“Poet, rhetorician, mathematicus, philosopher, physician, and most skilled in all the liberal arts and in multiple languages.” [1] This, at least, is how the exiled Catholic antiquarian John Pits summarized the activity of Adelard of Bath in one of the earliest scholarly reconstructions of his life and works. While Adelard’s CV has received some updates since Pits’s encomiastic entry saw print in 1619 (medicine, it is now clear, was not among his many preoccupations), the power of this Arabic translator, Mediterranean traveler, and poet-philosopher to enchant historians has not abated. Although never attaining the romanticized fame of his nearly identically named contemporary from Pallet, Adelard has nonetheless won the serious attention of some of the greatest scholars of medieval science and intellectual life, from Charles Homer Haskins to Lynn Thorndike to Charles Burnett. Understandably, the following of this “First English Scientist” [2] has always been most spirited among British and American scholars, but recent years have seen the expansion of a robust tradition of francophone scholarship on Adelard, evidenced above all by the energetic work of Max Lejbowicz. As a biography intended to present Adelard to a more general scholarly audience, Hanne’s monograph is a testament to this growing interest.
The task of writing a biography of Adelard is, however, a hazardous one, given that the sources for Adelard’s life are tantalizingly thin. His fame notwithstanding, Adelard has left us no historia calamitatum, inspired no hagiographies, and penned no collection of letters that has survived. Like so many other twelfth-century scholars, what is known of Adelard’s life must be deduced from isolated clues in his own works and chance appearances in documentary sources. Although the scattered shards of Adelard’s life are well known to specialists, the fragmentary nature of the evidence has left numerous lacunae and uncertainties. Furthermore, the corpus of Adelard’s work is a daunting arena for the intellectual historian, spanning as it does not only a range of technical genres but also two language traditions (even if only in Latin translation). The road is not easy, but Hanne’s goal is measured, for his foremost aim, as he expresses it in the introduction, is to provide a synthesis of modern scholarship on Adelard for non-specialists (17).
The first third of Hanne’s book (chapters 1-4), surveys what is known of Adelard’s life and offers reconstructions of Adelard’s activity; chapter 5 is devoted to Adelard’s natural philosophy as expressed above all in his dialogues De eodem et diverso and Questiones naturales; chapters 6-7 introduce Adelard as a translator from Arabic, and the remaining three chapters cover Adelard’s work in arithmetic and geometry (chapter 8), astronomy (chapter 9), and magic (chapter 10).
There is little in these pages that is new. Given the goals of Hanne’s work, this is understandable, and indeed the ambition to bring together scholarship on the various aspects of Adelard’s thought often treated in isolation is certainly a strong credit in the book’s favor. The value of such a synthesis, however, is only as great as its reliability. Unfortunately, the work is laced with overgeneralizations and mischaracterizations that could have been easily avoided. On page 182, for example, Hanne claims that all the Arabic translators of the first half of the twelfth century were either English or had “rapports particuliers” with England, a statement that, even if understood liberally, overlooks a sizable portion of known figures, including John of Seville, Stephen of Pisa, Plato of Tivoli, and the translating team John and Rusticus Pisanus. It is also surely painting with too broad a brush to begin the section “De la magie comme science” with the declaration that “Les auteurs du XIIe siècle qui pratiquent l’astrologie entendent s’immiscer dans le cours des événements humains par des rituels magiques” (271). And it is particularly alarming to see Hanne claim, unsupported by any citation, that “40% des textes passés de l’arabe au latin aux XIIe-XIIIe siècles concernent l’astrologie, la divination et la magie” (260), since no such count of twelfth or thirteenth century translations exists, or, in the present state of scholarship, could exist, given the number of undated anonymous translations from Arabic during these two centuries. Such examples could be multiplied. Perhaps the hyperbole of such claims is intentional, but if specialists will be able to sift through claims that can be trusted at face value and claims that must be taken with a grain of salt, this pattern certainly limits the monograph’s value as a resource for those working further afield.
More concerning, however, is the oppressive quantity of errors throughout the work. To take one example, in a discussion of medical knowledge at Salerno (70), in the span of two sentences the author incorrectly implies that there were medical translations from Persian into Latin in the eleventh century, misidentifies Alfanus (instead of Desiderius) as the abbot of Monte Cassino who received Constantinus Africanus into the abbey, and states that this abbot knew Arabic when in fact there is no evidence that either Alfanus or Desiderius knew Arabic. Elsewhere, Ptolemy’s Geography is wrongly said to have been translated around 1174 by Gerard of Cremona (249)--an apparent confusion with Ptolemy’s Almagest which is commonly though erroneously reported to have been translated in 1175. At another point (255) the author claims to see in Adelard’s De opere astrolapsus a reference to the “Géométrie de Ptolémée,” a work that does not exist; in this case, the confusion is particularly inexplicable, since the Latin passage cited in the accompanying footnote clearly refers not to Ptolemy, but to Adelard’s own De eodem et diverso (“Sunt et alie metiendi corpora demonstrationes, sed quoniam in eo libro quem de eo et diuerso scripsimus dicte sunt magisque geometrice quam astrolabice dici possunt, eas preterimus”). Errors of this sort are not limited to the body of the text. The diagram titled “Le système de Ptolémée” on page 226 is misdrawn (the eccentric point should, by definition, be the center of the deferent circle), mislabeled (although containing an eccentric point, the Earth is identified as the “centre du déférent”), and contains an error in the caption (an eccentric model does not in itself result in more frequent retrograde motions than a concentric one). Likewise, the diagram on page 235, “Le système des coordonnées dans les tables astronomiques,” appears to conflate the lunar nodes with the equinoctial points on the ecliptic. Errors appear in the citation of sources (on page 167, Rommevaux-Tanis, 2006 should be Rommevaux-Tani, 2016) and sources found in the footnotes are missing from the bibliography and not cited in full in any footnote (e.g., “Dachez 2021” on page 43 n10 and page 70 n32; “Boudet 2006” on page 94 n30, page 142 n32, page 228 n4, et passim).
Finally, it is worth drawing attention to the monograph’s most novel interpretation. In the last sentence of his introduction, Hanne ably tempts us to read on by claiming to find evidence that Adelard had doubts about the “double paradigme chrétien théo-anthropocentrique” (18). Hanne provides no gloss on this turn of phrase, but the suggestion that Adelard’s writings contain doubts about core doctrines of twelfth-century Latin theology is certainly a compelling cliffhanger. In the conclusion, Hanne expresses his view in full: “Dieu n’a pas, chez lui, les traits de la Trinité chrétienne; il est un artisan du cosmos qui n’appelle pas une relation de foi mais une gnose...Adélard est un esprit laïc qui veut amadouer les sphères célestes sans passer par l’autel” (295). If true, this would be a considerable discovery, one with significant implications for the seasoned tradition of scholarship on Christian Platonism. Unfortunately, Hanne does not provide us much evidence to evaluate his theory. Despite the prominence of the claim in the work’s introduction and conclusion, it is rarely discussed in the body of the work. The work’s most direct engagement with Adelard’s views on God, however, does not inspire confidence. On page 161, Hanne refers to a crucial passage towards the end of Adelard’s Questiones naturales, where Adelard and his nephew discuss the sphere of the fixed stars. According to Hanne, the discussion demonstrates Adelard’s rejection of the “God of the Bible” and embrace of an impersonal divine force. Referring to Adelard, Hanne writes “À la fin des Questions naturelles, ce dernier boude la demande de son neveu qui cherche Dieu. Il oppose alors deux définitions de Dieu: ‘un dieu qui est animé, rationnel, immortel,’ correspondant à celui de la Bible; ‘un dieu qui est la cause universelle des réalités, indivisible, sans forme, immuable, infini,’ impersonnel, cœur de toute la machinerie cosmique. Devant une telle alternative, son neveu s’exclame: ‘Cette [seconde] appellation est assurément à repousser avec horreur!’ (abhominandum est, LXXVI, 3). Or, c’est bien celle que retient Adélard” (brackets and parentheses are Hanne’s). This, however, is a bewildering misreading of a rather straightforward passage. Not only has the passage been ripped from its context as a discussion of the sphere of the fixed stars, but Hanne has also mistaken the description of the pagan gods of classical philosophy (“animé, rationnel, immortel”) for the God “de la Bible.” To make matters worse, Hanne then implies that Adelard has rejected the existence of a rational, animate, and immortal being, when in fact Adelard says precisely the opposite (the sphere of the fixed stars is just such an entity). Finally, whereas in Adelard’s text the nephew agrees with Adelard’s conclusions, in Hanne’s telling the nephew balks at his assertion in horror. This is a rich passage, and a discussion of what implications it might hold for Adelard’s metaphysics goes beyond the scope of this review. What is clear, however, is that something has gone seriously amiss between Adelard’s text and Hanne’s retelling of it.
In sum, the work gives the overwhelming impression of being written in great haste. This may well be the result of pressure to publish quickly, and if so it is a shame, for the field would certainly benefit from a reliable introductory guide to one of the most captivating figures of the twelfth century.
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Notes:
1. John Pits, Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis tomus primus (Paris: 1619), 201: “Poëta, Rhetor, Mathematicus, Philosophus, Medicus, omnium denique liberalium artium, et multarum linguarum peritissimus.”
2. Louise Cochrane, Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist (London: British Museum Press, 1994).