Medieval Latin
- Where
- Latin-reading Europe, especially the translation centres of Iberia and Italy
- When
- roughly 1100 to 1500
- What survives
- Latin translations of Arabic works, university texts, and manuscript commentary.
29 entries
1 of these entries carry an evidence grade, from a contemporary document or dated object (A) to a modern reconstruction (E).
- Abū Maʿshar
A ninth-century Baghdad astrologer whose two major works, each translated twice into Latin, were among the widest channels astrology used to reach Europe.
- Aquarius
Aquarius's Babylonian name is a status title, not a description of pouring water; the water comes from the god's picture, not from the name itself.
- Aries
Aries opens the tropical zodiac at the March equinox itself; its Babylonian figure was a hired farmhand, not a ram.
- Bede and the Old English Months
One chapter of an eighth-century textbook on time-reckoning is the only surviving account of the pre-Christian English calendar. What it does not say.
- Cancer
The narrowest of the twelve like-named constellations, and the one whose divine counterpart may have been an empty shrine rather than an animal.
- Capricorn
A goat with a fish's tail is not a natural animal, and it is the one zodiacal hybrid that survived Babylon to the present essentially unchanged.
- Claudius Ptolemy
The name attached to more of this site's material than any other, and the man underneath it, who names six of the twelve places and is silent about the rest.
- Essential Dignity
Domicile, exaltation, triplicity, bound and face: the fivefold scheme, its sources, and the three places where the surviving texts do not agree.
- Gemini
The Ptolemaic bounds of Gemini split the transmission: Lilly's row, which most software ships as Ptolemaic, disagrees with every Greek edition.
- House Division
Seven house systems divide seven different objects into twelve, which is why a chart tool that offers all seven never agrees with itself.
- Jupiter
The brightest true planet after Venus, completing the ecliptic in under twelve years, roughly a sign a year, the arithmetic behind its period-marking use.
- Leo
The Sun's sole domicile, and home to Regulus, one of the four bright stars near the ecliptic.
- Libra
The only sign figured as an object: a Babylonian balance, a Greek claw, and a Roman restoration credited to Julius Caesar.
- Mars
The reddest of the five true planets, with the widest brightness swing and the largest retrograde loop of the seven, both from its varying distance.
- Mercury
Mercury never strays far from the Sun and is visible only near dawn or dusk; it is also the one planet exalted in the sign it already rules.
- Moon
The fastest of the seven, covering about 13 degrees a day, which makes it the body most sensitive to an error in birth date or time zone.
- Pisces
Zero degrees of tropical Aries currently falls inside the constellation Pisces: the concrete case behind the whole tropical-versus-sidereal question.
- Precession of the Equinoxes
The slow westward slide of the equinox against the stars: the rate, who first measured it, and why it separates the seasonal frame from the stellar one.
- Sagittarius
The composite Mesopotamian god Pabilsag was carried into Greek astrology as a plain archer: the clearest case of simplification among the twelve signs.
- Saturn
The outermost classical planet: its Greek and Babylonian names, its dignities, the sect rule that governs it, and where the modern Saturn return came from.
- Scorpio
Of the thirteen constellations the ecliptic crosses, Scorpius is the narrowest by far, and its missing claws are doing duty as Libra's scales.
- Sun
The Sun rules one sign, holds no bounds, and is the only body whose sign depends on date alone, which is why a newspaper column could use it.
- Taurus
Taurus is a straight translation of the Babylonian Bull of Heaven, but its real distinction is the Pleiades and Hyades within it.
- The angles
The four points where the ecliptic crosses the horizon and the meridian, how fast they move, and the latitudes at which they stop existing.
- The Tetrabiblos
Ptolemy's four books on astrology: what the work is for, how it reached the present through three languages, and why its chapter numbers must be named.
- The Twelfth-Century Translation Movement
In the twelfth century, Arabic astronomical and astrological texts, Greek and Arabic in origin alike, were translated into Latin, chiefly from Iberia.
- The Zīj al-Sindhind
A Sanskrit astronomical treatise reached Baghdad in the 770s, became an Arabic zīj, and by that route entered Latin Europe.
- Venus
Venus was two names, a morning star and an evening star, before the recognition that they were one body collapsed the naming into one.
- Virgo
The sixth sign was a furrow before it was a virgin, and the name of its brightest star still carries the ear of grain the Babylonian figure held.