Anyone who has visited a site such as Ostia or Pompeii knows the fleeting sensation of needing to remind oneself that one is still in the present day. Perhaps when the camera-wielding tour group ahead has turned the corner, one looks down an empty street flanked with Roman insulae and, for only an instant, one expects a centurion to poke his head out of the next building or an oxcart to rumble down along the grooved indentations in the stone road. Those who have witnessed Charles Burnett’s uncanny ability to reconstruct the lives of medieval scholars from jots on parchment may recall a similar feeling. Such is his erudition that in the course of a conversation there are moments one feels as if Herman of Carinthia is just in the next room and forgets that one is speaking not to an eyewitness but to a scholar whose intimate knowledge has been hard won.
In Mastering Nature, Ann Giletti and Dag Hasse have created a worthy scholarly monument to one of the most influential historians of twelfth-century intellectual culture. Even in a field that has attracted some of the most towering scholars of the past century, Charles Burnett has stood out as one of the greats. The study of medieval translations, of magic in the Latin tradition, and of twelfth-century science, would all be unrecognizable today without his contributions, and the articles of the present volume testify to this broad range of Prof. Burnett’s work.
The opening article, by Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, traces the roots and fortuna of Abū Ma‘shar’s doctrine of planetary lots. While lots appear in some of our earliest sources for Hellenistic astrology, the association of a group of seven lots with the seven planets does not emerge in extant sources until the fourth century AD. Carefully sifting through the ancient astrological sources, Greenbaum offers something of a historical stemma of the evolution of the doctrine of planetary lots through the end of late antiquity, distinguishing two divergent traditions with different methods for calculating the important lots of Eros and Necessity (lots which were associated by one of these two traditions with Venus and Mercury respectively). While Greenbaum’s lucid reconstruction of this history is a worthy contribution in itself, Greenbaum then turns to the writings of Abū Ma‘shar, offering a valuable glimpse into the Persian scholar’s genius as he forges coherency out of the competing astrological traditions of his sources.
Godefroid de Callataÿ offers a fascinating piece on the geological thought of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (the “Brethren of Purity”). In keeping with the standard scientific literature of the Greek and Arabic traditions, the Ikhwān divided the Earth into discrete regions, each characterized by shared environmental patterns. Yet, whereas the Greek and Arabic traditions are generally understood to have conceived of these regions as largely static and unchanging, the Ikhwān proposed a theory that not only the climate but also the very geography, including human geography, of these regions will change as the fixed stars revolve around the ecliptic pole in a 36,000-year cycle (i.e. the precession of the equinoxes according to the value recorded in Ptolemy’s Almagest). Having elaborated the dynamic geography proposed by the Ikhwān, De Callataÿ then contextualizes these theories within their broader intellectual framework, concluding that the Brethren provide tantalizingly few clues as to how to reconcile the geological effects of this 36,000-year cycle either with other astrological cycles important to the prophetic theories of the Ikhwān (such as the cycle of the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter) or with standard Islamic doctrines such as the Prophethood of Muḥammad (who, according to the geological system of the Ikhwān, would have been born outside of the clime associated with prophets).
In his chapter, “Adelard of Bath on Climates and the Elements: An Adaptive View on Nature,” Pedro Mantas-España compares Adelard of Bath’s understanding of the terrestrial climes with that of Petrus Alfonsi. The conception of the earth as divisible into a number of latitudinal bands, known as klimata (or, in Latin, climata), that share similar environmental patterns appears early on in the Greek tradition and enters the Latin tradition through authors such as Pliny the Elder and Martianus Capella. Mantas-España examines how Petrus Alfonsi and Adelard understand the relationship between the climesand the intellectual dispositions of their inhabitants. While Adelard and Petrus both posit a clime around the equator characterized by an ideal, temperate climate that is particularly conducive to intellectual ferment, Mantas-España contends that Adelard is more open than Petrus to the possibility that locations characterized by a climate ideal for intellectual life could be found in regions further from the equator.
One of the volume’s highlights is Dag Hasse’s edition of the De diluviis, a Latin translation of the final chapter of the Meteorology portion of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Shifā’. [1] Hasse has already contributed a great deal to our understanding of this treatise by demonstrating, with Andreas Büttner, that the Latin scholar behind this work was almost certainly the famous thirteenth-century translator Michael Scot. [2] Although the De diluviis did not enjoy the same vast circulation as Alfred of Shareshill’s translation of two other chapters from the same portion of Avicenna’s Shifā’, [3] Hasse’s introduction underscores the outsized impact of this brief treatise, above all on discussions of spontaneous generation, where its influence can be felt through the sixteenth century. Thanks to Hasse’s state-of-the-art edition, complete with a facing English translation of Avicenna’s Arabic text, the De diluviis is now ripe for further study by modern scholars of medieval philosophy and science.
In her contribution, Ann Giletti compares the treatment of two different positions on the eternity of the world by thirteenth-century scholars associated with the University of Paris: (1) the position laid out by Aristotle in the Physics that the world was eternal (without mention of a creation ex nihilo); (2) the position outlined in a number of authoritative sources including Avicenna’s Metaphysics that the world is eternally created by God. The thirteenth-century philosophers and theologians of Giletti’s study recognized that these were discrete arguments with divergent starting points (here a crucial authority appears to be Maimonides). Nevertheless, Giletti contends, these authors treated these arguments together and saw the rejection of one as entailing the rejection of the other and the acceptance of one as the acceptance of the other.
David Porreca and Sophie Page both address another field close to the heart of Charles Burnett, the medieval learned magical tradition. David Porreca’s piece inventories the arguments and rhetorical tools used in the Picatrix that are designed to convince readers of the legitimacy of magic as a discipline and practice. So pervasive are such arguments that, in Porreca’s words, they contribute to the very “sound” of the Picatrix and allow the text as a whole to be interpreted as a work of pro-magic apologetic (204). Sophie Page devotes her study to the medieval reception of the Liber vaccae, a Latin version of the ninth-century Arabic magical text Kitāb al-nawāmīs. Sifting through the fourteen surviving copies of the Liber vaccae, Page identifies a number of instances where medieval readers selectively omitted magical experiments or key ingredients necessary to perform a magical operation. While Page identifies such acts as “censorship,” she skillfully illustrates just how thoughtful these “censors” were. Although when dealing with texts at the border of magical and alchemy it is always difficult to pinpoint the motivations behind textual omissions (as this was also a common strategy to preserve the secrets of the art), Page points to a number of occasions where medieval readers appear to decline fully to copy magical operations that involved morally dubious ingredients (e.g. human blood, semen, corpses of animals, statues of Satan) or that had patently harmful results (e.g. to cause others to suffer from epilepsy).
Koenraad Van Cleempoel’s article introduces the “Oxford Saphea,” a fifteenth-century astrolabe that had remained virtually unknown until it surfaced at auction in 2014 and that is now part of the collections of the History of Science Museum in Oxford. As a saphea (a species of universal astrolabe developed by the eleventh-century Andalusi astronomer Ibn al-Zarqālluh), the object is a precious addition to the relatively limited corpus of known medieval universal astrolabes. This particular saphea, however, also possesses a number of distinctive features, most strikingly an arc with a diametrical rule, engraved with degree and zodiacal markers, that rotates above the main plate (rather as would the rete in a conventional planispheric astrolabe). In addition, the astrolabe was later modified, as engravings in an early-modern hand attest. Unravelling the mysteries of this enigmatic object, Van Cleempoel not only provides a stratigraphy of the object’s two major phases (a mid-fifteenth century original construction and a ca. 1600 later reworking), but also identifies the mathematician and instrument maker Adrian Zeelst as the individual responsible for the object’s second phase. Van Cleempoel’s identification is thoroughly convincing, and it appears that the Oxford Saphea even served as the inspiration for some of Zeelst’s later work, including a discussion of a universal astrolabe in a 1602 treatise he produced with Gerard Stempel.
Finally, the volume ends with an itemized bibliography of Charles Burnett’s publications (a tabulation that runs for nearly 30 pages) and a helpful list of his Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew editions with sigla that direct the reader to the corresponding entry in the bibliographic listing. The volume is finely produced, with a generous selection of colored images. Giletti and Hasse deserve immense credit for producing a learned tribute that reflects the gratitude felt by all of those who have benefitted from Charles Burnett’s scholarship, guidance, and friendship.
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Notes:
1. The chapter corresponds to the natural philosophy portion of the Shifā’, fann V (Ma‘ādin wa āthār ‘ulwiyya), book 2, chapter 6.
2. Dag Nikolaus Hasse and Andreas Büttner, “Notes on Anonymous Twelfth-Century Translations of Philosophical Texts from Arabic into Latin on the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Physics and Cosmology, ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse and Amos Bertolacci (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 346-347.
3. Corresponding to the natural philosophy portion of the Shifā’, fann V (Ma‘ādin wa āthār ‘ulwiyya), book 1, chapters 1 and 5.