Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine

Galen

A Greek physician, Galen (129–post 216 [?] C.E.) was the son of Nicon, a rich architect of Pergamum. After Galen first studied philosophy, he opted for medicine at the age of seventeen because Asclepius appeared to his father in a dream. He started learning it in his home town with Satyrus, Aiphicianus, and Stratonicus, and in 149 at Smyrna with Pelops. From there he left for Alexandria where he stayed from 151 to 157, studying with Heracleianus and Iulianus. He then returned to Pergamum and was appointed physician to the gladiators. In 162 he moved to Rome. By this time a renowned philosopher and a brilliant anatomist, he abruptly deserted the city in 166, supposedly because of an outbreak of plague. Back in Pergamum, he was ordered in 168 to Aquileia by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. He returned to Rome in 169 and stayed in the capital as the personal physician of the emperor until his death, possibly sometime after 216. Galen was a prolific writer, and gathered an immense book collection, which was partially destroyed by fire in 191.

The immense oeuvre of Galen covers all medical topics from physiology and anatomy to medical terminology and ethics. As a philosopher, Galen was well acquainted with the main schools of antiquity. An eclectic, he borrowed from the systems of both *Plato and Aristotle. He had a strong interest in geometry, *logic, and theories of knowledge, and firmly believed in logical and empirical demonstrations to establish facts. In the analysis of matter, he followed Aristotle. With Plato he admitted the interaction between soul and body, and wrote treatises on ethics at the end of his life.

In matter of medicine, Galen conceived the body according to the Hippocratic system best presented in De natura hominis (written c. 410–400 B.C.E., by Polybius, one of *Hippocrates’ followers and his son-in-law). The body is made of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), which are derived from the four elements (air, water, earth, and fire respectively) and associated with two of the four basic qualities (hot and moist, moist and cold, cold and dry, dry and hot respectively). The main bodily organs are the brain, the heart, and the liver. They originate the three major systems that control all bodily functions: the brain governs thoughts through the nervous system, the heart the movements through the arteries, and the liver the nourishment through the veins. Following Aristotelian teleology, Galen considered that each organ had a function for which it was made. These speculative conceptions were supported by an extraordinary knowledge of anatomy, which Galen derived not only from his medical training in Alexandria following the Hellenistic model of Herophilus (fl. c. 300 B.C.E.), but also from his activity as physician to the gladiators, and from the many dissections he performed. However, his use of animals for such demonstrations led to mistaken conclusions that were not corrected until the Renaissance and the dissections by Vesalius (1514–1564) in Padua.

Galen’s system of pathology resulted directly from his conception of physiology. Apart from lesions of an accidental nature, illness results from imbalances in the quantity or the quality of the humors, which, in turn, disturb the function of the different organs. Diagnosis of illnesses relied on the perception of all possible signs (including urine and pulse) and logical reasoning. Therapy was surgical or pharmaceutical, accordingly. As a surgeon, Galen successfully performed a great number of operations with remarkable dexterity. In pharmacotherapy, he worked according to the principle of allopathy (contraria contrariis). He wrote major syntheses in the field—De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus (On the mixtures and properties of simple medicines), De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos (On the composition of medicines according to the places of the body), De compositione medicamentorum per genera (On the composition of medicines according to their types)—and also compiled several preexistent works, which he transformed according to a materialistic system of nature (medicines interact with the body by exchanging particles of different shape, size, and weight).

Galen’s all-embracing oeuvre is not necessarily the original synthesis it appears to be at first glance, since it relies at least in part on earlier compilations. Still, it had a deep impact on the knowledge and evaluation of earlier physicians by successive generations. Galen filtered, and indeed sometimes reinterpreted, earlier works according to his own agenda. So great was his reputation, and so widely were his works circulated, that his personal criteria often influenced whether other texts were preserved or discarded. As early as the fourth century the Byzantine encyclopedist Oribasius referred to Hippocrates only through Galen’s quotations, and not directly from the original text.

In the school of Alexandria, a corpus of sixteen Galenic treatises is supposed to have constituted the core of the teaching from the fifth century. This body of work did not reproduce exactly the sequence in which Galen himself had suggested that his work should be studied, and was thus probably not originated by him. It was divided in four main units, with an introduction and three coherent groups. The introduction contained On sects, Art of medicine, Short book on the pulse, and Method of healing, dedicated to Glaucon. The three groups were as follows: (a) Anatomy and physiology: Anatomy for beginners, On bones, On muscles, On nerves, On veins and arteries, On elements, On temperaments, On the natural faculties; (b) Pathology: the Book of Causes and Symptoms, On affected places; (c) Diagnosis and therapeutic method: the sixteen books on the pulse, On the differences between fevers, On crises, On critical days, and Method of Healing. Such an approach to Galenic medicine was reproduced in the medical school at *Ravenna and transmitted to the Arabic world, where a further treatise was added to the third group: On the preservation of health.

Decline of Influence

In Byzantium and the West the Galenic oeuvre rapidly lost its influence. This might be attributed at least in part to the spread of Christianity. The materialistic conception of medicine promoted by Galen was not necessarily compatible with Christian creationism in which bodily features, illnesses, and cures, as well as the characteristics and properties of natural substances (including plants) used in therapeutic resulted from the action of God. In Byzantium, anthropology was dominated by such works as Nemesius’ and Meletius’ treatises on the nature of man; pathology was a matter of divine punishment or grace, and pharmaceutical therapy, often miraculously operated by several saints on the model of Cosmas and Damianos, followed rather the Hippocratic and Dioscoridean heritage. However, the Galenic textual tradition was not limited to late medieval copies, contrary to a widely diffused opinion. Some texts were used in Constantinople and passages were introduced in such other manuscripts as the early-sixth-century copy of *Dioscorides, and others made their way from Alexandria to Ravenna and Bobbio (northern Italy) during the eighth century. Nevertheless, only a very limited number of works was translated into Latin in more or less reliable versions: On sects, Medical art, On pulse beginners, and Method of healing. In the East, a large number of texts and manuscripts was available to, or could be found by, sixth-century Syriac and ninth-century Arabic translators. Sergius of Ra’s al-‘Ayn (d. 536 C.E.) translated not only the sixteen works of the Alexandrian corpus, but also thirteen others dealing with such different topics as anatomy (On the use of body parts), pharmacology (On the mixtures and properties of simple medicines VI–XI), therapy (On eye diseases and their cures), dietetics (On the properties of aliments), and pharmacy (On the preparation of medicines by types and according to the parts of the body). Similarly *Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808–873 C.E.) translated first from Greek into Syriac, and then from Syriac or Greek into Arabic a great many of Galenic treatises. Working alone or in collaboration, he translated more than one hundred texts, sometimes having at his disposal several copies, which he collated before translating, sometimes repeating a translation because he found a better Greek manuscript. Through these translations, Galenic medicine deeply influenced Arabic medicine, particularly with such physicians as *al-Razi (865–925), *al-Biruni (943–1078), and *Ibn Sina (980–1037).

Tenth-Century Hellenic Revival

After its first decline in Byzantium, Galenic medicine was probably the object of some renewed interest from the tenth century among Greek-speaking groups. It is probably significant that Galen’s treatises are often associated with other works. A precursor might be the manuscript of Apollonius of Citium (Florence, 74.7) of the late ninth or early tenth century, which also includes Galenic material. Four manuscripts date back to the tenth century. They contain the Method of healing dedicated to Glaucon; passages of the Mixtures and properties of simple medicines associated with extracts from Dioscorides’ De materia medica; Galen’s collection of rare words associated with the Hippocratic corpus; and a collection of several Greek medical texts, among which appear the Method of healing dedicated to Glaucon and On the pulse to beginners. While there was no particular interest in Galen in the eleventh century, during the twelfth many of his works were produced by the scribe Ioannikios, whose location, problematic for a long time (Italy—maybe Palermo—or Constantinople), has been recently linked with the translator *Burgundio of Pisa (c. 1110–1193). The origin of the manuscripts reproduced by Ioannikios is still unclear, however. While Burgundio visited Constantinople on at least two occasions, the texts themselves and the characteristics of many of the other manuscripts of that period indicate an Italian origin and perhaps also a certain antiquity. If so, Galen’s text might have been better preserved from antiquity in Italy than in Constantinople. At any rate, it was not abundantly read and used as the concordance between these manuscripts as some late antique papyri suggest, but was reexhumed at that time.

Such a renewed interest might follow the eleventh-century translation activity best represented, but not necessarily initiated, by *Constantine the African (d. after 1087), who crossed the Mediterranean and settled in *Monte Cassino. There he translated or summarized Galenic commentaries on Hippocratic works (Aphorisms, De victus ratione in morbis acutis, and perhaps also Prognostics), as well as some of his original works, such as On human nature and On mixtures and properties of simple medicines. Before the mid-twelfth century, the commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms and Prognostics were included in the so-called *Articella collection, which also included the Isagoge by Constantine, two treatises On urine and On pulse respectively by Theophilus and Philaretus, and later the Techne by Galen (a translation from Greek of his Small art). These were circulated widely in the post-Salernitan world. The Italian enterprise of translation was soon followed by the Spanish one, with *Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187) and *Mark of Toledo (fl. mid-twelfth century). Working from Arabic as did Constantine, they expanded the range of topics covered with the Art of Medicine, On temperaments, Therapeutic method, On unclear movements, and On the use of pulse. The translations spread from Spain to Italy.

During the second half of the twelfth century, Burgundio of Pisa translated several treatises of Galen from Greek into Latin. Acting on a request from Pisan physicians, he translated such works of propedeutic, physiological, pathological, diagnostic, and preventive medicine as On sects, On temperaments, On the affected parts, On the differences between fevers, On the pulse for the beginners, and On the way to preserve health. He might have commissioned the Greek models he worked on from the copyist Ioannikios. During the same period, *William of Moerbeke (c. 1220/1235–before October 26, 1286) translated On the faculties of aliments from Greek and, somewhat later, *Pietro d’Abano (c. 1257–c. 1315) completed and took over the work of Burgundio of Pisa. Not only did he achieve the incomplete translation of On sects, but he also translated a part of Therapeutic method, On black bile, On palpitation, and maybe also On respiration. During the fourteenth century, *Niccolò da Reggio (fl. c. 1308–1345)—a Greek-Latin bilingual physician from Calabria connected with the court of Anjou—went to search for manuscripts in Constantinople. There, according to Renaissance printed editions, he found and translated from Greek into Latin up to forty-eight Galenic treatises. He touched many of the topics covered by Galen’s oeuvre: medical theory and history (On the parts of the medical art, On the best sect, On sects); medical reasoning (On antecedent causes); physiology and anatomy (On the best constitution of the body, On the cause of respiration, On the dissectionof the uterus), including some special questions (On the anatomy of the eye, On semen); therapy (On the method of healing, dedicated to Glaucon); surgical treatment (On the way of curing by cutting veins); pharmaceutical treatment (On the composition of medicines according to the places of the body, On themedicines easy to procure, On theriac); dietetics (On the good and bad juices from aliments), and even ethics (The soul’s dependence on the body).

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, Galen was widely regarded as the most important figure in medicine after Hippocrates. This illustration from the title page of a 1677 medical book by Justus Cortnumm shows the two men together beside a flowering bush. (Corbis)

Such massive importation of Galenic textual material in all fields of medical science had an impact on medical activity and, beyond, on medical teaching. New regulations were adopted by several universities across Europe: in Bologna in the 1280s thanks to *Taddeo Alderotti (c. 1206/15–1295), in Paris between 1285 and 1290 with Jean de Saint Amand (d. before 1307), and in Montpellier at the very end of the thirteenth century, principally thanks to the action of *Bernard of Gordon (c. 1258–c. 1320) and *Arnau de Vilanova (c. 1240–1311). This movement was further accentuated over time, such as in Montpellier where On temperaments, On crises, On the differences of fevers, and Therapeutic method among others were introduced into teaching in 1309.

Latin versions of Galen’s works were not printed before 1490 (Venice). Giorgio Valla (d. 1499), probably taking his models from his personal collection of manuscripts, rendered in Latin treatises previously translated by Niccolò da Reggio, as well as a fragment of On the constitution of medical art, On the signification of urine, Questions on Hippocratis on urine, and Presages, previously untranslated into Latin. Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524), who also had a significant collection of manuscripts, initiated philological analysis of Galen’s text and published Greek critical editions, Latin translations or commentaries of such fundamental treatises as Therapeutic method, Medical art, On the differences of fevers, On the elements according to Hippocrates, On the natural faculties, and On Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, which had been previously translated. He also worked on less well-known Galenic treatises—On diseases causes, On diseases differences, Crises—and published the first Latin translation of On muscle movement, previously untranslated. Many of Leoniceno’s works were republsihed several times during the sixteenth century and exerted a strong influence on medical and philological studies. In 1525, Gian Francesco d’Asola (c. 1498–1557/8) of Venice published the complete works in Greek in five volumes, before doing the same for the works of Hippocrates in the following year. Gunther von Andernach (1505–1574) translated and commented on Galenic treatises in his classes in Paris, definitively confirming the place and importance of Galen in medical teaching and practice.

See also Aristotelianism; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Translation movements; Translation norms and practice

Bibliography

d’Alverny, M.-T. “Pietro d’Abano traducteur de Galien.” Medioevo (1985) 11: 19–64.

Durling R.J. A Dictionary of Medical Terms in Galen. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.

———. Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of Galen’s Peri kraseôn “De complexionibus.” New York: De Gruyter, 1976.

———. Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of Galen’s Peri tôn peponthotôn topôn “De interioribus.” 2 vols. New York: De Gruyter, 1992.

———. “Renaissance editions and translations of Galen”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1961) 24 (3–4): 230–305.

García-Ballester, L. Galen and Galenism. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2002.

Moraux P. Galien de Pergame. Souvenirs d’un médecin. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985.

Nutton V., ed. Galen: problems and prospects. A collection of papers submitted at the 1979 Cambridge conference. London: The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1981.

Pesenti T. “The Libri Galieni in Italian universities in the fourteenth century.” Italia medioevale e umanistica (2001) 42: 119–147.

Sezgin, F. Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, III. Medizin-Pharmazie-Zoologie-Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970, pp. 68–140.

Siegel, Rudolph E. Galen’s system of physiology and medicine. An analysis of his doctrines and observations on bloodflow, respiration, humors and internal diseases. New York: S. Karger, 1968.

Temkin, O. Galenism. Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Ullmann, M. Die Medizin im Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970, pp. 35–68.

Wilson, N.G. Aspects of the Transmission of Galen. In Le strade del testo, edited by G. Cavallo. Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1987, pp. 45–64.

ALAIN TOUWAIDE

Gender in Medicine and Natural History

In antiquity, gender identity was bound closely to reproductive roles. Physicians and natural philosophers, including Hippocrates of Cos and those writing under his name, Aristotle, and Soranus of Ephesus wrote extensively on the subject of male and female bodies, and in so doing attempted to define the characteristics of each sex and its role in reproduction. While the works attributed to these three men were not the only ones in antiquity to approach the subject of the gendered body, they were the most influential; the ideas expressed in these works persisted into the Middle Ages and at an academic level influenced the construction of gender, as well as the characteristics and meaning of maleness and femaleness.

Of the sixty texts in the Hippocratic corpus, including the Aphorisms, On the Nature of the Embryo, On the Nature of the Child, and On Generation, ten discuss the qualities of male and female bodies as well as the processes of reproduction. Male bodies tended to be hot and dry in nature. Maleness was associated with the right side, the warmer, drier, and stronger side of the body; thus males were conceived on the right side of the womb, which also retained these characteristics. Because of their vital heat and vigorous activity level, men were able to burn off excess humors within their bodies and thus maintain proper humoral balance. Men contributed their vital heat, through sexual contact and resulting semen, to women, who were colder and drier than their counterparts. Femaleness was associated with the left side, the cooler, moister side of the body; thus female fetuses developed on the left side of the womb. Because women were cold and moist, they could not effectively burn off the excess humors produced by their bodies. To compensate for their lack of heat, women’s bodies purged themselves of excess humors through menstruation, which Hippocratic authors argued was a natural and healthy process. Both male and female seed contributed to the conception of a fetus through a process known as pangenesis. Importantly, the Hippocratic view of male and female was not hierarchical; neither male nor female was “good” or “bad,” but a balance between the two was best.

Aristotle (fourth century B.C.E.) utilized Hippocratic theories to develop a system of abstract male and female anatomy and physiology. Because he was a theoretician, Aristotle’s writings, such as De Generatione, reveal his interest in creating categories of male and female, each of which contain a system of elements that either mirror or oppose those of the other. Furthermore, Aristotle assigned values to the hierarchical system which he created. Heat and dryness were the best qualities; males were warm and dry, thus maleness was associated with perfection. Conversely, cold and moisture were lesser qualities, and women were considered base and lesser than men. Men’s bodies, being perfect, processed their humors effectively; women, imperfect, passed their bodily toxins out through menstruation. The man contributed semen containing vital heat and active principle to the woman’s cold, passive womb. It was the male semen that purified toxic menstrual blood into a life-giving matrix for the fetus. Clearly, there was no impetus for balance within the Aristotelian system; for if men met women in the middle, they became less than what they already were: perfect.

Brief mention must be given to Soranus of Ephesus (second century C.E.), whose works came down to the Middle Ages via the school of Salerno. Soranus, a methodist, rejected theoretical approaches to medicine, opting instead for therapies that would relax or constrict tissues. Soranus was interested in the care of women as whole individuals, not only their reproductive organs. In his Gynaecia, Soranus argued that, while male and female bodies were equal, women had illnesses unique to their sex. He advocated for the use of midwives in the treatment of female patients, to prevent embarrassment. Through him the care of women in general, and midwifery in particular, were established in written tradition as gendered practices.

Flexibility of Medieval Gender

Medieval bodies were gendered bodies, and, as in antiquity, much of gender identity was bound to reproduction. Physicians and academicians accepted on the authority of antiquity that men were larger, hotter, and drier, and the combination of their vital heat and semen was largely responsible for the reproductive process. Women were smaller, cooler, and moister, and although natural philosophers argued that they must contribute seed of some sort, the role of this female seed was negligible. Both men and women experienced pleasure in intercourse, but women desired this pleasure more than men. Because of their different bodily constitutions, women were believed to be more passionate and emotional, and unable to control their desires. Thus women, cold and moist, continually desired sexual contact with hot, dry men, in an effort to balance their own constitutions.

Medievals, at all levels, had a strong sense of what constituted male and female; however, they did not limit gender identity to just these two groups. An individual might not just be one or the other, but both. Examples of this would include womanly men, manly women, and hermaphrodites. This range of gender variations was due in part to the concept, received from *Salerno, of the seven-celled uterus; the three cells on the right produced males, the left three cells produced females, and the middle cell produced a hermaphrodite. Paradoxically, the gendered womb was also seen as a gradient, with areas closer to the center producing more ambiguous sexes. A womanly man (characterized by hairlessness, slightness of frame, physical weakness, impetuousness, and tender-heartedness) was an individual who was conceived closer to the central uterine cell. A manly woman, similarly conceived, was characterized by her hairiness, her beard, her large frame, her strength, and her manly virtue. In rare cases, these ambiguously gendered individuals were lauded for their qualities; effeminate men were praised as more pious, while the virago was hailed as a hero among her degenerate sex. The predominant response to individuals in society at large who did not conform to gender expectations, however, was undoubtedly disapprobation.

Gender in Nature and Alchemy

Not only human bodies expressed varying degrees of male and female characteristics, but also the elements of nature itself were gendered. Physicians and pharmacists utilized the qualities of materia medica, which were often associated with gender, in the concoction of medicinal recipes; cold and wet, and thus female, elements were used to counteract diseases that were hot and dry, and vice versa. The gender of natural elements was especially evident in *magic, *astronomy, and *alchemy. Two types of magic were prevalent in the Middle Ages: demonic magic and natural magic. The efficacy of the former depended on the supposed participation of demons, and became a persistent topoi after the eleventh- and twelfth-century translation and dissemination of Greco-Arabic treatises on magic. The later, natural, magic was a much older art form in the West, and depended on the harnessing of occult natural forces to effect change. Whether we categorize their activities as magic or medicine, folk-healers used natural elements in a system of sympathies and antipathies. For example, in order to guarantee the conception of a boy, one recipe book recommended that the woman drink a beverage made from the dried testicles of a pig. For the learned, the elements of nature combined with the alignment of the planets and stars to create a grid of gendered alliances. Saturn was believed to be cold and moist, and so was “female,” and thus facilitated or predicted the birth of a girl. When used for good, the purpose of the manipulation of these varied gendered natural elements was, as Hippocrates prescribed, to balance the male element with the female element, arriving at a point of harmony.

Where magicians and folk-healers were content with balance and harmony, alchemists sought perfect union, and through that union, an unearthly homeostasis of elements to be found only in the realm of perfection beyond the Moon or, on Earth, in the Philosopher’s Stone. The processes of alchemy involved the harnessing of the hidden powers within nature. By manipulating these elements, the alchemist of pure heart and soul could combine and refine base metals into gold, and raw elements, such as antimony, into a product so pure that its transformative power affected everything with which it came into contact. Important to our discussion here is the role of gendered elements in the process of alchemical combination. Alchemists believed that, in combining the male elements represented by the Sun with the female elements associated with the Moon, they would create the hermaphrodite, or Hermetic Androgyn, the symbol of perfect balance and unity, and often representing the Philosopher’s Stone. Perfection, in alchemy, was the balance between male and female, and expressed an ideal not of polarized gender, but of two genders in proportion with one another, meeting in the precise center of the alembic, womb, and all of creation.

See also Aristotelianism; Gynecology and midwifery; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical

Bibliography

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Cadden, Joan. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Dean-Jones, Lesley Ann. Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Green, Monica. The Trotula. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

Newman, Barbara. “Visions and Validations.” In Church History, 1985.

Soranus. Gynecology, translated by Owen Temkin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.

BRENDA GARDENOUR

Generation

The English word “generation” is derived from the Latin generatio and the Greek genesis. Together with its opposite, “corruption” (corruptio; phthora), it constitutes the main theme of Aristotle’s treatise On Generation and Corruption (De generatione et corruptione), also rendered as On coming-to-be and passing-away. Within the systematic ordering of Aristotle’s works on *natural philosophy, it comes third, after the Physics and De caelo, and before the Meterologica (cf. Aristotle, Met. 338a20–338b20). The Physics discusses the first causes of nature, and all natural change. De caelo is devoted more specifically to motions in the incorruptible celestial region. In Aristotle’s view, the celestial sphere, which stretches from the Moon to the fixed stars, is radically superior to the sublunar sphere. It reveals no changes, with the exception of the change of position of the celestial bodies, which move in uniform circular motion. In contrast to the heavens, the sublunar, terrestrial region is the theater of incessant change. De generatione et corruptione studies the types of natural change to be found in all those things which come to be and perish, or, in brief, the processes of the natural world.

According to standard Aristotelian doctrine, there are four different types of change. The change most likely to be associated with generation and corruption, according to Aristotle, is alteration or qualitative change. Its main characteristic is that a perceptible substratum subsists through the change of qualities or properties that come and go, as when a white wall turns into a black one. Another type of change is quantitative change, or change of size, such as growth and diminution. A third type of change is motion or change of one place to another. But the most basic change involves generation and corruption.

Aristotle distinguishes two senses of generation or coming-to-be. The first involves coming to be something from being something, for instance, “coming to be well from being ill, or small from big” (Aristotle, De gen. et corr. 317a33). The other sense is generation properly speaking, or coming-to-be and perishing—period. In this sense, generation refers to the transition between something that was not, and then was, or, in other words, to coming to be from not being without qualification (Aristotle, De gen. et corr. 317b1–5). This latter definition has to be properly understood. It is not contradicting the ancient axiom of Parmenides and Zeno that “nothing can come to be out of nothing.” On the contrary, Aristotle is searching for a way to save the phenomenon of change in nature, and to circumvent the conceptual dilemmas created by these two pre-Socratic philosophers. They had maintained that change is only apparent, since what comes to be, actually does so from what already is. The option that something comes to be from nothing at all was deemed absurd.

Aristotle too believes that nothing can come to be out of nothing, but at the same time, he believes that perceived change is real. How can this be so? According to Aristotle, the objects of the world are composites of the metaphysical principles form and matter. Matter is the raw material, the underlying substrate, which acquires the structure that constitutes an object into what it is through the imposition of form. From the perspective of matter, change involves continuation. The underlying substrate is already there, and does not change. From the perspective of form, however, change is real, because it consists of the successive replacement of one form by another. A good Aristotelian example of generation and corruption would be a log of wood that is turned into ash by fire. In this natural process, the form of wood perishes and is replaced by the form of ash, whereas the matter remains the same. The replacement of one form by another is not a transition from non-being to being, but rather a passage from potential being to actual being (the wood potentially is ash).

Generation is therefore not a coming to be out of what is not, and corruption is not the passing of things into nothing: the underlying matter is the cause of the perpetuity of generation and corruption. In this respect, generation is markedly different from another process, which came to play a crucial role with the advent of Christianity in the medieval West, namely creation. Creation, indeed, is coming into existence out of nothing, ex nihilo. This process is not natural, but supernatural, due to divine power. In nature, one only encounters generation and corruption.

Generation and the Elements

In Book Two of his treatise De generatione et corruptione, Aristotle studies the causes of generation and corruption. Here, his theory of the elements and the primary qualities play a key role. From a physical point of view, objects in the terrestial region are composites of the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. Each of these elements corresponds to two fundamental pairs of contraries, wet–dry and hot–cold. The element fire, for instance, is dry and hot, whereas the element air is wet and hot. Since each element contains a contrary quality, it can change into any of the others. In this sense, generation and corruption of the elements occurs: one element is transformed into another one. However, the elements can also mix, depending on the balance between the primary qualities. When this occurs, the elements are somehow preserved in the mixture. All natural entities in the physical world that are not elements are mixtures.

The Intellectual Context

De generatione et corruptione came to be translated into Latin, together with Aristotle’s other books on natural philosophy. The first translation was made from Arabic by *Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187). It was soon superseded by one made directly from Greek text by *Burgundio of Pisa (c. 1110–1193) and possibly revised by *William of Moerbeke. During the Renaissance, at least eight new translations appeared.

Aristotle’s text had a regular place on the curriculum of the medieval universities. Many well-known thinkers wrote commentaries on this text: Giles of Orléans, *Albertus Magnus, *Thomas Aquinas, *Boethius of Dacia, *Giles of Rome, *John Buridan, *Albert of Saxony, *Nicholas Oresme, and *Marsilius of Inghen. The bulk of commentaries on this particular text was, however, written during the Renaissance, when ancient Greek commentaries became available in Latin translation.

The commentary literature of De generatione et corruptione provides a rich field of themes that are interesting for the study of medieval natural philosophy. Aristotle’s account of mixture (mixtio) raised problems concerning the survival of the ingredients in a mixture. If these ingredients, i.e., the elements, remain somehow potentially in the mixture, what happens to their forms? And in what way is mixture still distinct from another natural process, that of aggregation? Related to this issue is the discussion about the existence of so-called minima naturalia, the smallest particles that are of the same nature as the whole, and about infinite divisibility. The treatise also induced methodological discussions, such as whether change of form (ens mobile ad formam) is its proper object, and whether certain knowledge about things that have ceased to exist, or are temporarily nonexistent, is possible.

Commentaries on the Physics can also contain material that is relevant for a better understanding of the concept of “generation,” as those by John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme illustrate. One of the ontological problems discussed there is what generation precisely is. Does it or does it not substantially change the thing in which it inheres, i.e., the thing that is being generated? In other words, is generation an accidental property? Other proposed solutions were that generation is a way of being of the thing that is generated (modus essendi), or the way of how the thing that undergoes generation is being understood (modus intelligendi).

Generation also arises in Aristotle’s biological works, in particular Generation of Animals (De generatione animalium) where he tries to explain the processes involved in the transmission and sustenance of life. There, too, he falls back on the familiar scheme of matter and form. The matter is contributed by the female menses, whereas the form is supplied by the male semen. Crucial in Aristotle’s account of animal generation is his effort to explain why the offspring resemble the parents.

See also Aristotelianism; Translation movements

Bibliography

Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione. Translated with notes by C.J.F. Williams. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Aristotle’s de Partibus Animalium I and de Generatione Animalium. Translated with notes by D.M. Balme. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

Caroti, Stefano. Generation/Generare: Ontological Problems in John Buridan’s Natural Philosophy. Medioevo (2002) 27: 373–413.

Thijssen, Johannes M.M.H. and Henk A.G. Braakhuis. The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.

JOHANNES M.M.H. THIJSSEN

Geography, Chorography

Much of the Western medieval geography was inherited from Greek and Roman scholarship, although the word “geography” itself fell out of use until the Western rediscovery of *Ptolemy c. 1400. More frequently, the term “geometry” was used, and geographical material was included in the *quadrivium and considered as part of physica. The created world (mundus) consisted of Heaven and the Earth, so astronomical material often preceded geographical description in cosmographies. The Earth was both the globe (orbis) and one of the four elements; the Latin terra stood for the element and for the inhabited world, or the Greek oikoumene. The Latin writers accepted the Greek sub-genres of pictorial and narrative geographic description: topographia, khorographia, and geographia, each aiming to describe or depict respectively one location (topos), a region or country (khoros), and the whole earth (ge). The discipline of chorography was defined by Pomponius Mela (c. 44 C.E.) as a narrative genre that may follow an itinerary and includes the human and cultural geography of a region. In consequence, “chorography” may refer on occasion to literary descriptions or visual images created by travel writers. The lack of mathematical precision caused *Ptolemy to criticize chorography for its qualitative and impressionistic aspects to the detriment of universal completeness, mapping information, and scientific observation. Thus, chorographia is primarily descriptive regional geography, while geographia is a complete representation of the known world based on geometry and astronomy.

The early medieval geography in the West relied heavily on Mela, Pliny (c. 79 C.E.), and his follower Julius Solinus (c. 230–240), whose works were transmitted and interpreted for the early Christian scholars by Macrobius (c. 400), Paulus Orosius (c. 417), Martianus Capella (fl. c. 410–429), and *Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636). The new Christian context of science was recognized by Augustine (354–430), who taught that one should know about “the natures of things” to understand the Bible. Geographical knowledge was part of *scientia, the knowledge of human things, meant to support sapientia, the knowledge of divine things. Lozovsky has pointed out that in the early Middle Ages geographical knowledge regarded the Earth as a physical testimony of God’s work and thus provided an image to contemplate and interpret rather than a travel guide. Consequently, theoretical description often ignored contemporary information in favor of classical authorities and the Bible.

The Bible does not offer a definite geographical concept. The Old Testament sometimes refers to the Earth as a flat circle under a dome-shaped heaven. Some statements indicate that the Earth has ends, therefore is not a circle. The Heaven is supported by columns and pillars, it does not rest on the Earth directly. The shape of the heaven is like a tent or cloth spread above the Earth. The number and qualities of heavens vary. Waters, concentrated above the heavenly firmament, pour onto the Earth as rain through special windows. Earthly waters surround dry land; the extent of the Earth and the height of Heaven are impossible for the human to grasp or determine. From Isidore on, scriptural elements form a lasting pattern of the Christian worldview: Jerusalem in the center of the earth, the earthly Paradise in the Far East, the Four Rivers of Paradise including the Tigris and Euphrates, the heathen peoples of Gog and Magog beyond Asian mountains, the three continents divided among the three sons of Noah (Asia for the descendants of Shem, Europe of Japheth, and Africa of Ham). Von Brincken has carefully analyzed such scriptural references, finding some allegories and contradictions. For example, *Hugh of Saint-Victor (fl. c. 1120) imagined the world in the shape of Noah’s ark, as described in Genesis 6:15. While the “four corners of the earth” of patristic authors such as *Kosmas Indikopleustês (see below) became part of medieval Christian cartography, the notion of a spherical Earth eventually prevailed and was firmly established with the acceptance of the Aristotelian view of a geocentric universe by the twelfth century. The shape of the universe was egg-like, with the spherical Earth like a yolk inside the white; some authors scaled it down to a drop of grease in the center of the yolk. The Earth was an unmoving sphere with a circumference of about 25,000 miles (40,000 km); its surface was divided, after the Greeks, into five climatic zones: two temperate, one torrid, and two frigid, sometimes illustrated with zonal maps. The oikoumene was in the northern temperate zone; it included Europe, Asia, Africa and some islands. The idea of an antipodean southern landmass, terra australis, remained a subject of intellectual speculation. By the thirteenth century Aristotle and Ptolemy were restored to scholarship, through Latin translations first from Arabic and then directly from Greek, but the concepts remained very naïve and the knowledge limited. Western translations from the Arabic helped spread not only Greek ideas of natural science: in the eleventh century Petrus Alphonsus has the mythical (Indian) city of Arin (see below) at the center of the inhabited world. *Adelard of Bath (c. 1070–c. 1142/1146), who translated *al-Khwarizmi’s ninth-century astronomical work, held that the uneven level of the ocean, higher in the north than in the south, was due to the eccentricity of the two spheres of the Earth and water; the Earth floated on the ocean and, where it protruded above the waters, formed the dry land. Another view allowed for underground river courses that took their source from the ocean. They filtered through the Earth losing salt content, and rose to mountain tops whence they subsequently descended creating the great rivers. The rise was explained by hydrostatic pressure or the attractivve energy of the Sun and stars. Variations of the earthly relief also were explained by the lesser or greater distance of stars from the Earth.

Physical Geography

Physical geography was neglected; it was drawn primarily from antique authors and only secondarily and reluctantly from observation. Theory came mostly from the Greeks and descriptive information from the Romans, including the material excerpted from the Greek works by the Latin writers, especially Pliny and Solinus. Aristotle’s Meteorology was highly influential in teaching that the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth) combined in various ways to produce tides, earthquakes, winds, thunder and lightning, and comets. *William of Conches of Chartres was unusual, presenting in his De philosophia mundi (before 1145) reasoned explanations of such atmospheric phenomena as clouds, rainfall, flood, and tides. Among the few authors who contradicted Aristotle’s notion that the Earth was cold at the center was *Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), who was instrumental in introducing Arabo-Islamic works into the philosophical mainstream. A teacher of *Thomas Aquinas, Albertus was a prodigious traveler and criticized Aristotle on the basis of his own personal observations. In De natura locorum he discussed earthquakes, comets, and fossils, and contributed an elaborate discussion of geographical theory in environmental terms. One fundamental error attributed to Ptolemy was an under-estimation of the size of the Earth: his Mediterranean Sea spanned an extra twenty degrees of longitude, and his Europe and Asia extended over half the globe, instead of the 130 degrees of their true extent, a miscalculation that later misled *Christopher Columbus into underestimating the distances to Cathay and India.

Medieval understanding of the tides was based primarily on the Introductorium in astronomiam of Albumasar (*Abu Ma‘shar), a ninth-century Arabic text translated into Latin in the twelfth century, although much earlier Bede (673–736) also had concluded that the Moon was involved. Abu Ma‘shar taught that the Moon caused ebb and flood tides, discussed the tidal effect of the Moon’s phases and its relation to the Sun, and commented on the effects of wind and topographical features on the tides. Other theories, such as *al-Bitruji’s notion that the tides were caused by the general circulation of the heavens, also came to the Middle Ages through Latin translations of Muslim writers. Tides were not an important concern in the Mediterranean, but northern Europe developed “rutters”—vernacular booklets with information about the tides, harbors, hazards, landmarks, and coastal streams. Gerald of Wales in his thirteenth-century Topographia Hiberniae compiled information about high and low tides. The earliest known tidal table also dates from the thirteenth century and was compiled for London Bridge.

After Orosius, geography was closely tied to Christian history; his History Against the Pagans was frequently used and translated by Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) into Anglo-Saxon. It was in the service of history that new geographical knowledge was often developed through the use of independent sources, especially for northern Europe poorly known to the ancients. The regional histories of England by Bede; of northern Germany and Scandinavia, with possible references to America (Vinland) by Adam of Bremen (c. 1076); and of Ireland and Wales by Gerald of Wales contribute much to our knowledge of historical geography and ethnography. Northern regions are also prominent in the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister (c. 700) and Dicuil’s Liber de mensura orbis terrae (Book on Measurements of the Terrestrial Globe, c. 825). Scholastics may be credited with bringing back an interest in geography and exploration and fusing antique theory with medieval travel. Some travel narratives were fantastic or doubtful, like those of St. Brendan; others sometimes failed to circulate, and might even be forgotten. The Baltic Sea was recognized as closed in the north, and Scandinavia as a peninsula, only in the eleventh century. The voyages of the Danes and Norse, extending from the Baltic and White seas to America, remained unknown in southern Europe, even those of Columbus. In turn, northerners believed, especially after linking Iceland to Greenland and Newfoundland, that the Atlantic was a mediterranean sea, and that Vinland shared a coastline with Africa. The Caspian Sea was recognized as a lake in the thirteenth and not charted until the fourteenth century.

By about 1200, the increased commercial and pilgrim travel by land and sea contributed significantly to the development of geographical knowledge, scholarly narratives and map-making, and travel literature, which was increasingly in vernacular languages. The Crusades were a major landmark in promoting cultural interchange and expanding the practical knowledge of the Middle East and routes to Palestine from remote departure points in Europe. Adelard of Bath visited the Levant c. 1147, and John of Würzburg between 1160 and 1170, and the first Western records of a compass and compass instrument come down from *Peter Peregrinus, a thirteenth-century French crusader (c. 1269). Marino Sanudo proposed a sophisticated grid system for enhancing a topographical image of the Holy Land in his Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (Book of Secrets for True Crusaders, 1306–1321). In the age of Christian-Muslim hostilities, Jews were often intermediaries and long-distance merchants. Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1159–1173) traveled from Spain to Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, expanding the western outlook toward Central Asia.

Another new era was created by the Mongol conquests of the mid-thirteenth century. Travel records of only two actual journeys to the Mongol court survive, by John of Plano Carpini (1245–1247) for the pope and by William of Rubruck (1252–1255) for King Louis IX. A fragment of Ascelin’s embassy (1247) by Simon of St. Quentin is preserved by *Vincent of Beauvais. The appearance of the Mongols from the east produced expectations of Antichrist and confusion of the “Tartars” with the subjects of the Gog and Magog. On the other hand, the Mongols’ association with Nestorian Christianity supported the proliferation of the legend of Prester John, a mythical potentate and potential ally for European Christians in Asia. The Mongols were also confused with the dog-headed people of the ancients, previously sometimes identified with Saracens.

Popular Guidebooks

A more broadly educated public became avid consumers of pilgrim and merchant guidebooks, cosmographies, and *encyclopedias now combining classical, Muslim, and newly discovered sources of information. Examples include L’image du monde (mid-thirteenth century), modeled after an earlier Imago mundi by Honorius of Autun (Augustodunensis, c. 1100), and Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1244–1260). *Roger Bacon (1214–1292) recommended an accurate and complete survey of the known world and produced a world map, now lost. The Scandinavian King’s Mirror (c. 1250) summarized the northerners’ knowledge of the world. Itineraries and Christian histories of places became more personalized and impressionistic, such as the Itinerary of King Richard I (c. 1200). Francesco Petrarch (1304–1370) wrote his Itinerarium syriacum as a guide to the Holy Land filled with descriptions very different from the early lists of distances and locations. Discoveries in the Atlantic led to speculation on African circumnavigation by Ramon Llull (1232/1236–1315) and *Pietro d’Abano (d. 1316). *Marco Polo’s book about his travels to China (1275–1295) may not have been believed, but was eagerly read and expanded his public’s geographic horizons. Habitations of Gog and Magog, the Amazons, and imaginary monsters kept moving to the margins of the known world. Unlike popular versions of the Romance of Alexander, probably the most famous traveler of medieval literature, Mandeville’s Travels (1330s–1340s) combines legend with authentic and recent travel reports, the latter especially for the description of Asia beyond Palestine (Odoric of Pordenone, Peter Comestor, Jacques of Vitry, etc.). One of the most widely read vernacular texts of medieval Europe, it was translated into eight languages and served, along with Marco Polo’s Travels, as an inspiration to Columbus. Significant advances in cartography achieved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, primarily in the countries of southwestern Europe, were enabled by the acquisition of the compass, maritime exploration, and the rediscovery of Ptolemy. Pilgrimage guidebooks—to Jerusalem, Constantinople, Santiago de Compostela, and especially Rome—became increasingly popular in the fifteenth century and benefited from the introduction of printing. Supported by a growing interest in systematic and reliable mapping, European scholarship of the early Renaissance era rediscovered geography as a scientific discipline.

Byzantine geography experienced a decline both in theoretical and descriptive works. All Byzantine cosmography bore an imprint of Aristotelian thought. The difficulties experienced in trying to merge the biblical worldview with ancient scientific theory and observation resulted in the development of two early schools of *cosmology. The authors of the Antioch school, including Kosmas Indikopleustês and Anonymous Ravennatus, envisioned a flat, usually rectangular Earth surrounded by the ocean under a heaven shaped like a hat or tent. They placed Jerusalem at the center of the Earth, located the earthly Paradise in the east with the four rivers flowing out of it and argued against human ability to reach it. By contrast, scholars of the Alexandrian–Cappadocian school showed reliance on the antique tradition and greater independence of the Scriptures. They presented the Aristotelian view of a geocentric universe subject to the laws of physics, a spherical Earth divided into climatic zones, with the logical possibility of the antipodes opposite the known inhabited world. To this school belonged Philoponus of Alexandria (mid-sixth century), the Armenian scholar Anania Shirakatsi (610–685), and St. John of Damascus (c. 676–c.754), the last of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose work The Fountain of Wisdom was translated into Slavonic in the tenth century and into Latin in the twelfth. A further development of the Hellenistic heritage in Byzantine cosmography came when Michael Psellos (1018–1078 or 1096) revived the geocentric Ptolemaic worldview, while drawing on Aristotle’s Meteorology for discussion of natural phenomena.

Administrative geography was represented in the writings of some of the emperors and court officials. Several new genres developed, including textbooks, *encyclopedias, city guides, metonomasias (reference works correlating ancient Greek to contemporary Byzantine place names), and notitias. A notitia by Nilos Doxapatres, originally of Constantinople, was presented by him to the Norman King Roger II of Sicily in 1143, about the time when *al-Idrisi was working in Palermo on his world geography (see below). This example of “church geography” describing the Five Patriarchates (Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem) was designed to persuade Roger to take his kingdom from under papal authority and transfer it to the patriarch of Constantinople.

Byzantine literature is not rich in travel writing. Kosmas’s Christian Topography (c. 540), while respected as an early example of patristic geography, probably owed a degree of its popularity to his description of travels to Ethiopia, Ceylon, and possibly India; it was copied and translated in Slavic countries. The so-called Ravenna cosmography (early eighth century) is a list, in Latin, of some five thousand geographical names arranged in approximate topographical order, roughly from west to east. Most extant Greek-language itineraries record pilgrim routes to Palestine, including Johannes Phokas’s 1185 record of pilgrim travel to Jerusalem and a fourteenth-century guide to Jerusalem in verse. Only one early secular itinerary survives, although city guides to Constantinople proliferated. Among the very few extant Byzantine periploi is one of all the coasts of the Black Sea (fifteenth century). Some foreign itineraries and embassy records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries added information on Russia, Crimea, Iran, Mongolia, Egypt, Scandinavia, and possibly Greenland. Among the Eastern Orthodox travelers associated with Russia were the pilgrim to the Holy Land Abbot Daniel (c. 1122), the future bishop of Kiev Isidore, who described his voyage from Constantinople to Syracuse (c. 1429), and Afanasii Nikitin, the first Russian to write a firsthand account of a journey to India (c. 1466–1472).

Byzantine writers’ use of ancient authors revived in the period of the Macedonian Renaissance (867–1059). The works of Strabo and Ptolemy were taught in schools and became a major source of information for historians. The Ptolemaic revival initiated by Maximus Planudes c. 1300 was followed by intensive export of copies of Ptolemy’s Geography and other ancient works to Italy, and helped to lay the scholarly foundations of Renaissance geography. Georgios Gemistos Plethon (1355–c. 1450), who knew the work of both Ptolemy and Strabo, proposed to correct Strabo on the basis of Ptolemy in a book to which he added more contemporary descriptions of Scandinavia, Russia, and the adjacent north. This encyclopedist, who met with Toscanelli, is an example of the Greek cultural and academic diaspora which grew as the empire shrank under the blows of the Turks and Crusaders.

Islamic Perspectives

Early Islamic geography absorbed the pre-Islamic cosmology reflected in the Qur’an and some hadiths, and pre-Islamic traditions recorded in the second and third centuries of Islam. One such view, recorded by al-Ya‘qubi (late ninth century), represents the Earth as a bird with spread wings whose head is in the east (China), tail in the west (Maghrib), and the body encompasses the core of the early Islamic empire: Mecca, Hijaz, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Scientific Islamic geography began in Baghdad in the early Abbasid period and was particularly encouraged by the Caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813–833 C.E.). The first steps included the measurement of the degree of latitude, construction of observatories, production of maps and instruments, and translation and adaptation of Indian, Iranian, and Greek geographical and astronomical tracts. The great majority of geographical works combined aspects of science and literature and were composed in Arabic, although non-Arabs and even non-Muslims made important contributions.

In addition to mathematical geography, Greek influence was strong in cosmology (for example, in the teachings of the Ikhwan al-Safa’ or Pure Brethren), cosmographic methods, and in physical geography. The Arabic authors understood that the changing positioning of the Sun resulted in differences between climatic zones: hot, temperate, and cold. They agreed that climate, topography, and soils conditioned the spatial distribution of life and water. They discussed the causes of wind, clouds, rain, tides, and earthquakes. The word djughrafiya was borrowed for the discipline and translated into Arabic as sarat al-ard (“picture” or “description of the earth”). The Earth in the universe was thought of as a sphere, resembling the yoke within the white of the egg. The Inhabited Quarter, al-Ma‘mura, was surrounded by the Ocean, al-Bahr al-Muhit, and divided into three continents. The names of Europe, Libya, and Ethiopia for Africa, and Scythia for Asia were transcribed, but little used. The Fortunate Isles (jaza’ir al-Khalidat) and the Pillars of Hercules formed the western boundary of the inhabited Earth, while the Wall of Alexander separated the civilized world from Gog and Magog in the far northeast. The Greek notions of zonal geography promoted the adoption of the seven-climate system and influenced the authors who wrote that the parts of the earth south of the equator were uninhabitable due to excessive heat. Ptolemy’s Geography was translated several times in the ninth and tenth centuries, though apparently without the maps. Extant works of mathematical geography, developed by *al-Khwarizmi, al-Farghani, and *al-Battani contain tables of astronomical coordinates of locations and geographical features, and descriptions of maps with coordinates (very few maps survive). Ptolemy’s idea of the Indian Ocean as a landlocked sea was never fully accepted, although tropical Africa was depicted extending eastward. The bulk of extant works are represented by the various narrative genres; some scholars treated geography as part of history, and it was also customary to discuss other sciences in the introductions to geographical works.

The newly reordered, vast Islamic empire required geographical information for administrative purposes. The genre of “Routes and Kingdoms,” Masalik wa Mamalik, comprised reference books describing the topography, district boundaries, and commercial and postal routes of the empire. Another early genre was that of fada’il, descriptions of “advantages” of places sacred to Muslims in some ways, which later acquired an increasingly secular nature. The geographers of the Balkhi school, also known as the school of the Atlas of Islam, focused on the world of Islam, which they divided into twenty climes or regions, and attached central importance to Mecca. The last and most original representative of this school was al-Muqaddasi (c. 1000).

Unique among the geographers of the late classical period of Islam is *al-Biruni (c. 1050). Apart from his important contribution to regional geography, he compared and critically evaluated the contributions to geography of the Arabs, Greeks, Indians, and Iranians. An advanced theoretician of geography and astronomy, he discussed the difference in seasons between the northern and southern hemispheres and argued that, contrary to the prevailing views, life was possible south of the equator; he alone among Muslim geographers conjectured that the Indian Ocean communicated with the Atlantic.

The rise of the Islamic empire provided new impetus and opportunities for travel, exploration, and long-distance trade. For some parts of the world, or certain periods of their history, medieval Islamic geographers provide major, if not the only, sources of information. Travel information fed the later genres of geographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, cosmographies and books of marvels (‘adja’ib), pilgrim guides (ziyarat) and personal travel narratives (rihla), such as the famous “Journey” of Ibn Battuta (1368/69 or 1377), who traveled over distances three times as great as those covered by Marco Polo, but unlike him, remained largely unknown to his contemporaries.

Marine geography for the most part remained outside the mainstream of Islamic scholarship. Only works of *Ahmad Ibn Majid (second half of the fifteenth century) and Sulayman al-Mahri (first half of the sixteenth century) survive. Among them are sailing manuals and nautical instructions for the Mediterranean and Red seas and for the Indian Ocean. Yet despite the far reach of travelers and navigators, later formal geographical works say disappointingly little about distant areas, overlook new facts or try to fit them into the old theoretically devised patterns. Some fifteenth-century cosmographies still speak of the Mount Qaf surrounding the ocean and the Isles of Waq-Waq where fantastic trees bear fruit of human heads. This conservative attitude forced practical geography to yield to theory and gradually led to scientific stagnation.

See also Cartography; Encyclopedias; Mandeville, John, Travel and exploration

Bibliography

Ahmad, S. Maqbul. A History of Arab-Islamic Geography (9th–16th century A.D.). Amman: Al al-Bayit University, 1995.

Alington, Gabriel and Dominic Harbour. The Hereford Mappamundi: A Medieval View of the World. Leominster: Fowler Wright Books, 1996.

Beazley, Charles Raymond. The Dawn of Modern Geography: A History of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Conversion of the Roman Empire to A.D. 900. 3 vols. London: J. Murray, 1897–1906. New York: Peter Smith, 1949.

Brincken, Anna Dorethee von. Mappa mundi und Chorographie. Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters (1968) 24: 118–186.

Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Donini, Pier Giovanni. Arab Travelers and Geographers. London: IMMEL, 1991.

Harley, J.B. and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography. Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, esp. chs 15–20. Vol. 2, Book 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, esp. chapters 1–14. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987–1992.

Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354. Translated with revisions and notes from the Arabic text edited by C. Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti by H.A.R. Gibb. 5 vols. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1971–2000.

Kamal, Youssouf. Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti. 5 vols. In 16 pts. Cairo, 1926–1951. Reprinted in 6 vols. Frankfurt: Institut für Geoschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1987.

Lozovsky, Natalia. The Earth is Our Book: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Marco Polo. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. London: Folio Society, 1968; reprinted Penguin Books, 1972.

Miquel, André. La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du XIe siècle. 4 vols. Paris: Mouton, 1967–1988.

Newton, A.P., ed. Travel and Travellers in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1996; London: Kegan Paul International, 2003.

Schmithüsen, Josef. Geschichte der geographischen Wissenschaft von den ersten Anfängen bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1970.

Tolmacheva, Marina. “Intercultural Transmission and Selection: Greek Toponyms in Arabic Geography.” In Tradition, Transmission, Transformation. Edited by F. Jamil Ragep and Sally P. Ragep with Steven Livesey. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996, pp. 419–440.

Westrem, Scott, ed. Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination. New York: Garland, 1991.

Wright, John Kirtland. The Geographical Lore of Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe. American Geographical Society Research Series no. 15. New York: American Geographical Society, 1925; republished with additions, New York: Dover, 1965.

Zumthor, Paul. La mésure du monde: representation de l’éspace au moyen âge. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993.

MARINA TOLMACHEVA

Gerard of Cremona

Gerard of Cremona was the foremost translator of scientific works from Arabic into Latin. According to the brief biography accompanying a list of his works drawn up by his pupils after his death Gerard was born in Cremona, and passed his life in *Toledo where he was the “glory of the clergy” and died at the age of seventy-three in 1187. He is probably to be identified with the “Gerardus dictus magister” who attestates two documents, in 1174 and 1176, as a canon of the cathedral (a third document, of 1157, mentions simply “Gerardus”). Daniel of Morley recounts his experiences listening to Gerard lecture on astrology and learning “the doctrine of the Arabs” from Gerard’s assistant, Galippus. He would have been working alongside *Domingo Gundisalvo, who was translating works on psychology and metaphysics, and may have revised Gerard’s translation of the Classification of the Sciences of *al-Farabi.

Work

Gerard seems in some way to have continued the work of *John of Seville in the science of the stars, and his own work on Aristotle’s natural science was in turn continued by *Alfred of Sareschel and *Michael Scot. Gerard’s pupils list seventy-one works, classifying them under the categories of dialectic, geometry, astronomy, medicine, alchemy, and geomancy, and adding at the end a translation of an Arabic Christian calendar (the Liber anoe). Almost all the texts listed have survived, and a few more translations have been added to the list on the grounds of their style or manuscript affiliation. The translations were evidently made in response to a need for basic texts in philosophy, mathematics and medicine in the nascent European universities and Gerard was evidently following a program. For Aristotle he seems to have followed the order of works established in al-Farabi’s Classification of the Sciences, which he translated. The works of *Galen that he chose either were those on the ancient curriculum of the school of Alexandria or had a particular bearing on element-theory, the temperaments and therapeutic method. His choice also reflects the interests of Islamic scholars in the Almohad Court in Córdoba in a radical *Aristotelianism, and includes several texts written by Andalusi scholars (those of Jabir ibn Aflah, *Abu’l-Qasim al-Zahrawi, Ibn al-Wafid, and ‘Arib ibn Sa‘d). His translations were eagerly copied by visitors to *Toledo, and several of the earliest surviving manuscripts were produced in northern Italy. Those translations which became standard works for the study of their respective subjects include *Archimedes’ On the Measurement of the Circle, al-Nayrizi’s Commentary on Euclid’s Elements, al-Farghani’s Rudiments of Astronomy, *Ptolemy’s Almagest, several texts by Jabir ibn Aflah and *Thabit ibn Qurra dependent on the Almagest, Aristotle’s Physics and De caelo, and the first three books of his Meteora, *Pseudo-Aristotle’s De causis, several works on medicine by Galen, *Isaac Judaeus and *al-Razi (Rhazes), the Surgery of Abu’l-Qasim al-Zahrawi and the Canon on Medicine by Avicenna (*Ibn Sina). Gerard’s pupils state that Gerard came to Toledo in the first place because of his desire for the Almagest, and the translation of this substantial and advanced work on mathematical astronomy marks a highpoint in the history of the transmission of Arabic learning. His version of Avicenna’s Canon became the principal text for the study of medicine from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and his versions of Aristotle’s Physics, De caelo, and Meteora joined translations from Greek to form the Corpus vetustius of Aristotle’s natural philosophy studied in the *universities. His translations are characterized by extreme literalness, and the frequent retention of Arabic terms in Latin transcription. Diagrams (in the mathematical works) and illustrations (e.g., in Abu’l-Qasim’s Surgery) were also reproduced with extreme accuracy. Often, however, an obscure term or phrase would be explained with a clearer Latin expression in the margin. Gerard himself is credited with more extensive explanatory notes to his translation of al-Razi’s Book of Almansor. Sometimes (as with the Almagest) a translation would be revised and improved in the light of a second Arabic manuscript. After the age of printing his translations would still be used as the basis for revised texts (such as Andreas Alpago’s revision of Avicenna’s Canon). Whether Gerard wrote any independent works is more debatable. One of the several versions of the Toledan tables that became the basis for European astronomical tables for the next one hundred fifty years, is likely to be by him. A very popular *Theorica planetarum (an account of the movements of the planets) circulated under his name and led to Gerard being sharply criticized by *Regiomontanus. His reputation as a doctor, an astronomer, and a philosopher lived on, especially in his native Cremona, to which, according to stories first encountered in the early fourteenth century, his books and his body were returned after his death.

See also Aristotelianism; Translation movements; Translation norms and practice

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Gerard’s version of Almagest bks VII–VIII is included in Paul Kunitzsch, Der Sternkatalog des Almagest. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986–1991.

The Latin Translation of the Arabic Version of Euclid’s Elements Commonly Ascribed to Gerard of Cremona. Edited by Hubertus L.L. Busard. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984.

Biography and list of works drawn up by his pupils, in Charles Burnett, The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century. Science in Context (2001) 14: 249–288.

Daniel of Morley. Philosophia. Edited by Gregor Maurach. Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch (1979) 14: 204–255.

Aristotle, Meteora I–III, translated by Gerard of Cremona. Edited by Pieter Schoonheim. In Aristotle’s Meteorology in the Arbico-Latin Tradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000.

Secondary Sources

Leino, Marika and Charles Burnett. Myth and Astronomy in the Frescoes at Sant’ Abbondio in Cremona. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (2003) 66: 273–288.

Pizzamiglio, Pierluigi, ed. Gerardo da Cremona. Annali della Biblioteca statale e libreria civica di Cremona XLI. Cremona: Biblioteca statle e libreria civica, 1992.

CHARLES BURNETT

Gerbert of Aurillac

Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II (999–1003), was born around 945–950 somewhere in Aquitania of humble parents, and died at Rome on May 12, 1003. He received his early education at the monastery of Saint-Géraud d’Aurillac where, according to his biographer Richer of St.-Rémy, his studies focused on grammatica. In 967 the abbot there entrusted the young monk to Borrel II, count of Barcelona, then visiting the French monastery on a pilgrimage. Borrel introduced Gerbert to the *quadrivium and then passed the student on to Atto, bishop of Vic. Three years later Gerbert, Borrel, and Atto visited the papal court in Rome, where Gerbert’s knowledge of mathesis greatly impressed Pope John XIII, and the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I. In consequence, Gerbert was invited to remain in Rome as a teacher, an invitation that initiated a meteoric career in both scholarship and politics. In 972 Gerbert left Rome to study logic in Rheims under Bishop Adalbero, at the same time teaching mathematics at the cathedral school. In January 981 in Ravenna, in the presence of Emperor Otto II, Gerbert held a successful disputation with Otric, schoolmaster of the cathedral school at Magdeburg, on the classification of knowledge, in particular on the relationship between mathematics and physics. This episode resulted, a year later, in Otto appointing Gerbert abbot of the prestigious monastery of St. Columban of Bobbio in northern Italy. But after the death of his patron, Otto II, Gerbert had to flee Bobbio and returned to Rheims. A few years later, he was elected bishop of Rheims but unfavorable political circumstances forced him to leave France in 997. Under the protection of emperor Otto III, he was elected archbishop of Ravenna in 998 and then pope in 999, with the name of Sylvester II.

Gerbert’s contemporary reputation for exceptional scholarship, especially in mathematics and astronomy, has echoed through the centuries, and not long after his death a “dark legend” circulated, implying that he acquired some of his knowledge from Saracens (who were reputed to have taught him necromancy). He was also supposed to have made a pact with the devil in order to learn the secrets of astrology. Modern scholarship, however, tends to deny any great originality to Gerbert, nor does it accept that he interacted with Arabic regions. Yet there is much indirect evidence in favour of the traditional view: Gerbert may well have been the scholar who first brought Arabic science to the West.

Although little is known from primary sources about the three years that Gerbert spent in Spain, it is possible that Gerbert did acquire there some knowledge of Arabic science. First, favorable cultural and political conditions for traveling from Catalonia to al-Andalus were already in place at least as early as 940. Second, it has been shown that Atto of Vic, Gerbert’s Catalan mentor, served as archdeacon of Girona before becoming bishop of Vic, and that he had a strong cultural and political relationship with Gotmar, bishop of Girona. The latter did travel to Córdoba accompanied by Hasday ibn Shaprut, a leading figure in both the political and cultural life of the early Andalusi Caliphate, and his embassy inaugurated a period of good diplomatic relations between Catalonia and al-Andalus. The existence of a small cultural circle of so-called “Gotmar’s followers,” which included Atto of Vic, the count-bishop Miro Bonfill, and count Borrel II, has also been hypothesized. It has been suggested that by the end of the first half of the tenth century Arabic scientific writings could already have filtered into Catalonia through the channel opened by Gotmar’s embassy.

Traces of Arabic influence can be detected in Gerbert’s astronomical and mathematical works. Gerbert’s teaching of astronomy at Rheims, as described by Richer, was based on the use of four demonstrational celestial spheres: one planetary sphere, one hemisphere, and two star spheres. The planetary sphere carried the circles of the planets suspended within the zodiacal armilla, and was used to show students apsides, altitudes, and the relative distances of the planets. A drawing of this sphere has been discovered in a Vatican manuscript, BAV, Pal. Lat. 1356 (fol. 113v). The hemisphere was equipped with sighting tubes (or fistulae) and it was used to familiarize the students with the classical five circles of the Aratean tradition (two arctic circles at 36° from the poles, two tropic circles at 30° from the arctic circles, and the circle of the equator located at 24° from the tropics). This hemisphere is described in detail in a letter, known as De sphaera, from Gerbert to his disciple, Constantine of Fleury. One of the star spheres featured a sighting tube (used to orient the sphere with the celestial pole), and had the stars and constellations outlined on it by iron and copper wires. The other star sphere displays an adjustable horizon ring that demarcates the visible and invisible constellations for any latitude desired, which was alien to the Latin astronomical tradition. However, the use of a horizon ring is well attested in all the surviving demonstrational celestial spheres of the Islamic tradition. Therefore Gerbert might have acquired knowledge of this technical element from Arabic sources. A number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts credit Gerbert as the author of a treatise on the astrolabe, De Utilitatibus Astrolabii (with incipit: Quicunque astronomicae discere), but this attribution remains highly controversial. De Utilitatibus Astrolabii was certainly written by someone who not only had acquired knowledge of the astrolabe from Arabic sources but also had mastered other Latin astronomical sources. In particular, chapters XVIII and XIX of De Utilitatibus Astrolabii describe the Earth’s subdivision into climatic bands (or climata) with their respective geographical locations, and these two chapters cannot be considered to have been derived from any Arabic source. It is noteworthy that Gerbert did show familiarity with the notion of climatic bands in a letter sent to a monk named Adam.

Gerbert is also said to have built a horologium for telling the time at night. His mathematical expertise ranged from knowledge of classical sources, *Boethius in particular, to the use of an innovative computing tool. In a letter to Constantine of Fleury he explains a difficult passage of Boethius’s De arithmetica (II.1) on the changing of sesquiquartal numbers (an explanation known by the name Saltus Gerberti). According to Richer, Gerbert had manufactured a special abacus for his mathematical teaching at Rheims. This abacus was a board with twenty-seven columns that functioned with special counters or apices on which were carved special symbols. These symbols closely resemble Hindu-Arabic numeral notation. Gerbert also authored a small treatise, Regulae de numerorum abaci rationibus, to explain how to perform multiplication and division with the abacus.

Unsigned painting of Gerbert of Aurillac during his reign as Pope Sylvester II (999–1003). (AKG Images)

Gerbert’s works in geometry and music do not display any Arabic influence. Gerbert seems to have compiled sections of a Geometria and also wrote a letter to Adalbold of Utrecht (d. 1026) explaining the difference between arithmetical and geometrical procedures for calculating the area of a triangle. Evidence for Gerbert’s expertise in music is mainly provided by two letters addressed to Constantine of Fleury explaining two passages of Boethius’s De musica, and by descriptions of the organs he constructed. Among Gerbert’s philosophical works, a brief logical treatise titled De rationali et de ratione uti is all that has been preserved.

Bibliography

Bergmann, Werner. Innovationen im Quadrivium des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.

Bubnov, Nicolaus. Gerberti postea Silvestri II Papae Opera Mathematica (972–1003). Berlin: R. Friedländer & Sohn, 1899.

Millás Vallicrosa, José. Assaig d’história de les idees físiques i matemátiques a la Catalunya Medieval. Barcelona: “Estudis Universitaris Catalans,” Sèrie Monogràfica I, 1931.

Ordeig i Mata, Ramon. Ató, bisbe i arquebisbe de Vic (957-971), antic arxiprest-ardiaca de Girona. Studia Vicensia (1989) 1: 61–97.

Pratt Lattin, Harriett. The Letters of Gerbert with his Papal Privileges as Sylvester II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

Riché, Pierre. Gerbert d’Aurillac. Le Pape de l’An Mil. Paris: Fayard, 1987.

MARCO ZUCCATO

Ghazali, al-

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in 1058 C.E. in Tus, a town near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashhad. Orphaned at an early age, he began his religious education in Tus, later moving to Nishapur where he studied jurisprudence (fiqh) and possibly philosophical theology (kalam) with the famous Ash‘ari philosophical theologian al-Juwayni (1008–1085). Al-Juwayni had been appointed by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1017–1092) to teach at the Nizamiyya religious college (madrasa), one of the several such newly established institutions he had endowed primarily for the teaching of Shafi‘i jurisprudence. During the course of his studies here, al-Ghazali authored his earliest writings and was initiated into mystical Islam (tasawwuf).

After al-Juwayni’s death, al-Ghazali joined Nizam al-Mulk’s court, finally making his entry into Baghdad in 1091 where Nizam al-Mulk appointed him to teach jurisprudence at the Nizamiyya madrasa of Baghdad. In recognition of al-Ghazali’s standing, Nizam honored him with the appellations “the ornament of the faith” (zayn al-din) and “the nobility of the leading scholars” (sharaf al-a’imma). But the political and social situation in Baghdad was in turmoil. Having wrested control of Baghdad from the Shi‘i-leaning Buyids in 1055 the Seljuks had ushered in the period now known as the Sunni “revival.” At the same time, they were engaged in fighting, literally and polemically, with the Christian Byzantines in Eastern Turkey, and the Shi‘i Fatimid caliph in Cairo, as well as quelling internal opposition by the conservative Hanbalis who were striving to politically advance their conservative literalist position and to foment opposition against “heretical innovations” of Mu‘tazili philosophical theology and sympathy towards the martyred mystic al-Hallaj (d. 992). In 1092, a year after al-Ghazali’s arrival in Baghdad, his benefactor Nizam al-Mulk was assassinated. A tumultuous series of events followed: the death of the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah, a struggle of succession resulting finally in the appointment of Sultan Barkiyaruq in 1094, followed four days later by the death of the caliph al-Muqtafi culminating in the inauguration of his sixteen-year-old son al-Mustazhir as caliph, an event attended by al-Ghazali.

Al-Ghazali’s years in Baghdad had been quite productive. He had, according to his Autobiography, engaged in an intensive study of religious truth ostensibly as result of skepticism. This initiated an intense examination of religious philosophy (kalam), Islamic Hellenistic philosophy (falsafa), the tenets of Ismailism, and possibly Islamic mysticism (tasawwuf). As a result, he composed several works, the most significant of these, with respect to his attitude towards science, are his Maqasid al-falasifa (Aims of the Philosophers), which is a summary of Islamic Hellenistic philosophy based on *Ibn Sina’s Persian work Danishnama-i ‘Ala’i, followed by his critique of this philosophy in his Tahafut al-falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), then by his logical treatise Mi‘yar al-‘ilm (Standard of Knowledge), and then his treatise of religious philosophy, Al-Iqtisad fi’l-i‘tiqad (Moderation in Belief). But his epistemological skepticism continued its ravages, and according to his Autobiography, resulted in a spiritual crisis, manifested in an inability to speak and thereby to teach. As a result, al-Ghazali quit Baghdad in November 1095 under the pretext of pilgrimage to Mecca.

Al-Ghazali went first to Damascus and then to Jerusalem, where he engaged in spiritual retreat and overcame his skepticism, finding certainty in mystical experience. He then commenced his influential magnum opus, Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din (Revival of the Religious Sciences), completed in 1105. The Revival is a reformulation of Islamic doctrine and practice grounded in the perspectives of mystical Islam instead of jurisprudential formalism.

After a sojourn of eleven years, al-Ghazali returned to retire in his hometown of Tus. Soon after, in 1106, he was persuaded by Nizam al-Mulk’s son to return to teaching at Nizamiyya religious college of Nishapur. His Autobiography entitled Munqidh min al-dalal (Deliverer from Error) was written during this period as is his text on the principles of jurisprudence al-Mustasfa fi ‘ilm alusul (Choice Elements Regarding the Principles of Religion). He retired from teaching for a second time in 1109 and died in 1111. In total, over four hundred works have been attributed to him.

Attitude to Science

Customarily, historians of science concur with al-Ghazali’s own classification, which derives from Ibn Sina, that “the sciences of the [Islamic Hellenistic] philosophers… consist of mathematics, logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics” (Autobiography, 72). As such, the physical theory of the religious philosophers, namely their theories of matter, space, time, motion, and void, have no place in the discussion of the history of science in Islam. Al-Ghazali’s familiarity with the atomistic physical theory of his teacher al-Juwayni is plainly evident in his works; however an examination of al-Ghazali’s remarks reveals an ambivalent if not hostile attitude towards the atomism of the religious philosophers.

Al-Ghazali’s early work Aims of the Philosophers is a summary of the logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics of the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers and forms the basis of his familiarity with the Aristotelian cosmology that underlies their natural sciences. Ironically, as a result of the Latin translation of this work by *Domingo Gundisalvo in the twelfth-century, al-Ghazali or Algazel as he was known, came to be regarded as one of the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers. In the sequel to this work, Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali’s aim is “[refuting] the ancients, showing the incoherence of their beliefs and the contradiction of their doctrines with regards to metaphysics” (Incoherence, 3). In particular, his attacks are directed against Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Al-Ghazali’s critique is effective because it utilizes the conceptual vocabulary and methods of the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers. Hence the “incoherence” or perhaps even more apt, destruction or collapse of their doctrines as a result of incoherence, as is captured in the title of the Latin translation of this work, Destructio Philosophorum. Al-Ghazali charges the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers with heresy for their belief in the eternity of the world, God’s lack of knowledge of particular events, and denial of physical resurrection, all of which are in opposition to the literal sense of the Qur’an. He also attacks some of their views on natural philosophy, particularly their theory of causality. While the attack is grounded in the occasionalism of the religious philosophers, al-Ghazali’s argument is reminiscent of Hume’s later critique of causality. However, one needs to bear in mind that the cosmology of the “scientists,” that is to say the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers, not only claims that causation derives from the natural properties of objects, for example the property of fire to burn cotton, but moreover, as a result of their Neoplatonism, ascribes a causative role to celestial bodies, souls, and intellects which, via their emanations, influence and thereby participate in the causation of events in the terrestrial realm.

In his later works, particularly Revival and Autobiography, al-Ghazali discusses his perspective, as a legal scholar, on the utility of different kinds of knowledge with particular regards to preparing oneself for the next world. Knowledge is either religious, which is transmitted by prophets, or is secular and a result of the human intellect, observation, or social convention, for example arithmetic, medicine, or language. Some secular sciences have a utilitarian role insofar as they aid human beings preserve their health or society so that they may pursue what is truly important, which is to prepare for the next world. As such, the study of medicine or arithmetic is a collective obligation on societies. Yet, one should not engage too deeply in them for one may then lose sight of the real goal of human existence and waste precious time. Apart from medicine, the natural sciences have no utility and can, like *metaphysics, lead to heresy. However, *logic is a neutral tool for it consists of methods of proof and demonstration. It is also found in the religious disciplines albeit their terminology differs from that of Islamic Hellenistic philosophy. Al-Ghazali thereby devoted several works to logic. In his al-Qistas al-mustaqim (Correct Balance) he even claims a Qur’anic origin for logic. In the late text al-Mustasfa, which was composed during his return to teaching in Nishapur, al-Ghazali incorporated the Aristotelian logic of Islamic Hellenistic philosophy into the study of the principles of jurisprudence. However, Aristotelian logic is not a neutral and formal tool. It is grounded in the Aristotelian conceptual vocabulary of substance, form, accident and the Aristotelian categories. Al-Ghazali’s action thereby had the consequence of embedding elements of Aristotelian *cosmology, ontology, and epistemology in that most Islamic of disciplines—the study of the principles of jurisprudence. Al-Ghazali’s attitude towards religious philosophy, on the other hand, was less than enthusiastic. He endorsed its need, as being the same as medicine, namely that it may aid those who are beset by religious doubt and therefore is a collective obligation for Islamic societies. However, he did not endorse its claim to provide certain knowledge, although agreeing to its positions regarding God’s omnipotence, omniscience, prophecy, occasionalism, and the lack of human free-will.

In the Incoherence, al-Ghazali had charged the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers with heresy. His conservative opponents, who were opposed to his engagement, critical though it was, with the Islamic Hellenistic philosophers, the Isma‘ilis, and mystical Islam in turn laid the same charge against him. Al-Ghazali’s response to them is found in his Faysal al-tafriqa ma bayna al-islam wa alzandaqa (Clear Criterion which Distinguishes between the Religion of Islam and Heresy), which was probably written during his first period of retirement in Tus. Al-Ghazali examined the juridical charge of heresy, noting that this charge had been hurled for sectarian purposes, by the Hanbalis against Ash‘ari religious philosophers or by the Mu‘tazilis against the Ash‘aris. At this point in his career, al-Ghazali urged caution against hurling this charge injudiciously and proposed latitude of interpretation of the Qur’anic text within calibrated norms that respected the literal meaning of the text while allowing for metaphorical extension.

The influence of al-Ghazali’s critique of Islamic Hellenistic philosophy during the medieval period may be gauged by its having stimulated a point by point rebuttal by the Andalusi Islamic philosopher *Ibn Rushd (1198). In modern times, the contemporary sociologist Toby Huff is the latest of a series of scholars who have regarded al-Ghazali’s attitudes towards science as being extremely influential for its course in Islamic civilization. Huff argues that the decline of science in Islam is to be attributed primarily to the opposition of religious philosophy. This is exemplified by al-Ghazali’s critical attitude towards the sciences, in particular by his critique of causality in the Incoherence. Huff’s hypothesis has however been criticized by many reviewers. Some point to the corresponding critique of causality by David Hume in the seventeenth century as well as to the occasionalism of the followers of Descartes which suggest that since, by themselves, these attitudes failed to inhibit Western science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they cannot be held responsible for the decline of scientific activity in Islam. Perhaps more to the point is the observation that a case for documenting the influence of al-Ghazali’s attitude remains to be made, particularly in the light of continuing scientific activity in Islamic lands four to five centuries after al-Ghazali’s death.

Bibliography

Alon, I. Al-Ghazali’s Theory of Causality. Journal of the American Oriental Society (1980) 100: 397–405.

Dallal, A. Ghazali and the Perils of Interpretation. Journal of the American Oriental Society (2002) 122: 773–787.

Frank, Richard. Al-Ghazali and the Ash‘arite School. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Ghazali, Abu Hamid al-. “Autobiography.” In Freedom and Fulfillment: An annotated translation of al-Ghazali’s Munqidh min al-Dalal and other relevant works of al-Ghazali. Tr. R. McCarthy. Boston: Twayne, 1980, 61–143.

———. “The Clear Criterion for Distinguishing between Islam and Heresy.” In Freedom and Fulfillment, 145–174.

———. “The Correct Balance.” In Freedom and Fulfillment, 287–332.

———. The Book of Knowledge, being a Translation with Notes of the Kitab al-‘ilm of al-Ghazali’s Ihya ‘ulum al-din. N. Faris, tr. Delhi: International Islamic Publishers, 1988.

———. The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Michael Marmura, tr. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1997.

Goldziher, Ignaz. “The Attitude of Orthodox Islam towards the ‘Ancient Sciences.’” In Studies in Islam. M. Schwartz, tr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 185–215.

Hourani, George. A Revised Chronology of Ghazali’s writings. Journal of the American Oriental Society (1984) 104: 289–302.

Huff, Toby. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Laoust, Henri. La Politique de Ghazali. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1970.

Marmura, Michael. “Al-Ghazali’s Attitude towards the Secular Sciences and Logic.” In Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science. G. Hourani, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975, 100–111.

———. Ghazali and Ash‘arism Revisited. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (2002) 12: 91–110.

ALNOOR DHANANI

Giles of Rome

Giles of Rome was an eminent theologian and commentator on the works of Aristotle in the second half of the thirteenth century. He was born very probably in Rome c. 1243–1247. He entered the Augustinian Order in Rome and then studied philosophy and theology in Paris, where he may have attended *Thomas Aquinas’s lectures in the years 1269–1272. In any case, Aquinas had a very strong influence on Giles’s philosophical and theological thought. In the years 1270–1277, as a bachelor of theology at the University of Paris, Giles lectured on the four books of the Sentences by *Peter Lombard and wrote most of his commentaries on Aristotle’s works. In 1277 he was involved in the condemnation of heterodox *Aristotelianism by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. One of the reasons for Giles’s condemnation was his defense of the Thomist positions about the unity of the substantial form and the possibility of an eternal world. Another reason was the similarities between some of his views and those of the main targets of the condemnation, such as *Siger of Brabant. In reaction to the condemnation Giles wrote the polemic treatise Contra gradus et pluralitatem formarum, in which he maintained that the doctrine of the unity of substantial form is philosophically sound and not contrary to faith. After the condemnation Giles probably left Paris, but he returned in 1285 and was appointed master of theology. Between 1286 and 1291 he produced six Quodlibeta and several collections of Quaestiones disputatae. Following this academic period, Giles enjoyed a prominent ecclesiastical career. In 1292 he was elected Prior General of the Augustinian Order, and in 1295 he was appointed Archbishop of Bourges by Pope Boniface VIII. Giles of Rome died in Avignon on December 22, 1316.

Metaphysics

The distinction between essence and existence is a central topic of Giles’s metaphysics. Although Giles finds this distinction in the writings of Aquinas, he gives a radical and controversial interpretation of it. Giles maintains that in every creature one needs to posit essence and existence as two distinct things. The essence of a creature is ontologically prior to its existence, and existence is a thing over and above the essence that a creature acquires when it passes from potential existence to actual existence. In Giles’s account, the relation between essence and existence is very similar to the relation between substance and accident in Aristotle’s metaphysics. As to the structure of a composite substance, Giles’s final position in the debate about the unity or plurality of substantial forms is that there is only one substantial form in any composite with the exception of the human being: the question of humans, however, he leaves open because of theological concerns. Like Aquinas, Giles holds that the principle of individuation of a composite substance is matter endowed with a quantitative mode, which is prior to a substantial form and explains the multiplication of a substantial form, the so-called indefinite dimension (dimensio indeterminata).

Natural Philosophy

Giles’s most extensive work in natural philosophy is his lengthy commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, which became a standard reference for later commentators. In this work Giles not only gives a detailed explanation of Aristotle’s text but also proposes original interpretations of a number of central issues of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. For example, in his account of rarefaction and condensation, Giles introduces a distinction between the bodily dimensions, which do not remain the same when the body is condensed or rarefied, and the quantity of matter, which remains the same. This distinction is very similar to the modern distinction between volume and mass. In order to save Aristotle’s claim that the place of a body is immobile, Giles modifies Aristotle’s notion of place by distinguishing between material place and formal place. The material place of a body is the limit of the body containing it, that is, place in Aristotle’s sense. The formal place of a body is an order (ordo) or distance (distantia) between the located body and the fixed points of the universe. When the containing body moves, the material place of a body at rest changes but its formal place stays the same and in this sense it is immobile. While a similar distinction is found in Aquinas, Giles’s account is original because it makes material place and formal place two independent items and with two quite distinct roles. Material place is a principle of delimitation of the extension of a body, while formal place defines a frame of reference for describing the motion and rest of a body. As to Aristotle’s theory of the continuum, Giles maintains that the extension of natural bodies is not infinitely divisible, but that it is composed of minimal parts, the so-called natural minima (minima naturalia). The existence of natural minima is due to the substantial form. For each substantial form there is a minimal extension in which that form can exist. Giles maintains that Aristotle’s claim that time is continuous is not universally true, and admits the existence of a discrete time conceived of as a succession of instants without any intervening period of time. For example, Giles claims that the motion of a body in the void would not take place in an instant, as Aristotle and Averroes (*Ibn Rushd) maintain, but in a succession of instants, that is, in a discrete time. Giles also modifies Aristotle’s postulate of the unity of time by admitting the simultaneous existence of many temporal durations. On the debate about the eternity of the world, Giles’s early position is very close to that of Aquinas. That is, he claims that Aristotle’s and Averroes’s arguments for an eternal world are not conclusive because they do not take into account types of production that do not involve physical change, but that it is theoretically possible that the world is eternal. After the *Condemnation of 1277, Giles takes the more careful position according to which it is theoretically possible to prove that the world had a temporal beginning, although adequate arguments for this claim have not yet been found.

See also Elements and qualities; “Latin Averroists”; Hylomorphism

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Giles of Rome (c. 1269–1273). Quaestiones Metaphysicales. Venice, 1501.

——— (c. 1271-3). Super librum I Sententiarum. Venice, 1521.

——— (c. 1274). Super De generatione et corruptione. Venice, 1505.

——— (c. 1274). Quaestiones super librum I De generatione et corruptione. Venice, 1505.

——— (c. 1274). Theoremata de Corpore Christi. Rome, 1554.

——— (c. 1274–1275). Super Physicam. Venice, 1502.

——— (1277-8). Contra gradus et pluralitatem formarum. Venice, 1500.

——— (1278-85). Theoremata de esse et essentia. Ed. E. Hocedez, Louvain: Museum Lessianum, 1930.

——— (c. 1286-7). Quaestiones de esse et essentia. Venice, 1503.

——— (1286-91). Quodlibeta. Louvain, 1646.

Secondary Sources

Donati, S. La dottrina di Egidio Romano sulla materia dei corpi celesti. Discussioni sulla natura dei corpi celesti alla fine del tredicesimo secolo. Medioevo (1986) 12: 229–280.

———. La dottrina delle dimensioni indeterminate in Egidio Romano. Medioevo (1988) 14: 149–233.

———. Studi per una cronologia delle opere di Egidio Romano. 1: Le opere prima del 1285. I commenti aristotelici. Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale (1990) 1.1: 1-112; (1991) 2.1: 1–74.

Eardley, P. Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will. The Review of Metaphysics (2003) 56A: 835–862.

Hocedez, E. Gilles de Rome et Henri de Gand sur la distinction réelle (1276–1287). Gregorianum (1927) 8: 358–384.

Nash, P. W. Giles of Rome on Boethius’ Diversum est esse et id quod est. Mediaeval Studies (1950) 12: 57–91.

Pini, G. “Being and creation in Giles of Rome.” In Philosophie und Theologie an der Universitdt von Paris im letzen Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts, Edited by J. A. Aertsen, K. Emery, and A. Speer. New York: De Gruyter, 2000.

Porro, P. Ancora sulle polemiche tra Egidio Romano e Enrico di Gand: due questioni sul tempo angelico. Medioevo (1988) 14: 107–148.

Trifogli, C. La dottrina del luogo in Egidio Romano. Medioevo (1988) 14: 235–290.

———. La dottrina del tempo in Egidio Romano. Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale (1990) Ll: 247–276.

———. Giles of Rome on Natural Motion in the Void. Mediaeval Studies (1992) 54: 136–161.

———. Giles of Rome on the Instant of Change. Synthese (1993) 96.1: 93–114.

CECILIA TRIFOGLI

Gilles de Corbeil

The medical writer Gilles de Corbeil was born around 1140, presumably at Corbeil in the Île de France. He studied at *Salerno, and returned to Paris sometime between c. 1180 and 1194. There he probably taught medicine, and certainly composed his medical and satirical poetry. He died around 1124.

Of his four medical poems, two were widely copied, read and commented on, namely De urinis and De pulsibus. These are essentially versifications of two of the books of the *Articella anthology, Philaretus’ De pulsibus and Theophilus’ De urinis (to which Gilles adds additional material from *Isaac Judaeus). Indeed, in many Articella manuscripts Gilles’ poems actually supplant Philaretus and Theophilus, and by 1270–1274 they were on the official reading list for the licentiate in medicine in Paris. Eminent masters such as *Gilbertus Anglicus and *Gentile da Foligno composed commentaries on them. They appeared in print in Padua in 1483, and went through eight subsequent Renaissance editions.

Gilles’ poem on semiology, De signis et symptomatibus egritudinum, may also have been conceived as a substitute for, or supplement to, elements of the Articella, e.g., Hippocrates’ Prognosis. After a brief overview of the signs indicating excess of one of the four humors, Gilles treats the symptoms of named diseases from head to foot, after the manner of a manual of therapeutics. Sections on gynecological disorders and on whole-body diseases such as arthritis, leprosy, and fevers follow. Gilles also discusses the causes of these ailments, as well as the symptoms, which reinforces the resemblance of this work to a practica. Despite this rational arrangement, De signis had a much more restricted circulation in the Middle Ages than did the pulse and urine poems. This is also the case with Gilles’ fourth poem, De laudibus et virtutibus compositorum medicaminum. De laudibus is a verse compendium of Salernitan drug therapy, directly inspired by the Antidotarium of *Nicolas of Salerno (whose alphabetical order it adopts) and the commentaries on the Antidotarium by Platearius. Indeed, Gilles describes this work as a versification of Platearius’ glosses. However, it concentrates on the powers of the individual drugs and considerations regarding their administration, rather than the recipes for compounding them.

Didactic poems such as these underscore the medieval teacher’s role in producing summaries for his students (for example, Gilles reduces the hundred forty recipes of the Antidotarium to eighty), and in making large tracts of doctrine easy to digest and remember. Like the Aphorisms of Hippocrates (another constituent of the Articella), didactic poetry distilled medical learning into pithy axioms. Nonetheless, Gilles’ poems are also replete with lively digressions. Some are mildly satirical in character, such as his aside on the erectile dysfunction that can be the unexpected result of overuse of the aphrodisiac diasatyrion, and the consequent vexation of the disappointed woman. Others are autobiographical and historical. In the epilogue of De urinis, the prologue to Book Three of De pulsibus, and above all in the prologues to the first two books of De laudibus, Gilles invokes the memory of his Salernitan teachers—archbishop Romuald II (d. 1181), the pre-eminent master Petrus Musandinus (student of *Bartholomaeus of Salerno), Salernus, Platearius, *Maurus, and *Urso—and asks Romuald’s blessing on his own project to transplant Salernitan medical learning to the banks of the Seine. Gilles presents himself as the French kingdom’s first teacher of academic medicine, and vaunts his Salerno training as a guarantee of intellectual excellence, particularly in comparison to the doctrines of Montpellier. He likewise castigates the “empirics” on the loose in the capital (including the chronicler Rigord) for their lack of knowledge of theoretical medicine. On the other hand, he praises Nicholas’s Antidotarium as much for the experience it distills as for its instruction, and closes the De laudibus with a lengthy and impressive account of the physician’s ethics and decorum. This balance of text-based medical theory and systematized practical medicine is typically Salernitan. Gilles himself was fiercely loyal to his old school, although he laments that standards have slipped, and of late students were graduating at a dangerously young age. In the prologue to Book Two of De laudibus, he also complains that the rising generation was rejecting the older Salernitan teaching.

Gilles de Corbeil was close to Peter the Chanter’s reform circle in Paris, and supported its agenda in a scathing satire of the failures of the contemporary Church entitled Hierapigra ad purgandos prelatos (“A laxative to purge prelates”). Although medicine essentially plays an allegorical role in this poem—the spiritual remedy required for spiritual ills—Gilles occasionally resumes a more clinical voice: for example, he provides medical arguments to justify the reformers’ critique of enforced clerical celibacy.

See also Constantine the African; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Pharmacy; Universities

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Aegidius Corboliensis Carmina Medica. Edited by Ludwig Choulant. Leipzig: Voss, 1826.

Viaticus de signis et symptomatibus aegritudinum. Edited by Valentin Rose. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907.

Hierapigra ad purgandos prelatos. Extracts from Bibliothèque nationale MS nouv. acq. lat. 138 published in Vieillard, Essai (see below) pp. 360–410.

Secondary Sources

Ausécache, Mireille. Gilles de Corbeil ou le médecin pédagogique au tournant des XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Early Science and Medicine (1998) 3: 187–215.

Baldwin, J.W. Masters, Merchants and Princes: the Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

D’Irsay, Stephen. The Life and Works of Gilles de Corbeil. Annals of Medical History (1925) 7: 362-378.

Sudhoff, Karl. Salerno, Montpellier und Paris um 1200. Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin (1920) 20: 51–62.

Vieillard, C. L’urologie et les médecins urologues dans la médecine ancienne. Gilles de Corbeil: sa vie, ses oeuvres, son poème des urines. Paris: Librairie scientifique et littéraire, 1903.

Vieillard, C. Essai sur la société médicale et religieuse au XIIe siècle, Gilles de Corbeil. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909.

FAITH WALLIS

Glassmaking

Most glass consists of minerals heated until they melt, then cooled at a rate that prevents them from resuming their crystalline structure. Regardless of its composition, glass behaves like a solid, but has the random structure of a liquid; it is less a material, therefore, than a state of matter. Glass exists in nature and it has been manufactured for more than four thousand years. Before 1500 C.E., glassmaking was restricted to Eurasia and North Africa, although elsewhere imported glass might be melted to make small objects. This entry deals exclusively with man-made glass and its focus is Europe and the “Central Islamic lands,” which extended from Egypt to Iran. The entry discusses glass melting, forming, and finishing, and the role of glass in other technologies. The most glaring omission is glass in the Byzantine Empire, about which we know surprisingly little.

Glass Melting

Medieval glass was usually made from three ingredients: silica (the major constituent, usually in the form of sand), soda or potash (which acted as a flux), and calcium (which conferred stability). Depending on the time and place, the soda was usually either the mineral trona or ash derived from halophytic plants, although in Europe from the ninth century, potash, usually derived from beech leaves or ferns, replaced soda. The calcium was often introduced inadvertently as an impurity in the soda or silica. In parts of India, glass may have been made from a single ingredient: an earth containing silica, sodium, and calcium. Sometimes glassmakers in Europe and Western Asia produced lead silicate glasses, and in China some glasses had elevated quantities of lead and barium. In all these regions, the addition of selected oxides imparted color or decolorized the glass.

From the beginning, glassmaking (melting natural ingredients to produce “raw” glass) and glass working (transforming raw glass into objects) were independent activities, which required temperatures of approximately 1000–1100ºC and 650–1020ºC respectively, the latter depending on the technique employed. In pre-Roman times in the Mediterranean region and Western Asia, furnaces capable of attaining such temperatures were small and consequently only a few kilograms of glass could be produced in a single operation.

In the first century B.C.E., glass working was transformed by the discovery of glassblowing (see below), which enabled glass workers to produce a greater range of forms and to work more quickly than ever before. This accelerated production, and the corresponding increase in consumption that archeologists have noted throughout the Roman world, imply the ability to make raw glass on an unprecedented scale. The breakthrough that made this possible was the invention of the reverberatory tank furnace, where raw materials were fed into tanks capable of melting several tons at a time. The first known tank furnaces, in Egypt and the Levant, date from early Byzantine or Islamic times, but circumstantial evidence suggests that their invention may have taken place not long after the discovery of glassblowing. The presence of several tons of cullet (raw glass and broken vessels) on the underwater shipwreck at Serçe Limani, Turkey, indicate the large-scale trade in glass for recycling when the ship went down about 1026, while literary and archeological evidence shows that glassmakers at Tyre were exporting large quantities of raw glass both before and after the crusaders occupied the city in 1124.

We know little about medieval furnaces for glass working in the Central Islamic lands, but archeological excavations and literary sources (e.g., the twelfth-century writer Theophilus and a drawing of a workshop in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Mandeville’s Travels) tell us something about workshops in Europe. Production was on a small scale and glass was both made and worked in the same place. Unless it was deliberately colored, most medieval European glass was light green or brown because of impurities in the raw materials. Beginning in the thirteenth century, however, glassmakers in some areas manufactured colorless glass: the forerunner of cristallo glass in Renaissance Venice. The medieval products were known as Waldglas (forest glass) because the workshops were usually located in forests that provided both fuel and potash.

Glass Forming and Finishing

The principal techniques of forming glass in the Mediterranean region and Western Asia in pre-Roman times were core forming, casting in molds, and slumping over forms. Core forming consisted of applying glass to a ceramic core, which was later removed mechanically. The labor-intensive technique was superseded very quickly by glass blowing. From time to time throughout the medieval period, various methods of casting and slumping were used in Eurasia and North Africa. In every region, however, the preferred method of forming glass vessels in the Middle Ages was blowing.

The word “glassblowing” is often used loosely to mean any kind of glass working: an indication of the extent to which glassblowing dominates the traditional repertoire of the glassworker. Strictly speaking, however, glassblowing is the term used to describe the process of gathering a mass of molten glass on the end of a blowpipe and inflating it by blowing through the other end.

The tools used by modern glassblowers are few and simple. In addition to the blowpipe, they include the marver (a smooth surface used to shape partly formed vessels), pontil (a metal rod used to support unfinished objects after removal from the blowpipe), jacks or pucellas (spring-loaded pincers used for shaping the glass), and molds. All these tools were used in the Roman world and we assume that they were universally available in the Middle Ages. Other traditional tools, which may or may not have been available, include blocks, shears, and the soffietta (puffer), which is used to inflate partly formed vessels when they are on the pontil.

During inflation, the mass of molten glass (“parison”) was shaped in various ways, using some of the tools mentioned above. In addition to making vessels, the glassworker could blow the parison into a cylindrical form, which was cut open, flattened, and cut into window panes; or it could be spun into a disk to make circular “crown” panes. After modest beginnings, flat glass was produced on a prodigious scale in Europe in and after the twelfth century to satisfy the demand for large pictorial windows in churches.

Alternatively, the parison might be inflated in a decorated mold. Cup-shaped “dip” molds imparted patterns that remained in the glass regardless of the ultimate shape of the object, while “full-size” molds imparted both the pattern and the shape. Both types of mold were widely employed in the Islamic world, while in Europe dip molds were much more common than full-size molds. At the end of the forming process, all glass objects were allowed to cool slowly (a process known as annealing) to eliminate stresses, which could cause them to self-destruct.

At different times and in different places, glass workers in the Islamic world used a wide range of decorative techniques in addition to inflation in molds. While the object was still hot, they sometimes applied trails of molten glass, which could be left in relief or worked into the surface of the object by rolling it on a marver. They also produced repetitive ornament by pinching the object with decorated tongs. After objects had been annealed, they could be decorated by painting with vitreous enamels, gilding, or metallic stain, processes which required re-heating to fix the pigments permanently. An alternative technique, at which glass workers in the Central Islamic Lands excelled in the ninth and tenth centuries, was cutting, grinding, and polishing the surface with rotating wheels fed with an abrasive slurry.

Glassworkers in Europe used a smaller range of decorative techniques and, as far as we know, cutting was not practiced before the Renaissance and the use of staining was restricted to a limited quantity of late medieval window glass.

The Role of Glass in Other Technologies

Glass is everywhere and we tend to take it for granted. However, its role in the development of medieval science and technology was enormous. Glass vessels made possible medical diagnosis by uroscopy (inspection of urine samples), which began in the Islamic world, from which it spread to Europe. Glass apparatus was indispensable for scientific experiments. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Europeans had access to eyeglasses, which assisted everyone whose activities depended on close observation. In the words of Macfarlane and Martin “almost every great scientific advance needed glass at some stage.”

Bibliography

Baumgartner, Erwin and Ingeborg Krueger. Phönix aus Sand und Asche: Glas des Mittelalters. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1988.

Brill, Robert H. and John H. Martin, ed. Scientific Research in Early Chinese Glass. Proceedings of The Archaeometry of Glass Sessions of the 1984 International Symposium on Glass, September 1984, Beijing. Corning: The Corning Museum of Glass, 1991.

Carboni, Stefano. Glass from Islamic Lands. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2001.

Carboni, Stefano and David Whitehouse. Glass of the Sultans. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.

Dell’Acqua, Francesca and Romano Silva, eds. Il Colore nel Medioevo: Arte Simbolo Tecnica: La Vetrata in Occidente dal IV all’XI Secolo. Papers presented at the third international conference on Color in the Middle Ages, September 1999, Lucca, Italy. Lucca: Istituto Storico Lucchese, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Italia, 2001.

Dodwell, C.R. Theophilus, De Diuersis Artibus: Theophilus, The Various Arts. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1961.

Foy, Danièle and Geneviève Sennequier. À travers le verre du moyen âge à la renaissance. Rouen: Musées et Monuments départementaux de la Seine-Maritime, 1989.

Macfarlane, Alan and Gerry Martin. Glass: A World History. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press 2002.

Nenna, Marie-Dominique, ed. La route du verre: ateliers primaires et secondaires du second millénaire av. J.-C. au Moyen Âge. Lyon: Maison del’Orient Mediterranéen-Jean Pouilloux, 2000.

Raguin, Virginia Chieffo. The History of Stained Glass: The Art of Light, Medieval to Contemporary. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2003.

Tait, Hugh, ed. Five Thousand Years of Glass. London: British Museum Press, 1991 (revised 1999).

Ward, Rachel, ed. Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle East. London: British Museum Press, 1998.

DAVID WHITEHOUSE

God in Christianity

During the Middle Ages, God played practically no role in the mathematical, or exact, sciences of astronomy, optics, and mechanics, largely because there were no issues in the mathematical sciences that conflicted with Scripture or traditional theology. It was quite otherwise with the discipline of natural philosophy. The Biblical account of creation in Genesis guaranteed that the Christian God would play a significant role in the natural philosophy of the Latin Middle Ages. This was so primarily because of the works of Aristotle, whose numerous writings on natural philosophy were translated from Greek and Arabic into Latin during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and thereafter formed the basis of all natural philosophy until the sixteenth century. Aristotle’s treatises on natural philosophy, and the numerous commentaries on those works by his medieval followers, were concerned primarily with change and motion and the causes thereof. The domain of natural philosophy was therefore the entire physical world, which in Aristotle’s interpretation meant both the celestial region (everything beyond the moon) and the terrestrial region (everything below the lunar sphere to the center of the earth).

Aristotle’s views on a number of issues were contrary to Christian ideas about the world and its governance. His ideas about God were radically different. Aristotle’s God did not create the world, which Aristotle regarded as eternal, without beginning or end; nor does he have anything to do with it. Indeed, he does not even know it exists. Aristotle thought of God as an immaterial, immo-bile substance located at the sphere of the fixed stars, the outermost sphere of our spherical cosmos. God thinks only of himself, because only he is an object of thought.

By contrast, the Christian God of Genesis is an all-powerful creator who created the world from nothing, requiring no prior material bodies or substances to do so. In creating the cosmos, God chose to make it a world of lawful regularity, although He could have made it otherwise, since He had infinite possibilities from which to draw. During the Middle Ages, theologians distinguished between God’s ordained power (potentia ordinata) and His absolute power (potentia absoluta). By His ordained power, God chose the laws and entities He wished to include in the world. Once He had made his selections, it was generally believed that, apart from a miracle here and there, God would not intervene and alter the natural laws of the world He had created. That would imply a change of mind, which to theologians would have been unthinkable. The myriad of unrealized possibilities was now only hypothetically possible. It was, however, assumed that, by His absolute power, God could, if He wished, convert any of those hypothetical possibilities into reality, provided that such an act did not involve a logical contradiction.

Because it was believed that God had created a rational, lawfully operating universe, natural philosophers at the medieval universities, where almost all treatises on natural philosophy were written, found it unnecessary to intrude God into their discussions. Miracles were not regarded as part of natural philosophy. Nevertheless, for most of the thirteenth century, the Church and many conservative theologians were fearful that some of Aristotle’s ideas and concepts about the world and its structure would subvert the faith. This was especially true at the University of Paris. In 1210, it was forbidden in Paris to read Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy. This ban seems to have been ineffective, because by 1231 the Church sought to purge the offensive errors from Aristotle’s works and leave a sanitized version for scholars and students. The expurgation of Aristotle’s texts was never carried out, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s works in natural philosophy were in use as textbooks in the arts curriculum at the University of Paris. By the late 1260s, a final assault was made. Rather than ban or expurgate Aristotle’s works as had previously been attempted, the theologians now chose to issue public condemnations of ideas, many drawn from natural philosophy. The crisis came in 1277, when the bishop of Paris condemned two hundred and nineteen propositions or articles. Although the list was drawn up hastily, and was inconsistent and repetitious, many of the articles were relevant to natural philosophy and most were derived from the works of Aristotle.

Parisian theologians were deeply concerned about the restrictions Aristotle had inadvertently placed on God’s absolute power. These limitations operated even in an area where Aristotle’s theories and the Christian faith were in accord. If the creation account in Genesis strongly suggested a temporal beginning for the world, it also seemed to signify its uniqueness. Here, at least, Aristotle and Christianity seemed in agreement: there is only one world. This apparent unanimity was, however, deceptive. Although Aristotle’s conclusion might be applauded, his derivation of it was offensive because he had argued that the existence of another world was impossible, or, as he put it, “there is not now a plurality of worlds, nor has there been, nor could there be” (De caelo 1.9. 279a. 7–11). To argue that creation of other worlds was absolutely impossible was viewed as a restriction on God’s absolute power to do as He pleases. For this reason, article 34 condemned the idea that God could not create other worlds.

The *Condemnation of 1277 made it clear that what Aristotle regarded as “natural impossibilities” were not impossible for God, Who could make them realities if He so desired. Indeed, article 147 condemned those who believed “That the absolutely impossible cannot be done by God or another agent—An error, if impossible, is understood according to nature.” Because of the condemnation, it became obligatory for all natural philosophers to concede that, by His absolute power, God could, if He wished, bring into existence any natural impossibility that Aristotle had identified. As a consequence, medieval natural philosophers and theologians conjured up hypothetical situations in which God was imagined to create other worlds that existed simultaneously; or that came into existence successively; and even worlds that existed simultaneously, one within another. In their conjectures, natural philosophers imagined that God created other worlds that were identical to ours, and then concluded that those worlds would be completely independent of each other with each operating by the same laws that governed our world. Although no one in the Middle Ages really believed that God had created other worlds of the kind described here, they did regard such worlds as supernaturally possible, whereas Aristotle considered them to be utterly impossible.

One of the condemned articles (article 49) held that God could not move the world with a rectilinear motion. Natural philosophers then argued that God could indeed do so, even though such a motion violated Aristotle’s belief in an immobile cosmos and his concept of the way a body occupies a place or space.

Articles 34 and 49 both presupposed void spaces beyond our world. Some scholastic theologians assumed that an infinite void existed beyond our world, but that it was not a space created by God. Indeed, it was uncreated, because it was equated with God’s infinite omnipresent immensity. Because God is an immaterial being without extension, English theologian *Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290–1349) characterized Him as “infinitely extended without extension.” By equating infinite void space with God’s immensity, infinite space was regarded as real, though without extension. By being the first to introduce God into infinite space, medieval theologians influenced the spatial conceptions of seventeenth century scientists and philosophers, especially Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton, Pierre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes.

Natural philosophers also assumed that, despite Aristotle’s claim that a vacuum within our world is impossible, God could, if He wished, create vacua within our world. They imagined that God might do this by annihilating all or part of the matter that existed in our world. If He did, they then posed and answered questions such as: could material objects located within such a void space be capable of finite, rectilinear motion; or would their motions be instantaneous, as Aristotle argued? Would it be possible to measure distances in such void places? If people were located in such empty spaces, would they be capable of seeing and hearing each other? By such unusual and interesting questions, the concept of God’s absolute power became an instrument for the introduction of subtle and imaginative questions, which were usually answered in terms of Aristotelian physics and cosmology, even though such “contrary to fact” conditions were impossible in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Although these novel questions and responses were subversive of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, they did not cause the abandonment of the Aristotelian worldview. But they made many aware that things deemed impossible by Aristotle were indeed possible by God’s supernatural power and, moreover, if God chose to enact all, or some, of them, they would be intelligible.

What God Can and Cannot Do

During the Middle Ages, only professional theologians were authorized to express themselves about God’s attributes and powers. They usually did this in theological commentaries on the Sentences (Sententiae, or “opinions”), the basic theological textbook composed in the twelfth century by *Peter Lombard (c. 1095–1160), who divided his treatise into four books, the first of which was about God. Since medieval theologians were thoroughly trained in natural philosophy and logic, it became commonplace for them to inject both subjects into all sorts of theological questions, especially those concerned with God. It is no exaggeration to say that theologians transformed theology into a highly analytical subject that was heavily logico-mathematical and which was permeated by natural philosophy.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, theologians posed an amazing array of questions about God and His attributes and powers. They inquired about His knowledge; what He could or could not do; and what He had intended to do. In all these questions, it was axiomatically assumed that God could not produce simultaneous, contradictory actions. He could not, for example, make something exist and not exist at the same moment. Such an action was regarded as unintelligible. A primary concern was whether God could create an actual infinite magnitude or multitude. Some theologians were convinced that this would involve God in a contradiction, because if God created an actually infinite magnitude, He would be unable to create anything larger, since there is nothing larger than an infinite magnitude. Thus God’s absolute power to do anything whatever would be restricted, which involves a contradiction.

There were theologians, however, who did not believe that a contradiction would be involved if God created an actually infinite magnitude or multitude. A major area of debate concerned the eternity of the world. Could God have created the world from eternity? St. Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274) drew what he regarded as a number of impossible consequences to demonstrate the absurdity of an eternal world and the necessity to believe in its creation. *St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274), and others, however, rejected Bonaventure’s arguments and insisted that neither the creation of the world nor its eternity was demonstrable. Thomas also proclaimed that no logical contradiction was involved in assuming that God could have created a world that existed from eternity, and which was therefore co-eternal with Himself.

Because God is an omnipresent, infinite being, theologians were strongly attracted to the infinite and found numerous occasions to discuss its different aspects. In the fourteenth century, a few of those who believed that God could create an actual infinite arrived at results about the nature of the infinite that were only rediscovered in the nineteenth century with the promulgation of infinite set theory by Georg Cantor. Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) was convinced that God could produce three different kinds of infinites: an infinite magnitude, an infinite multitude, and an infinitely intense quality. Gregory showed that such terms as “part,” “whole,” “greater than,” and “less than” were also applicable to infinites. In the course of his lengthy discussion, Gregory discovered the counter-intuitive idea that a part of an infinite can equal the whole infinite, which we can illustrate (although Gregory did not) by placing the even numbers into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. Also in the fourteenth century, Henry of Harclay argued that one infinite can be greater than another, another idea that would be fully developed by Cantor in the nineteenth century.

Theologians also applied the concept of infinite divisibility to show what God could or could not do. By the use of proportional parts, they showed how God could make an infinite number of angels in an hour. They also conjured up examples to show how God’s power might, under certain unusual circumstances, be indecisive. One theologian, Robert Holkot, imagined that in the last hour of his life, a man is meritorious in the first proportional part of the hour and unmeritorious in the second proportional part; he is again meritorious in the third proportional part, and unmeritorious in the fourth proportional part, and so on through an infinite series of decreasing proportional parts. Because the instant of death is not part of the infinite sequence of diminishing proportional parts, there can be no last instant in which the man can be either meritorious or sinful. Therefore God cannot judge him. Here again, the application of logico-mathematical techniques to God’s powers led medieval theologians to strange conclusions.

Much of medieval theology devoted to God utilized natural philosophy and logico-mathematical analysis to explore God’s powers and to determine what He could or could not do. Since it was assumed that God could do anything that did not involve a logical contradiction, much of the analysis of His powers to perform this or that action—for example, whether He could make a creature exist for only an instant—was an effort to determine whether a logical contradiction was involved in the performance of that action. Because of this extraordinary and distinctive concern, the Christian God of the Middle Ages in Western Europe differs dramatically from the Christian God of the modern world. This is immediately evident from the rather unusual questions medieval theologians proposed about God’s powers, a number of which have already been mentioned:

Whether the foreknowledge of God is the cause of the future being the future.

Whether God could make the future not to be.

Whether God could do evil things.

Whether God could have made the world before He made it.

Whether God knew that He would create a world from eternity.

Whether without any change in Himself, God could not want something that at some (earlier) time He had wanted.

These, and numerous other, questions were largely answered by the application of logico-mathematical analysis that was regularly employed in natural philosophy.

See also God in Islam; Religion and Science

Bibliography

Courtenay, William J. John of Mirecourt and Gregory of Rimini on Whether God can Undo the Past. In Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale (1973) 40: 147–174. Reprinted in William J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Theology and Economic Practice. London: Variorum Reprints, 1984, VIIIb.

———. Capacity and Volition: a History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power. Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990.

Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Gilson, Etienne. Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.

Grant, Edward. “God, Science, and Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages.” In Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt, eds., Between Demonstration and Imagination, Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North. Edited by Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt. Leiden: Brill, 1999, 243–267.

———. God and Reason in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Oakley, Francis. Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: an Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

EDWARD GRANT

God in Islam

In the Qur’an, the scriptural text of Islam, God is depicted as the Creator of the world, who created the world in six days, and then “sat” on His Throne. He hears, He sees, He creates directly by the command “Be!”; He is omnipotent, He “gives life and brings on death,” He displays lightning, He brings on rain-clouds, He is the rain-maker, He makes crops grow, He is the agent who causes the embryo to grow and become fully grown, there is nothing that He has neglected in creation; He is omniscient, knowing “what goes into the earth and what emerges from it, what comes down from the sky and what rises up towards it” and He knows “your hidden secrets and apparent actions.” God describes Himself with several attributes, Creator, Merciful, Knowing, Living, etc. The beings of creation continually praise and worship Him. The creation is full of signs of God; examples are the transformation of the dead land in spring, the creation of sexual pairs, the transformation of night into day, the use of constellations to guide man’s travels, etc. Man needs to reflect on these signs and remember his Creator. Man will be resurrected and see his Creator on the Last Day when he will have to account for his actions.

Early Islamic discussions focused on the anthropomorphic and corporeal descriptions of God in the text of the Qur’an. Literalists asserted that problematic passages were to be accepted without question (literally “asking how”). But others who were opposed to literalism noted that these passages must be understood allegorically, for example, “God’s Hand” represents His Power. The religious discipline of kalam, which is sometimes translated as “theology,” emerged out of these discussions. In its classical form, formulated in the early tenth century, kalam asserted that God is completely different from Creation, which He created ex nihilo, God is the Omnipotent, nothing happens in the creation without God’s power and knowledge; there is no natural causation as only God has, and in the view of one school of kalam human beings in a limited sense have the power of causal agency. God’s freedom of action is absolute. Any notion that we have of uniformity in the working of nature is due to God’s custom or habit of creating the same sequence of events, for example burning when fire and cotton are brought together. In fact, objects like fire and cotton are completely inert and have no properties which play a role in the burning when they are brought together. The conjunction of what are thought to be causes and effects are actually just concomittant events. Burning is, in fact, directly caused by God and is an intentional act, a free choice. The fact that God sometimes chooses to follow a different sequence of events is evident in those occurrences which we term “miracles.”

The beginnings of Arabo-Islamic science are coterminous with the end of the process of the development of classical kalam (late eighth and ninth centuries C.E.). The pursuit of science started with the appropriation of the scientific knowledge of previous civilizations primarily via the movement to translate Greek and other scientific texts into Arabic. As such, the commitment of most scientists, during this period of the appropriation and subsequently naturalization of science in Arabic, was to the philosophical cosmology of a Neoplatonized Aristotelianism, known as falsafa (the Arabic transliteration of the Greek philosophia), which studied “the true nature of things.” For Muslim scientist-philosophers, God was a Muslim version of the Neoplatonic Aristotelian God. Falsafa had definite positions regarding the nature of God as creator, the active engagement of God in the world, and the nature of God’s knowledge. Uniquely, the early scientist-philosopher *al-Kindi (d. 870), argued that the world originated ex nihilo through God’s direct act of creation. He supported this position by utilizing arguments which derive from the Christian philosopher-theologian Johannes Philoponus (fl. 6th century). Later scientist-philosophers such as *al-Farabı (d. 950), *Ibn Sına (d. 1037), and *Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) rejected al-Kindi’s view and were committed to Aristotle’s original position that the world is eternal, and the Neoplatonic view that the world is eternally emanating from God, and that emanation (or “overflowing”) is the nature of Divinity. As such the question of whether God wills or chooses to emanate is meaningless. In fact the whole notion of whether we can have positive knowledge about God was raised, and many practitioners of falsafa asserted that we can only describe God through negative attributes. However, they agreed that God does not directly and intentionally intervene in the workings of the universe, but rather the events that occur in it are the result of natural causation, that is to say, the events are a result of the natural properties of objects and their receptivity to the “influences” of the emanations of celestial beings, that is to say celestial intellects and celestial souls. These natural properties and celestial influences therefore play a causal role in the events that occur in the world (which are thereby their effects). From the viewpoint of the concept of God, this is a completely deterministic world in which God’s activity and role is limited to emanation. Moreover, this emanation is necessary and it follows therefore that God has no freedom of action. Yet, even though God is not directly engaged in the workings of the world, He is still the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover and the First Cause. On the basis of this view of Divine remoteness, and their notion of God’s utter simplicity, the scientist-philosophers asserted that God’s knowledge is universal and unchanging, and therefore confined to eternal, universal principles rather than knowledge of actual particular events and of particular individuals. As such, the falsafa concept of God represents a significant departure from the literalist reading of the Qur’an and the position of kalam and thereby demands an allegorical reading of revelation.

The religious thinker *al-Ghazali (d. 1111) criticized these views of the practitioners of falsafa in his The Incoherence of the Philosopher. Chief among these are the metaphysical views of the practitioners of falsafa regarding the eternity of the world, God’s knowledge of particulars, their denial of physical resurrection, and their view on natural philosophy which claims that objects have natural properties which play a role in causation. On the basis of his detailed discussion of the first three of these views of the scientist-philosophers, al-Ghazali accuses them of unbelief. Therefore, in his view, the scientist-philosophers have placed themselves outside the normative beliefs of Islam. But in a later juridical work, Clear Criterion, which distinguishes between the religion of Islam and heresy, al-Ghazali offers a more nuanced discussion of the interpretive possibilities, particularly when the literal sense of the Qur’an conflicts with actual order of things, which in this case are the positions of falsafa’s philosophical cosmology. Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence and Clear criterion were in turn criticized by the Andalusian scientist-philosopher Ibn Rushd in his Incoherence of the Incoherence and his On the harmony between religion and philosophy. In the later work, which is written from the perspective of his role as a jurist, Ibn Rushd utilizes the Qur’anic view of creation as containing the signs of God in his argument that the activity of science-philosophy (Ibn Rushd uses the term hikma, meaning wisdom, instead of falsafa!) is the study of existing things and reflecting on them as signs of their Maker. Therefore, the study of science-philosophy is not only sanctioned, but necessary from the perspective of Islamic Law. Ibn Rushd’s position thus highlights the contentious position that its base, scientific activity, is a window to God’s creation.

Following its decline in the thirteenth century, falsafa was, at least in many Sunni circles, incorporated into the discussions of kalam. This meant of course that the problematic falsafa views on creation ex nihilo, emanationism, natural causation, Divine knowledge, and God’s lack of freedom of action had to be replaced by kalam views on these questions. Many scientists were now engaged in non-scientific professions which were affiliated with religious institutions of learning like the madrasa sometimes like law or Arabic grammar. Moreover, some mathematicians were employed by religious institutions, for example as official mosque time-keepers (muwaqqit). This then raises the question of whether they remained committed to the falsafa views on God and causation or the kalam views on these questions. As a result, A.I. Sabra suggests that they may have therefore held an instrumentalist view of knowledge. However, this thesis requires further research via an inquiry into the actual beliefs of the scientists of this period, and thereby their concept of God.

See also Aristotelianism; God in Christianity

Bibliography

al-Ghazalı, Abu Hamid. “The Clear Criterion for Distinguishing between Islam and Heresy.” In Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translation of al-Ghazali’s Munqidh min al-Dalal and other relevant works of al-Ghazali. Tr. R. McCarthy. Boston: Twayne, 1980, pp. 145–174.

———. The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Tr. Michael Marmura. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1997.

al-Kindı, Abu Ya‘qub. Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics. Tr. A. Ivry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974.

Ibn Rushd. On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy. Tr. George Hourani. London: Luzac, 1967.

———. The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Tr. Simon van den Bergh. London: Luzac, 1978.

Rahman, Fazlur. The Major Themes of the Qur’an. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980.

Sabra, A.I. The appropriation and subsequent naturalization of Greek science in medieval Islam: A preliminary statement. History of Science (1987) 25: 223–243.

ALNOOR DHANANI

Grosseteste, Robert

Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170–1253), an influential philosopher and theologian, was born into a humble family in Suffolk, England. The first twenty years of his life are wanting in historical details. It is unclear how he was able to gain a basic education and eventually become so learned in the liberal arts. The earliest evidence places him in and around the diocese of Hereford where he was a member of the bishop’s household from 1192 to 1198. That position was gained in part by a recommendation from Gerald of Wales who described the young Grosseteste as being learned in both canon law and medicine. The connection to Hereford may explain Grosseteste’s initial exposure to medieval science, as it was a center for the study and dissemination of newly translated texts in natural philosophy. However, his two earliest works—one on the liberal arts in general (De artibus liberalibus), and another that advanced a theory of sound (De generatione sonorum)—reveal no influence of the new Arabic or Greek thought. After 1198 Grosseteste almost entirely disappears from the historical record until 1225, when he obtained an ecclesiastical benefice in the diocese of Lincoln. Four or five years later, the Franciscan convent at Oxford petitioned him to become its first lector in theology, a position he occupied until 1235, when the canons of Lincoln elected him bishop. Despite being responsible for the largest diocese in medieval England and being zealously committed to pastoral reform, Grosseteste was able to make time for theological and philosophical study. Most notably, he further developed his ability to read Greek (which he had begun to learn while teaching the Oxford Franciscans), and began major translation projects including the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the major works of John of Damascus, the first complete Latin rendering of the Nicomachean Ethics, a partial translation of Aristotle’s De caelo, translations of some Greek commentators of Aristotle, and two other Pseudo-Aristotelian works (De virtute and De lineis indivisibilibus). Grosseteste died on October 9, 1253, leaving behind an impressive corpus of translation, commentary, and analysis.

Title page of 1658 London edition of the works of Robert Grosseteste. (University of Pennsylvania Library/Edgar Fahs Smith Collection)

Grosseteste’s writings before 1220 are not very remarkable as they are more recapitulations of the Latin scientific tradition than original contributions. He makes consistent appeal to the teachings of the astrologers and alchemists, although he would unequivocally reject the validity of both after 1225. Among these early writings, however, is the notable De sphaera (c. 1215). Many scholars have speculated on the relationship between this text and *John of Sacrobosco’s work of the same name. There is some evidence that Grosseteste may have had a copy of the latter as he wrote his own, and it may have been his attempt to put flesh on the bare bones of Sacrobosco’s text. Even if a firm relationship between these two treatises cannot be established, later English readers of Sacrobosco’s De sphaera employed Grosseteste’s own text as a magisterial gloss.

After 1220, Grosseteste’s scientific interests took an important turn. He began to integrate into his Neoplatonic worldview the writings of Aristotle, including newly translated texts and their Arabic commentaries. This amalgamation led to his major scientific and philosophical interest: the action of light. The reading of Aristotle had challenged Grosseteste to reconsider causation in the natural world. His exploration of meteorological phenomena (De impressionibus elementorum) included an account of how the rays of the Sun (and not Sun as a warm body itself) could account for the climatic differences between the various geographic regions. Hence it is the action of the reflection and condensation of rays that explains the warmth of valleys and the coldness of mountaintops. Heat caused by the Sun’s rays also explains the appearance and disappearance of clouds as they moved through the three levels of the atmosphere. In his treatment of the cause of tides, Grosseteste is far more explicit on the causal nature of light. The explanation of change in the elements can be explained only in terms of rarefaction and condensation. This raises two fundamental premises: first, rarefaction is the motion of matter toward the periphery, and condensation is movement towards the center; second, since earth cannot be condensed any further and fire cannot be rarefied any more, the focus of elemental motion is on air and water. Having dealt with change in the air in a previous treatise, Grosseteste elects to examine motion in water, as exemplified in tidal movements. Despite the focus on one natural occurrence, he continues his discussion with a universal claim, namely that the efficient cause of elemental motion must be supralunary since an element cannot move itself nor can it be moved by another element. Grosseteste attaches the long-standing assertion that the Moon is the efficient cause of tides to a non-Aristotelian notion that the rays of light emitted by the Moon cause the waters to move. Light has become for him the medium by which heavenly bodies can influence the sublunary world.

Grosseteste developed his theory of light in two important ways in subsequent writings. The first was metaphysical as he claimed that light was the basis of all corporeal reality. “I consider the first corporeal form,” Grosseteste writes in De luce, “which some call corporeity itself, to be light.” This treatise is in part an attempt to resolve a quandary about the origins of corporeal bodies within a hylomorphic universe. Matter on its own has no extension, and requires a form to impress it to create a body. However, a form also has no extension since it is simple. Hence it would appear that something else is required to create a body with form and matter—unless there was a corporeal form that has its own capabilities of generating itself and could do so in a multidimensional way. The only created thing that can do this is light. Therefore, this light “multiplied itself by its very nature an infinite number of times on all sides and spread itself out uniformly in every direction. In this way it proceeded in the beginning of time to extend matter which it could not leave behind, by drawing it out along with itself into a mass the size of the material universe.” The multiplication of light occurred until it reached its rarified maximum. The subsequent condensation produced the heavenly spheres and then the full condensation of light created the Earth. His “light metaphysics” would also lead Grosseteste to posit that color was light incorporated into a material body that could be seen by the human eye only when a greater light was diffused over it (De colore). This proposition in turn became the central metaphor for his theological account of truth, namely that each created thing contained truth in the same way a material body incorporated light as its color, but it required illumination by the uncreated light in order for the human mind to perceive the truth of a thing.

Secondly, the action of light demanded a more sophisticated account of rectilinear motion, and the only science that could adequately explain this was Euclidean geometry. While Grosseteste had begun to study the Greek and Arabic sources for Aristotle’s Optics after 1220, it was not until the end of that decade and into the next that he had fully digested their principles. That full understanding of classical optics emerged in De lineis, angulis et figuris (c. 1228). It begins with a rather astounding assertion a for a medieval thinker: “All the causes of the natural world can be discovered in lines, angles, and figures, otherwise those causes could never be fully known.” Grosseteste pursued one major example in his study of the rainbow (De iride), in which he notes that the Physics allows the enquirer to come to know the quid of the natural world, but it is the Optics that reveals the propter quid. This treatise also introduced a theory of refraction to explain the variation of color in a rainbow as well as its shape, in contradistinction to Aristotle who had used only reflection.

In addition to reading Aristotle for his own interests, Grosseteste also produced commentaries on the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Sophistici Elenchi, De caelo et mundo, as well as notes on the Physics and the Nicomachean Ethics. John of Salisbury had commented a generation before that only mathematicians seemed to grasp the Posterior Analytics. Not surprisingly, then, Grosseteste’s own commentary, the first in the Latin West (c. 1228–1230), adopts a Euclidian model where he regularly pauses to identify the “conclusions” that Aristotle had demonstrated—and this is in addition establishing the explicit connection between mathematics and Aristotle’s own theory of scientific demonstration. Mathematics, for example, is presented as the ultimate example of knowledge of the universal, since the numerical objects are known consistently in one mode (in contrast to natural philosophy in which the frequency of things moves the mind towards the universal). And, mathematics plays a pivotal role in articulating Aristotle’s theory of subalternation, a construct that would solidify the relationship between geometry and optics. Grosseteste’s Notes on the Physics were clearly a preparation for a major commentary that was never completed; nonetheless the notes began to circulate soon after he became bishop of Lincoln. While Aristotle greatly influenced his worldview and his own methodology, he never accepted all the tenets of the Stagirite. The doctrine of the eternity of the world he found in particular to be theologically and philosophically suspect. He first attacked the notion in a short treatise on eternal and temporal causality (De finitate motus et temporis), a topic that came directly out of his study of the Physics. He also addressed this same issue in a theological disputation on the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity (De ordine emanandi causatorum a Deo). He then pursued the eternity of the world further in his commentary on the Genesis creation narrative (Hexaëmeron), where he attacked the philosophical assumptions that supported this doctrine.

While some historians have suggested that Grosseteste be counted among the fathers of modern science, his body of work does not suggest such a fundamental role in the history of science. Despite his assertion about the utility of mathematical analysis, he never considered quantitative analysis of the natural world to be necessarily superior to the qualitative. Moreover, while he continually referred to data obtained by experience (experimento), this was not a reference to any nascent empiricism. Rather, the phrase “experiential knowledge” (scientia experimentalis) could refer both to personal observation and repeatable (but not controlled) experiments, as well as to literary data found in the ancient texts. Grosseteste labored intensively on explaining the application of syllogistic logic in natural philosophy, but gave no account of how empirical evidence could be evaluated. He did adopt the Aristotelian resolutio–compositio method for exploring problems in natural philosophy, but this use did not require analysis of only observable data. Grosseteste’s scientific writings had considerable influence on scholastics at Oxford, especially *Roger Bacon but also Richard Fishacre, Adam Marsh, and *Richard Rufus of Cornwall.

Although Grosseteste focused mainly on theological study after 1230, he never lost interest in the natural world. His inaugural lecture as a Master of the Sacred Page is an apology for how one can employ the quadrivium in biblical exegesis without impugning the superiority of the theological enterprise. His own exposition of Scripture betrays a continued fascination with creation: in addition to his exposition of Genesis, he exploited his scientific experience in his lectures on the Psalms and the book of Ecclesiasticus (partially surviving as De operationibus solis). His theological speculation was built on his experience with Euclidean and Aristotelian methodologies—although Grosseteste considered Aristotle’s definition of science to be of limited value to a theologian since that science of demonstration focused primarily on the sublunary world. At the heart of his theology was a theory of the unity of all creation that would eventually enjoy full union with its Creator, and he saw the Incarnation as the unifying force. That perception was clearly built on his earlier scientific study of the universe and his metaphysics of light.

See also Agronomy; Aristotelianism; Optics and catoptrics; Scholasticism; Scientia

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Baur, Ludwig, ed. Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln. Münster i. W.: Aschendorff, 1912.

Dales, R.C. The Text of Robert Grosseteste’s Questio de fluxu et refluxu maris with an English Translation. Isis (1966) 57: 455–474.

Grosseteste, Robert. Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum libros. Edited by Pietro Rossi. Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1981.

———. Commentarius in VIII libros physicorum Aristotelis. Edited by R. C. Dales. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1963.

———. Hexaëmeron. Edited by R.C Dales and S. Gieben. London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1982.

McEvoy, James. The Sun as res and signum: Grosseteste’s Commentary on Ecclesiasticus ch. 43, vv. 1–5. Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale (1974) 41: 38–91.

Panti, Cecilia. Moti, virtù e motori celesti nella cosmologia di Roberto Grossatesta: studio e edizione dei trattati De sphera, De cometis, De motu supercelestium. Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001.

The Electronic Grosseteste. Edited by James R. Ginther. URL = <http://www.grosseteste.com>.

Secondary Sources

Crombie, A.C. Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Dales, R.C. Robert Grosseteste’s Scientific Works. Isis (1961) 52: 381–402.

Editing Robert Grosseteste: papers given at the thirty-sixth annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 3-4 November 2000. Edited by E.A. Mackie and J.Goering. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Ginther, J.R. Natural Philosophy and Theology at Oxford in the Early Thirteenth Century: An Edition and Study of Robert Grosseteste’s Inception Sermon (Dictum 19). Medieval Sermon Studies (2000) 44: 108–134.

Laird, W.R. Robert Grosseteste on the Subalternate Sciences. Traditio (1987) 43: 147–169.

McEvoy, J. The Chronology of Robert Grosseteste’s Writings on Nature and Natural Philosophy. Speculum (1983) 58: 614–655.

Southern R.W. Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Thomson, S. Harrison. The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1235–1253. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1940.

JAMES R. GINTHER

Gundisalvo, Domingo

Domingo Gundisalvo (c. 1120-1184 C.E.), or in the Latin form of his name Dominicus Gondisalvus (also Gundissalinus), was one of the foremost of the Toledan translators. Working in the second half of the twelfth century, he became, in Knowles’s phrase, “a kind of harbinger or sponsor of Arabian and Jewish thought, and helped make its introduction to the West a simple and natural process.” He was a major figure in the movement of translation and dissemination of the “new” Arabic knowledge of the sciences that reenergized the schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As well as a translator, he was an author (although the term must be used advisedly, for he was more of a cut-and-paste redactor) who became an authority for other medieval scholars.

Unfortunately, we possess little in the way of biography for any twelfth-century translator. With one notable exception, no contemporary seems to have written any account of the people involved in the important movement traditionally known as the Toledo School of Translators. More disappointing than this, though, is the fact that the raw materials for discovering biography do not exist in any abundance either; here we are dependent mostly on brief autobiographical allusions contained in the dedications of manuscripts. Only *Gerard of Cremona, the most prolific of all the translators, had anything like an attempt at biography written about him by his students. But, if we are willing to draw on a bit of speculation, we can present a brief biographical sketch of Gundisalvo.

First, Gundisalvo is attested as being from Cuéllar, a small town some nineteen miles (31 km) southwest of Toledo. Rivera has speculated about Gundisalvo’s family of origin. Part of the village was given by Alfonso VII in 1140 to Juan, archdeacon of Segovia. In 1166, Juan became bishop of Osma and gave his portion of the village to his niece, Palencia, and her husband, Gonzalo Petri. If they had a son, his patronymic would have been González, Gundisalvus in Latin. Nearly contemporary with this, Domingo González is recorded as archdeacon of Cuéllar, residing in the chapter of Toledo and sometimes identified as the archdeacon of Segovia or of Toledo: it would appear that this is Gundisalvo the translator and author. If this is actually the case, then Gundisalvo would have come from a highly placed family from the frontier with royal connections; this would explain his level of education, knowledge of Arabic, and his entrée into the world of the church.

Second, Gundisalvo worked in Toledo in one of the most interesting periods in that city’s history. Prior to the Christian Conquest of 1085, Toledo was one of the major centers of scientific and philosophical study in al-Andalus. This was primarily because of the patronage of the ruling family, the Banu Dhu’l-Nun. Yahya ibn Isma’il ibn Dhi’l-nun successfully built Toledo into a beautiful city and he was a patron of scholars and poets. *Sa’id al-Andalusi (d. 1065), who lived in that city, tells us that when the great library of the caliph at Córdoba, al-Hakam II, was being ransacked by the orthodox ‘ulama (religious scholars) at al-Mansur’s behest, many of the books were smuggled to Toledo. There scholars were welcomed; in particular, considerable numbers of Jews from the south moved to this “city of kings.” In Christian hands, Toledo became a magnet for both Christians and Jews fleeing the Berber Muslim armies of the Almoravids. With its abundant libraries and numerous academics steeped in Islamic science and philosophy, Toledo in this period must have been an exciting environment for a scholar, especially for a translator.

Third, Gundisalvo was a churchman. Note that he is attested as an important member of the chapter of the cathedral, the archdeacon. This office was generally responsible for directing the educational functions of the chapter. His own writings have a theological bent, attempting to provide a rational basis for theology. Etienne Gilson has even credited him with being a pivotal figure who initiated a type of philosophical and theological reasoning which was to achieve its full realization with thirteenth-century scholars.

In older works (and even some modern ones) Gundisalvo is often cited as being a member of the “School of Translators” under the Archbishop Raymond. This is an unfortunate mistake which keeps being repeated, despite much scholarship to the contrary. As far as we can tell, there was no “school” in any sense of the word, something Charles Homer Haskins long ago recognized. Instead, what was in place was a system of patronage by highly placed churchmen (abbots and bishops) who commissioned translations and probably provided support for translators by appointing them to positions in cathedral chapters. This was clearly the case in Toledo, but it also was seen in other cities of newly reconquered northern Spain. More important for Gundisalvo, he is not attested in the chapter until after Raymond is dead. This is also true for the most prolific of all the translators, Gerard of Cremona. Therefore, the institutional context for the transfer of Arabic philosophical and scientific knowledge was not the product of an organized scholastic endeavor, but of the genius of individual scholars. This does not mean, however, that there was no direction of the process; on the contrary, it appears that the translators of Toledo were following much the same program as Andalusi Jewish and Islamic scholars did in learning science and philosophy. Considered in this respect, Gundisalvo’s most important work was probably his De Scientiis (On the Sciences, his translation of *al-Farabi’s Book of the Enumeration of the Sciences), which appears to have guided translators as well as scholars in search of “the knowledge of the Arabs.” This system of knowledge, based on the authentic texts of *Aristotle, stood in radical contrast to all earlier medieval classifications of knowledge, like that of *Hugh of St-Victor.

The work of Gundisalvo as a translator has been thoroughly studied. In the course of his career he produced the following: (1) De Scientiis (On the Sciences), a translation and adaptation of al-Farabi’s Kitab ihsa’ al-Ulum (Enumeration of the Sciences); (2) Liber al-Kindi de Intellectu (Book of al-Kindi on Reason); (3) Alexander of Aphrodisias, De intellectu et intellecto (On Reason and Reasoning); (4) De intellectu (On Reason), a translation of Risalat fil-‘aql (Letter on Reason) of al-Farabi; (5) Fontes Quaestionum, probably a translation of the Uyun al-masa’il (Source of Questions) of al-Farabi; (6) Liber exercitationis ad viam felicitatis (Reminder of the Way to Happiness), a translation of al Farabi’s Tanbih asla sabil al-as’ada; (7) Liber de definitionibus (Book of Definitions) of Ishaq al-Israeli; (8) Liber introductorious in artem logicae demonstrationis, attributed to the Ikwan as-safa’; (9) Logica et philosophia algazelis, a translation of the Maqasid al-Falasifa (The Intentions of the Philosophers) of al-Ghazali; (10) Metaphysica Avicenna, the metaphysics of the Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing) of Ibn Sina; (11) De convenientia et differentia subiectorum de Avicenna, an unknown work of Avicenna; (12) Fons Vitae (Source of Life) of Ibn Gabriol.

Gundisalvo’s skill in Arabic is actually quite good. His method is anything but slavish, and he translates according to sense rather than word for word; in addition he adds or excises passages as he feels the necessity. In some of his translations he explicitly indicates that he worked with a co-translator; his collaborators were both Jews and Christians. Much has been written about this “dragoman” method of translating; as one might expect it was based in the reality of the social structure of Toledo, a city in which Arabic was the primary spoken language, where most scholars were multilingual, and between whom there was a lively intellectual exchange. Many of the translators working in Spain knew each other and often dedicated their works to each other.

Gundisalvo was also the author of five works that draw heavily on his translations. Scholars have described them variously as “mosaic” or “pastiche” works, yet they contain great originality. He is generally regarded as the first western Christian scholar to have been greatly influenced by Avicenna (*Ibn Sina). These books are: (1) De divisione philosphiae (On the Divisions of Philosophy); (2) De Anima (On the Soul); (3) De Unitate (On Unity); (4) De Processione mundi (On the Procession of the World); (5) De Immortalitatae animae (On the Immortality of the Soul).

In spite of being a somewhat uncreative author, it appears that Gundisalvo was aware of his central role in providing scholars the texts they needed in order to “know with certainty.” He gave a glimpse of his intentions in the prologue to De Anima which addresses the need for new knowledge and the faith–reason dilemma which might accompany it:

“I have carefully collected all the rational propositions about the soul that I have found in the works of the philosophers. Thus, at any rate, a work hitherto unknown to Latin readers, since it was hidden in Greek and Arabic libraries, has now, by the grace of God and at the cost of immense labor, been made available to the Latin world so that the faithful, who toil assiduously for the good of their souls, may know what to think about it, no longer through faith alone but also through reason” (tr. Jean Jolivet, 142).

As it stands, this could have been written by any Jew, Muslim, or Christian who sought to be a philosopher. The clear understanding is that understanding and reason are good for the soul of the believer.

The second text which indicated Gundisalvo’s understanding of this problem is his translation of the very text which al-Farabi had written to justify the study of philosophy, the Kitab al-Tanbih ‘ala Sabil al-Sa‘adah or Book of the Reminder of the Way to Happiness. In this short work al-Farabi presented the thesis that the final goal of human life is happiness. He went on to say that by discretion a man can discover the attitudes and judgments that lead to happiness, and the only sure way to arrive at knowledge of good and evil is to learn philosophy. He then proceeded to show that by philosophy he really meant the acquisition of knowledge of the sciences. Thus, in these two translations Gundisalvo presented the Latin world with the rationale for the study of science—demonstrating the understanding that such study was transformative—and providing the handbook which told how the sciences should be arranged and studied so that one could reach that final goal of human life. Furthermore, such science was the only sure foundation for religious belief.

Gundisalvo’s influence on medieval scholars was substantial, though often secondhand. From late in the twelfth century or early in the thirteenth there survives a curricular list of readings, probably from *Alexander Nequam. It indicates that he expected students to be reading the newly translated texts in the divisions as Gundisalvo had passed them on. *Robert Kilwardby wrote a text called “On the Rise of the Sciences,” which is directly dependent on Gundisalvo’s On the Divisions of Philosophy. Nearly contemporary with him, *Vincent of Beauvais copied almost all of “On the Sciences” into his Speculum doctrinale. This was one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. Slightly later, there are significant disputes in the new University of Paris about the way the sciences should be organized, learned, and taught. Masters of theology railed against the arts, beginning in the 1230s, and especially against the new divisions of knowledge in the arts’ curriculum that put the newer, “secular” sciences up against their own specialty. The fact was that a new way organizing knowledge for teaching and learning was abroad in Europe: despite its detractors, it was never to be stopped.

See also Toledo; Translation norms and practice

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Baur, Ludwig, ed. “Dominicus Gundissalinus: De Divisione Philosophiae.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters. Vol. 4. Münster: Aschendorf, 1903.

Grant, Edward and Marshall Clagett, translators. “Domingo Gundisalvo: Classifications of the Sciences.” In Edward Grant, ed., Sourcebook of Medieval Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Secondary Sources

Alsono, M.M. Traducciones del Arcediano Domingo Gundisalvo. Al-Andalus (1947) 12: 295–338.

Burnett, Charles S. F. “The Institutional context of Arabic-Latin Translations of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment of the ‘School of Toledo’.” In Olga Weijers, ed. Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepohls, 1995.

Gilson, Etienne. History of Christian Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1955.

Haskins, Charles Homer. Studies in the History of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924.

Jolivet, Jean. “The Arabic Inheritance.” In Peter Drinke, ed. A History of Twelfth Century Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. London: Longman, 1963.

Rivera Recio, Juan F. La Iglesia de Toledo. Rome: Instituto Español de Historia Ecclesiástica, 1966.

MICHAEL C. WEBER

Gunpowder

Gunpowder and gunpowder weaponry were probably the most important technological innovations in all military history. Especially in Europe, gunpowder weapons revolutionized warfare, changed military strategy and tactics forever, destroyed old empires and created new ones, and challenged the privileged status of knights, nobles, and princes.

Origins in China

Nowadays it is of course common knowledge that gunpowder was invented in China, and it along with paper and the compass are very frequently listed among China’s “gifts” to the world or at least the West’s “debts” to China. But the priority of the Chinese invention of gunpowder has not always been affirmed; in the West it used to be widely believed that gunpowder had been invented by a fourteenth-century monk named Berthold the Black. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did Gustav Schlegel establish Chinese priority in gunpowder invention, with much compelling evidence.

To this day, however, a persistent and widely circulated but incorrect cultural canard in the West holds that while the Chinese may have invented gunpowder, its first weaponized and military applications occurred in Europe. In reality, the Chinese were using and perfecting many varieties of gunpowder weaponry for the first time in world history between the tenth and fourteenth centuries Ironically, gunpowder was invented in China not by military men innovating more effective ways of destroying life but by alchemists who sought both the philosopher’s stone and the mysterious and elusive elixir of immortality, a concoction or compound which, if ingested, would halt the natural aging process and prolong human life, perhaps even indefinitely. Chinese alchemists had been experimenting with brimstone (sulfur) since the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Sulfur especially had been used in many alchemical recipes for “potable gold” and “cyclically transformed gold elixir.” Brimstone was of course highly volatile and toxic, so Chinese alchemists attempted to “subdue” its volatility by mixing it with saltpeter. The mixture of these two ingredients proved a key step towards the invention of gunpowder, but at the time it was hoped that compounds such as this might be used to turn molten lead into gold.

By 808 an alchemical work mentions a compound of six parts sulfur, six parts saltpeter, and one part birthwort herb (which would have contained enough carbon to make the compound combustible). This is probably the world’s first crude formula for gunpowder. A mid-ninth-century Taoist alchemical work contains thirty-five elixir formulae which are listed as dangerous or improper; three of these contained saltpeter, and one was associated with a dire warning:

“Some have heated together sulfur, realgar (arsenic disulphide), and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down. Evidently this only brings Taoism into discredit, and Taoist alchemists are thus warned clearly not to do it.” This is a more refined formula for gunpowder. (The honey would have contained carbon.)

Around 1040 Zeng Gongliang (999–1078), the main compiler of Wujing Zongyao, a massive military compendium, published the world’s first gunpowder formulae for three different varieties of weapons. These formulae contained sulfur and saltpeter as well as several other ingredients such as waxes, oils, roots, and resins. They bore little resemblance to the classic three-ingredient formula for gunpowder (seventy-five percent potassium nitrate, fifteen percent charcoal, and ten percent sulfur) familiar to schoolchildren today. They contained low nitrate levels and on ignition were deflagrative and incendiary rather than explosive or detonative in their effects.

Gunpowder Weaponry in China

Historically the Chinese have been no strangers to explosions and fireworks. As early as 200 B.C.E. the Chinese were heating sections of bamboo in fire until they exploded loudly. (Indeed, baozhu, a common term in Mandarin Chinese today for firecracker, literally means “exploding bamboo.”) The Chinese thus had a fireworks tradition from very early times, and for several centuries they saw the properties of gunpowder deflagration and explosion as an extension of it.

But the Chinese did not always regard gunpowder as a mere fireworks novelty, and they were the first people in the world to make military use of gunpowder weapons. In the early tenth century they used a gunpowder fuse to ignite petroleum distillates in what might be thought of as a crude prototype of the modern flamethrower. The Chinese had long made extensive use of incendiary and inflammable oils and resins in warfare, but by the middle of the eleventh century truly explosive gunpowder bombs with a high percentage of saltpeter came on the scene. Known as “thunderclap bombs,” these were ignited by fuse and then hurled by hand or catapult, and they terrified enemy troops and horses. By the early thirteenth century the Chinese were making deadly antipersonnel fragmentation bombs with metal casings that exploded into shrapnel. These “thunder-crash bombs” were used in 1232 against Mongol besiegers in northern China, and a contemporary account of their use is graphic:

“Among the weapons of the defenders there was the heaven-shaking thunder-crash bomb. It consisted of gunpowder put into an iron container; then when the fuse was lit and the projectile shot off there was a great explosion the noise whereof was like thunder, audible for more than a hundred li [tens of miles], and the vegetation was scorched and blasted by the heat over an area of more than half a mou [many acres]. When hit, even iron armor was quite pierced through.”

The Chinese also used rockets and multiple-rocket launchers militarily, and by the end of the thirteenth century they were making and deploying gunpowder landmines complete with sophisticated triggering mechanisms. In addition, they used flares, grenades, and sea mines.

Despite a certain amount of popular wisdom to the contrary, the Chinese were also the first civilization to invent and use the true gun or cannon, or a tube containing and controlling an explosion which propelled a fairly tightly fitted projectile. Since the early tenth century they had been using “fire lances” or “flame-spewing spears,” which were in effect lethal and long-burning Roman candles tied to long poles. Eventually fire lances evolved from bamboo tubes into metal tubes and emitted projectiles, although these were not true bullets because they were not tightly fitted into barrels. Needham dates the earliest known true gun in China to about 1280, while the first true gun appeared in Europe in c. 1326 or 1327. The lag time between the gun’s first known existence in China and its appearance in Europe was thus remarkably short, and it may well have been that Chinese guns were carried to Europe and directly copied there. In the process, guns would have been introduced into the Islamic world as well, but, perplexingly, current evidence indicates that the first place outside of China where guns appeared was the Latin West. (The Arabs and Persians were already aware of a high-saltpeter recipe for gunpowder and its Chinese origins by the middle of the thirteenth century. Indeed, saltpeter was called “China snow” by the Arabs and “China salt” by the Persians.) It may have been that the Europeans, for whatever reason, were more immediately impressed with the military potential of the gun than the Muslims of the time were.

The Mongols and the thirteenth-century world empire they built probably made possible this pivotally important transfer of firearms technology and know-how from the East to the West. Nevertheless, the transfer of military technology that the Mongols fostered was by no means a one-way process. It is quite likely that the counterweighted trebuchet, a non-gunpowder siege engine which the Mongols found so useful for battering down the walls of fortified Chinese cities during the 1260s and 1270s, was introduced from the Mediterranean world to China during the second half of the thirteenth century.

Gunpowder in the West

Gunpowder became known in western Europe by the middle of the thirteenth century, but the particulars of how it arrived are not yet settled. Some scholars hold that it may have come through the Islamic lands to Byzantium or Spain and thence to western Europe. British Sinologist Sir Joseph Needham (1900–1995), the main editor and originator of the monumental, multivolume technological history Science and Civilisation in China, long held that the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck (c. 1220–c. 1293) likely brought back an important formula for gunpowder to Europe in 1256, when he returned from his travels to Mongolia, and gave it to his friend *Roger Bacon (1214–1294). Recent scholarship has strongly indicated that the Mongols and their armies during the thirteenth century did much to diffuse gunpowder and gunpowder weaponry throughout the Eurasian landmass.

Roger Bacon was clearly fascinated with gunpowder and seems to have written about its formula, at least initially, in anagrammatic secrecy. Perhaps he himself or some of his associates had been overawed by various experiments and experiences with the substance. At any rate, in his apparent description of gunpowder’s effects in his Opus majus (published around 1267), one can almost hear, see, and smell the effects of the substance igniting:

“Certain inventions disturb the hearing to such a degree that if they are set off suddenly at night with sufficient skill, neither city nor army can endure them. No clap of thunder can compare with such noises. Some of them strike such terror to the sight that the thunders and lightnings of the clouds disturb it considerably less.”

But for Bacon, the importance of gunpowder was beyond mere pyrotechnic spectacle; he had some inkling of its awesome destructive potential, and in one of his last works, Opus Tertium (published around 1268), he speculated on how it might be put to practical, if violent, use:

“By the flash and combustion of fires, and by the horror of sounds, wonders can be wrought, and at any distance that we wish—so that a man can hardly protect himself or endure it. There is a child’s toy of sound and fire made in various parts of the world with powder of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal of hazlewood. This powder is enclosed in an instrument of parchment the size of a finger, and since this can make such a noise that it seriously distresses the ears of men…. If the instrument were made of solid material the violence of the explosion would be much greater.”

Following Bacon, other thirteenth-century European writers such as Albert the Great (*Albertus Magnus) and the pseudonymous Marcus Graecus, also wrote on the formulae for gunpowder. The exact proportions varied slightly, but all described a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal which, if ignited, produced powerful effects.

Gunpowder Weaponry in the West

The first gunpowder weapons in Western Europe were not bombs but large guns or cannon. References to the use of guns in western Europe during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are suspect and controversial. The first incontrovertible evidence of gun use in the Latin West dates to 1326. By the 1330s and 1340s there are many references to gunpowder weaponry in European materials, and they may have seen battlefield use by the middle of the fourteenth century. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, guns had become especially effective in siege warfare against the walls of castles, as in 1377 at the siege of Odruik, when Philip the Bold’s cannons penetrated the castle’s walls. Guns had a much smaller impact on late medieval battlefield fighting, and they only made gradual appearance on battlefields in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. (The problem was, of course, the heavy and unwieldy nature of the guns.) Smaller and more transportable guns were likely invented by the late fourteenth century. The first reference to a “hand gonne” dates to an English document written in 1388 during the reign of Richard II. By 1410 handheld guns were used by the dukes of Burgundy, and by the middle of the fifteenth century most battlefield encounters included at least some handheld guns.

Guns also were found on warships prior to the fifteenth century, and by the beginning of the century almost all warships, but especially English and Italian ones, carried at least some cannon. The first recorded sinking of a warship by cannon on another warship dates to 1499.

See also Alchemy; Artillery and firearms; Catapults and trebuchets

Bibliography

Allsen, Thomas T. “The Circulation of Military Technology in the Mongolian Empire.” In Nicola di Cosmo, ed., Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002, pp. 265–293.

Buchanan, Brenda J., ed. Gunpowder: The History of an International Technology. Claverton Down, Bath: Bath University Press, 1996.

Chase, Kenneth Warren. Firearms: A Global History to 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Cocroft, Wayne D. Dangerous Energy: The Archaeology of Gunpowder and Military Explosives Manufacture. Swindon: English Heritage, 2000.

DeVries, Kelly. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.

———. Guns and Men in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002.

———. Medieval Military Technology. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1992.

———. Medieval Military Technology. Second Edition. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2006.

DeVries, Kelly and Robert D. Smith. The Artillery of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, 1363–1477. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005.

Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Lewis, Archibald R. and Timothy J. Runyan. Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean, A.D. 500–1100. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

McNeil, William H. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Illumination from a 1363 French manuscript of Guy de Chauliac’s Chirugia magna depicting a postmortem at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine. (Corbis/Gianni Dagli Orti)

Needham, Joseph et al. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7: Military Technology; The Gunpowder Epic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Partington, J. R. A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder. Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1960.

Sawyer, Ralph D. and Mei-chün Lee Sawyer. Fire and Water: The Art of Incendiary and Aquatic Warfare in China. Boulder: Westview, 2004.

Zhou, Jiahua. “Gunpowder and Firearms.” In Ancient China’s Technology and Science, compiled by the Institute of the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1983, pp. 184–191.

DAVID CURTIS WRIGHT

Guy de Chauliac

The most famous name in medieval French surgery, Guy de Chauliac was born in Chaulhac in the south of France at the end of the thirteenth century. Legend has it that after he cured a noblewoman’s fracture her wealthy family paid for his studies in medicine at the famous school of Montpellier. It is nevertheless established that he did receive the major part of his medical education at Montpellier. He himself states in his work that he studied under Raymond de Molieriis, who was chancellor of the University and taught there around 1335. Chauliac himself never taught at Montpellier, as was the custom for graduate masters, but instead went on to study in Bologna under Alberto de Zanchariis and Bertruccio. Although known mainly for his contribution to surgery, there is no evidence that he actually practiced as a surgeon. Guy de Chauliac first practiced medicine on a regular basis in Lyon where he was living in 1344. He later treated three successive popes—Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V—dividing his time between Lyon and Avignon. Although he occasionally treated other high-ranking patients such as the Duke of Savoy in 1363, he appears to have been mainly attached to the Avignon papacy. In this cultural setting that has been described as “pre-humanistic,” he had access to the palace’s exceptional library and the possibility of practicing with colleagues from Montpellier, Bologna, Paris, and the Kingdom of Aragon. In the course of his life, he became a beneficiary of several canonical charges, Saint-Just in Lyon in 1344 and later Mende in 1367. He died in Lyon in July 1368.

His work, Inventarium sive collectorium in parte chirurgicali medicinae, stands out as a fundamental work for both medieval and early modern surgery, so much so that after its publication the tradition of learned surgery that had began with *Roger Frugard (Ruggiero Frugardi) appears to have come to an end. The Inventarium is an encyclopedia of surgical knowledge that gives precedence to ancient sources such as *Galen, who is cited eight hundred ninety times, and *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), to whom there are six hundred sixty-one references, and also uses material from more recent authors such as *Abu al-Qasim ibn Mahfuz (Albucasis) (one hundred seventy-five citations), and contemporaries such as *Henri de Mondeville (eighty-six), and all the Salernitan scholars, Frugard and his commentator Rolando of Parma (ninety-six), *Theodorico Borgognoni (eighty-five), Guglielmo de Saliceto (sixty-eight), and *Bruno Longoburgo (forty-six).

The book quickly became the standard text and was used, despite its highly scholastic content, as a vade mecum by most medieval surgeons. By the fifteenth century it had been translated into Middle French, Middle English, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, and Hebrew. The Inventarium or Chirurgia Magna was extensively copied in its Latin version and was first printed in 1490. It was published altogether twelve times in the course of the sixteenth century. Among the most complete editions of Chauliac’s work is the annotated version of the Latin text published in 1579 by Montpellier doctor Laurent Joubert and the French edition published in 1890 by Edouard Nicaise. The introduction to this translation contains most of the biographical data concerning Guy de Chauliac. The Latin text of a Vatican manuscript dated 1373 was published in two volumes in 1997 with a commentary by Michael McVaugh. It provides the most comprehensive means of studying the text in its original form. One Middle English translation has been published by Margaret S. Ogden from a Parisian manuscript. The Middle French tradition has been studied by Sylvie Bazin-Tacchella, and several of her articles explain the importance of Chauliac’s work in France.

The work itself lacks originality but its fundamental aim was to present the state of the discipline in Guy de Chauliac’s time in the mid-fourteenth century. The Inventarium is in seven books, and starts with a chapter entitled capitulum singulare in which the author defines surgery and traces its history and filiation since ancient times. Having attributed its origins to *Hippocrates and *Galen, he continues by enumerating Arab sources such as *Haly Abbas, Albucasis, and *Al-Razi. The Salernitan masters and their Italian successors follow. Finally, he cites the influences of the school of Montpellier with *Henri de Mondeville and *Arnau de Vilanova, and in so doing shows that he was well aware of belonging to a long tradition of learning. This approach to the history of surgery from its origins to the Middle Ages is still valid today and is used, consciously or not, by most historians of medicine.

The content of Chauliac’s work is profoundly marked by a Galenism stemming mainly from the translations from Arabic to Latin that were available at the end of the thirteenth century and were part of the learning program at Montpellier. However, Guy also had access to the works of Galen newly translated directly from the Greek by *Niccolò da Reggio at the papal court which he used extensively. The anatomical content of the work is therefore more original since it is based on a truer version of Galen’s anatomical treatise De usu partium translated from the Greek rather than the faulty condensed version that was available in Latin before that.

One other interesting feature of the Inventarium is the vivid descriptions of the plague in France that can be found in the section devoted to apostemes. Guy was a witness to both outbreaks, those of 1348 and 1360. He even contracted the disease and cured himself. His distinction between bubonic and pneumonic plague has been called a model of clinical reporting.

The main contribution of the work is Guy’s effort to assemble, collate, and present all the existing information on surgery and to integrate it with the medical scholastic discourse of the time. He also states his position on major doctrinal debates. For example, he disagrees with Theodoric and Henri de Mondeville’s dry treatment of wounds. In addition, the Inventarium features notable original passages on tracheotomy, intubations, suturing methods, and accounts of a few interesting instruments such as the “pelican” for extracting teeth and a traction devise to treat fractures.

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Surgery

Bibliography

Huard, Pierre, and Mirko D.Grmek. Mille ans de chirurgie en Occident: Ve-XVe siècles. Paris, Dacosta, 1966.

McVaugh, Michael. “Therapeutic strategies: surgery.” In Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

———. Guigonis de Caulhaco Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna, vol. 1: Text. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1997.

Nicaise, E. La grande chirurgie de Guy de Chauliac. Paris, Alcan, 1890.

Ogden, Margartet S. The Galenic Works Cited by Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia Magna. Journal of the History of Medicine (1973) 28: 24–33.

Enselme, Jean. Biographie de Gui de Chauliac. Revue Lyonnaise de la Médecine (1969) 17: 697–710.

GENEVIÈVE DUMAS

Gynecology and Midwifery

Gynecology, the subfield of medicine that deals particularly with the diseases of the female reproductive organs, was not an area in which medieval practitioners specialized, but it was recognized as a distinct subject and, as such, often generated its own specialized literature when authors or compilers believed there existed a distinct audience for such works. In the Mediterranean context of Greco-Roman antiquity, female midwives or healers (obstetrices or medicae) were presumed to be responsible for everything we now put under both the headings “obstetrics” and “gynecology.” By the end of the Middle Ages, at least in western Europe, midwives were often only responsible for attendance at normal births and, in some circumstances, for serving as manual assistants to male practitioners. Physicians were recognized as competent to diagnose and treat gynecological disorders, while surgeons increasingly were called on in cases of difficult births. This transition in the gendering of women’s healthcare was not smooth, nor was it complete. Nevertheless, the question of whether women’s health-care was to be managed by laywomen themselves, by specialized female practitioners, or by male medical practitioners, constitutes a key issue in the development of the field over the course of the Middle Ages.

A variety of evidence—inscriptions, textual sources, sculpture, etc.—confirms female practitioners’ responsibility for women’s gynecological and obstetrical conditions in antiquity. Many of these women were literate, and Greek writers such as Soranus (first/second century C.E.) and *Galen addressed their works on women’s diseases or anatomy to them. How long this situation persisted in the Byzantine world is not clear; a sixth-century text on gynecology is said to be the work of a female author, Metrodora, but the bulk of gynecological writing from the Byzantine period is only to be found in the works of male medical encyclopedists. The same is true of the Arabic-speaking world, where male physicians such as the Spaniard *al-Zahrawi or the Persian *Ibn Sina included significant sections on gynecology or obstetrics in their medical encyclopedias, but apparently had to give oral instruction to midwives to have their instructions carried out. Only three specialized works on women’s medicine are known from the medieval Islamic world, all of them by male authors.

Western Europe is therefore distinctive, vis-à-vis Byzantium and the Islamic world, in having such a large tradition of independent gynecological writing. This sizable corpus (a total of more than one hundred and fifty texts or excerpts from larger works circulating separately between the fourth and fifteenth centuries) originated in late antiquity, in part when translators rendered Soranus’s textbook, the Gynecology, into Latin several times. The most widely disseminated work was Muscio’s, written probably in North Africa in the fifth or sixth century, which included a series of images of the fetus in utero. As in antiquity, most of these late antique texts were written for literate midwives; Muscio repeats Soranus’s requirement that the good midwife be able to read and understand medical theory.

In the twelfth century, two new texts came out of the southern Italian town of *Salerno: Conditions of Women, which is a patchwork made primarily from other written texts (including a recent translation from the Arabic by *Constantine the African); and Treatments for Women, attributed to the female Salernitan practitioner Trota and distinguished by its rich therapeutical detail, extensive practical experience of the most intimate conditions of women’s genitalia, and a broad conception of what the diseases of women actually are (everything from nuns’ problems of maintaining their chastity to uterine prolapse and ano-vaginal fistula). No other text on women’s medicine would match these qualities for several centuries.

The *Trotula (as these two Salernitan texts came to be called once they were linked with a third text on cosmetics) would quickly eclipse Muscio’s Gynecology which, based on the Methodist theories of late ancient medicine, was no longer compatible with (or even intelligible to) the strongly Galenic environment after the twelfth century. Then, beginning in the early fourteenth century, a series of physicians associated with the medical school at Montpellier began to compose their own treatises on fertility. The earliest of these, by *Arnau de Vilanova, was quickly followed by at least six others, all of which to varying degrees, and with varying detail, drew on gynecological disease classifications and treatments to achieve the desired outcome of producing healthy progeny.

Medieval depiction of the stages of pregnancy and childbirth. (The Art Archive/Real biblioteca de lo Escorial)

In the fifteenth century, male medical writers turned yet another corner. They continued (as had male Salernitan writers and others throughout Europe after them) to compose medical encyclopedias organized in head-to-toe order, which situated gynecological and obstetrical conditions right after those of the male genitalia. Some of these sections became so big that they were circulated separately. Moreover, several writers composed entirely new texts on women’s diseases. Thus, for example, a mid-fifteenth-century English writer took an earlier translation of *Gilbertus Anglicus’s chapters on gynecology, rearranged them, and then added major new sections on childbirth (drawn from Muscio’s text), on expelling the dead fetus, and various other conditions. Such works as these, in Latin as well as in several vernacular languages, greatly expanded the fund of gynecological knowledge available to average practitioners and, just as importantly, reflect how common male involvement with women’s medicine had become.

Midwives and Other Female Practitioners

There is ample evidence that medieval women practiced in a variety of medical contexts besides midwifery; they were surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, and general healers. In fact, midwifery may have been the last of these fields to coalesce as a profession in the High Middle Ages. The environment that had supported the specialized (and literate) female midwives of antiquity had disappeared, and it is difficult to find evidence of any women taking on the formal title of “midwife” again prior to the latter half of the thirteenth century. In the interim (and even in many situations thereafter), it is likely that birth was managed by a network of female kin and neighbors, none of whom necessarily claimed to be more expert in handling childbirth than the others. In examining the range of possible audiences for gynecological texts, therefore, we must keep in mind that for most of the Middle Ages there was no predetermined “target audience” of literate specialist midwives to address. The first text on women’s medicine that was specifically aimed at midwives was Michele Savonarola’s Regimen for the Ladies of Ferrara (c. 1460), which actually addressed laywomen as well as midwives. The same was true of the two most famous midwifery manuals, the Women’s Handbook (printed c. 1495), and the Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (printed 1513), both published originally in German but later translated into a variety of different languages. Gynecological texts addressed generically to women, in contrast, can be found sporadically in several languages from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The earliest are in French, with later ones in English and Dutch; all were probably composed by male authors or translators. The earliest of the English ones, called The Knowing of Woman’s Kind [i.e., nature] in Childing, which dates from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, opens with a poignant claim that the text is meant to be shared among women so that they do not have to show their diseases to men. The upper-class women to whom such texts were addressed certainly do not represent the majority of medieval women, but such sentiments do reveal the tension caused by a social system that granted literacy and education to men—and so the possibility of engagement with formal medical theory—but only rarely to women.

See also Magic and the occult; Medicine, practical; Salerno; Women in science

Bibliography

Barkaï, Ron. A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 1998.

Green, Monica H. From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2000) 30: 5–39.

———. Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

Green, Monica H. and Linne R. Mooney. The Sickness of Women. In Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: TCC R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe and Text. Edited by M. Teresa Tavormina. Tempe: Arizona State University, 2005.

Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Taglia, Kathryn. Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives in Northern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200-1500. In Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Edited by Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler. York: York Medieval Press, 2001, pp. 77–90.

MONICA H. GREEN