. Haskins, “Reception of Arabic Science,” 58.

  14. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 180.

  15. Ibid., 180–83.

  16. There has been considerable scholarly debate about the date of On the Use of the Astrolabe. Its apparent dedication to Prince Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II, at “the age of discretion” would suggest Henry was around sixteen years old at the time. That would place the work around 1149 or 1150. For this view, see Dickey, “Adelard of Bath,” 64–70 (see chap. 2, n. 28). Charles Homer Haskins prefers somewhat earlier, 1142–1146. See Haskins, Studies, 28–29 (see chap. 5, n. 3). It was clearly one of Adelard’s later works, for it refers to several of his earlier texts and assumes the reader is familiar with them.