The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement
Two and a half centuries after the The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement
carried Greek and some Sanskrit material into Arabic, a second movement carried
a large share of that same accumulated body, astronomy, astrology, medicine,
mathematics and philosophy, from Arabic into Latin. It ran chiefly through the
Iberian peninsula and Sicily across the twelfth century, and it is the stage at
which this site’s own The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement hands off
to its The Zīj al-Sindhind and Abū Maʿshar content and, by
extension, to everything this corpus tags medieval-latin.
Adelard of Bath
Adelard, an Englishman, travelled to Sicily, to the Norman principality of Antioch, and by his own account into Muslim Spain, before his translations reached readers in England 1. Two of his translations sit directly behind material this site already describes. He rendered into Latin the astronomical tables of al-Khwārizmī in the recension of Maslama al-Majrīṭī, the zīj whose Sanskrit-derived parameters are the subject of The Zīj al-Sindhind, and he translated Abū Maʿshar’s shorter Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, printed today alongside the Arabic it renders 2.
John of Seville, and a name that has been two people
Abū Maʿshar’s fuller Great Introduction reached Latin readers by a second, independent translation, made by John of Seville working from the Arabic in the Iberian peninsula 2. Older scholarship repeatedly conflated this John of Seville with a separate translator, John of Spain, active in the Toledo circle associated with Archbishop Raymond; the modern literature has worked to disentangle the two, though the attribution of some individual translations between them is still argued rather than settled 3.
Gap in the evidence
Which specific translations belong to John of Seville and which to John of Spain is not resolved for every text carried under either name. This entry follows the position that they are two distinct translators without asserting a complete, item-by-item division of their output.
Toledo, and the limits of calling it a school
Toledo, with its cathedral library and its Christian, Muslim and Jewish populations sharing Arabic as a working language, became the best documented single center of this activity, though not the only one. What the record supports is less tidy than the phrase “the Toledo school” suggests: named scholars working alone or in shifting pairs, a Latin-writing partner and an Arabic-speaking collaborator 13.
Correction
Commonly saidTwelfth-century translation from Arabic into Latin was organized through a single formal institution, the Toledo school.
Toledo’s importance as a place where this work happened is not in question. What does not survive contact with the record is the picture of a chartered academy: the activity documented is a network of individually named translators and their local collaborators, operating over decades and sometimes at a distance from Toledo entirely, as Adelard’s own career shows.
What the movement produced, for this site’s purposes
By the end of the twelfth century, Latin Europe held translations of
al-Khwārizmī’s tables, Abū Maʿshar’s two major works in more than one
version each, a growing body of shorter Arabic astrological treatises
including material carried under Māshāʾallāh’s name, and, on a separate and
longer transmission line, Ptolemy’s own astrological text
1; see The Tetrabiblos for
that line and Māshāʾallāh for the earlier Baghdad astrologer whose
work fed it. This is the material base the site’s medieval-latin tradition
tag covers, and this entry is where the islamicate stage hands it over.
References
- Charles Burnett (ed.). Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century. Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, XIV. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1987. ISBN 9780854810703 recordscholarly
A collection of essays on Adelard's biography, travels and translations, including his Latin version of the zīj of al-Khwārizmī in the recension of Maslama al-Majrīṭī. ISBN and series details confirmed against the contemporary review in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
- Abū Maʿshar, trans. Charles Burnett, Keiji Yamamoto, Michio Yano. Abū Maʿšar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, together with the Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 15. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994 (composed c. 850 CE), viii + 170 pp.. ISBN 9789004099975 recordprimary source
Critical edition and translation of Abū Maʿshar's own abridgement of his larger Introduction, printed alongside Adelard of Bath's twelfth-century Latin translation of it, so the Arabic original and its Latin vehicle sit in one volume. Record confirmed against the contemporary review in the Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes and the publisher's own catalogue entry.
- Charles Burnett. John of Seville and John of Spain: A mise au point. Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 44, 2002, 59-78. doi:10.1484/J.BPM.2.303854 recordpeer reviewed
Untangles John of Seville, translator of Arabic astrological texts including Abū Maʿshar's larger Introduction, from John of Spain (Johannes Hispanus), a distinct Toledo-based translator the two are often conflated with in older scholarship. Reprinted with corrections in Burnett's collected volume "Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages" (Variorum, Farnham, 2009), article VI. DOI confirmed by resolution to Brepols Online, the journal's publisher.
- Abū Maʿshar, trans. Keiji Yamamoto, Charles Burnett. Abū Maʿšar on Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), 2 vols.. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 33. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (composed 886 CE). ISBN 9789004117334 recordprimary source
Volume I edits and translates the Arabic Kitāb al-Milal wa-d-Duwal; volume II edits the Latin translation, made probably at Toledo around the 1130s and known as De Magnis Coniunctionibus. The great-conjunctions doctrine of dynastic and religious change, worked out from the slow cycle of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, is Abū Maʿshar's own synthesis rather than a straight relay of a Greek or Sanskrit source. Record confirmed against the publisher's listing and independent library holdings.