Magic and the Occult

While in the modern world belief in magic is often held to be opposed to and incompatible with scientific rationalism, in medieval Europe conceptions of magic developed and were held in harmony with contemporary scientific, that is, theological and natural philosophical, thought. By the later Middle Ages, some aspects of magic became fields of academic or quasi-academic study. Certainly educated elites regarded many common magical practices as foolish and irrational. They did not maintain, however, that such practices were necessarily ineffective, only that uneducated people performed them without proper understanding of the means by which they operated. Authorities themselves were convinced that they could understand the workings of magical operations in essentially logical and coherent ways. Most typically Christian authorities explained supposed magical effects by means of demonic forces. In fact perhaps the most basic aspect of authoritative medieval conceptions of magic was that magical rites invoked demons, as opposed to prayer and legitimate church ceremonies that drew on divine power for their effect. Yet some authorities, particularly in the later Middle Ages, also allowed for a variety of magic that relied on natural but occult forces inherent in the physical world.

Forms and Functions of Medieval Magic

Magic as a general category would only have been discussed by educated elites in the Middle Ages, employing the Latin terms magia or ars magica. Common people would have spoken, in various vernaculars, of specific practices—spells, charms, incantations, the carrying of tokens or amulets, the observation of signs or omens. Or they would have referred to the desired ends these acts were believed to achieve—divination, healing, or protection, among many others. There is little way to determine to what extent, if any, ordinary people conceived of such varied practices as related to or representative of a single category of action that might broadly be described as magic. Nevertheless, such actions were often grouped together by authorities. Early Christian authors, seeking not just to supplant the cults of the classical world but to subsume them into an entirely Christian universe, argued that the myriad rites of pagan antiquity were essentially related in that they all secretly called on and expressed reverence for Christian demons. This reliance on demonic power became essential to medieval conceptions of magic.

Demonic connections aside, early-medieval authorities inherited most of their conceptions of magic, along with most of their systems of knowledge, from the ancient world. In his Etymologies, *Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) provided an encyclopedic summary of various kinds of magic, based on ancient categories. Geomancers, aeromancers, hydromancers, and pyromancers were those who, supposedly following systems first developed by the ancient Persians, divined the future by the four elements. Augurs foretold the future based on the flights of birds, a highly developed practice in the Roman world. Mathematici made predictions based on the positions of the stars. Divination in general figured heavily in Isidore’s discussion of magic, as it had among many of the early church fathers, including the great Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who wrote a work specifically On the Divination of Demons. Isidore joined Augustine in condemning all magic as relying on demonic power.

Beyond the categories of learned authorities, a wide variety of magical practices existed in medieval Europe, employed by all levels of society. Such practices served an equally wide variety of purposes. They often entailed divination in some form, but perhaps their most common functions were protective and medicinal—to heal injury or disease, or to ward off illness, accident, or misfortune. People spoke ritualized spells or incantations, often incorporating elements of official prayers or blessings. They also carried certain items or objects as protective amulets, or they could inscribe a spell or blessing on some object to fashion a curative or protective talisman. Herbs and other plants might be administered to the sick, but here too more magical elements were often incorporated. A particular root might be gathered at a certain time of night or under a certain astrological sign, or it might be prepared as a medicine while reciting some spell or blessing. Harmful effects were also possible. Spells were widely believed to be able to cause illness and injury, to impede fertility and sexual activity, or to prevent crops from growing, and the use of poisons was typically regarded as an aspect of harmful magic.

The Rise of Learned Magic

In the early Middle Ages, authorities tended to link magic primarily to paganism and the supposed survival of pagan practices in predominantly Christian Europe. Although they might inveigh strongly against such practices, they typically did not treat them with great intellectual seriousness. Rather they associated these practices with simple, uneducated folk who had been led into error by demonic deceptions. They still held that magic was real, in that magical rites induced demons to act, but they regarded most supposedly magical effects as illusions caused by demons. Educated people, they maintained, would be able to see through such deceits. As one early-tenth-century document declared about certain common magical beliefs: “Truly, who is so stupid and obtuse as to believe that all these things that happen only in spirit actually occur in the flesh.” Magic was largely a matter of common credulity and demonic trickery, and did not need to be investigated more deeply. By the twelfth century, however, this view was changing.

During the intellectual revival broadly labeled the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” intellectual and scholarly activity increased across Europe. *Cathedral schools formed in major urban centers, and by the end of the twelfth century the first *universities emerged. The rise of schools led to a rediscovery of ancient sources long neglected in Europe, and soon drew an influx of other ancient sources either unknown or lost to the West from the Byzantine East and from the Muslim world, which had preserved and expanded the classical intellectual tradition far more effectively than had medieval Europe. Among these texts were some that treated aspects of magic with great seriousness and intellectual precision, and brought to this subject the intellectual weight of antiquity. Magic never became a fully accepted subject of study at medieval schools and universities, but some scholars began to dabble in areas of magic, and a few such as *Michael Scot (c. 1175–1235) and *Albertus Magnus (c. 1190–1280) developed (usually false) reputations as great magicians. Another major scholar associated with magic was *Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 940–1003). He was one of the earliest scholars to pursue learning in Spain, a major location of Muslim-Christian intellectual interaction. He then returned to northern Europe and eventually became Pope Sylvester II. By the late eleventh century his rise to power was being explained as the result of magical skills he had learned in his youth. Clearly magic was no longer being conceived as the province primarily of the lowly and uneducated.

The principal branch of new, learned magic in later-medieval Europe was *astrology. Of course, some astrology had existed in early-medieval Europe too, but now with fuller access to the writings of classical authorities such as *Ptolemy and Arab authorities such as *al-Kindi and *Abu Ma‘shar, more systematic and learned forms of astrology emerged, as did various forms of astral magic in which certain materials, inscriptions, or incantations were used to draw down and manipulate the power of heavenly bodies. Again Arab treatises, such as Ghayat al Hakim (Aim of the Wise), or Picatrix as it became known in Europe, provided important and authoritative sources. *Alchemy was another major area of learned magic, and again much alchemical knowledge derived from the Arab world, for example from the writings of *Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in Europe as Geber. Above all, European scholars sought to understand the operations of magic in terms of the natural philosophy of Aristotle, which increasingly dominated their understanding of the physical world.

Demonology and Demonic Magic

The rise of learned magic caused some authorities to question the longstanding Christian position that most, if not all, aspects of magic relied on demonic power. Astrologers, astral magicians, and alchemists claimed that they were manipulating entirely natural although hidden or occult forces in the physical world, and arguments about the potential extent of such natural magic continued into the Renaissance. The influx of new learning beginning in the twelfth century, however, also served to reinforce the belief that much magic was dangerously demonic. In the thirteenth century, the great theologian *Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) argued strenuously that astral magicians, insofar as they employed invocations clearly directed at some intelligence, were engaging with demons and not simply the natural power of the stars. Moreover, a form of learned magic developed in these years that openly relied on demonic forces. Practitioners of necromancy, as this art was called, claimed that they commanded demons by means of complex and powerful rituals, but church authorities maintained that these rites masked the secret worship of demons in exchange for magical services.

Learned authorities of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries devoted much attention to the exact range and extent of demonic powers, mainly seeking to explain demonic actions in terms of Aristotelian physics. They argued, for example, that although demons were spiritual beings, they might mimic physical forms by condensing the air around them, and by similar means they could produce illusions and other magical effects. Famously, Aquinas and other authorities developed a rationale by which demons might impregnate women although they could not themselves generate semen. First the demons took female form and seduced human men. Having thus gained human seed, they then took male form and used it to impregnate women. Precisely because conceptions of demonic power and aspects of magic were tied to other areas of theological and natural philosophical thought, as such thought became more advanced in the later medieval period, concern over magic escalated rather than declined.

Common magical practices also persisted throughout this period, of course, and these too were increasingly demonized in the minds of concerned authorities. By the early fifteenth century, the notion of diabolical witchcraft developed. Practitioners of common forms of harmful magic believed to cause illness, wither crops, or impede fertility were now cast as members of conspiratorial, diabolical cults. Although the emergence of witchcraft in late-medieval Europe and the ensuing witch-hunts primarily in the early modern period are typically viewed as irrational by modern observers, the concept of witchcraft took hold precisely because it made sense in terms of larger theories of magic, demonic power, and the natural world that developed during the Middle Ages.

See also Aristotelianism; Bacon, Roger; Gynecology and midwifery; Herbals; Lapidaries; Macrobius; Medicine, practical; Miracle

Bibliography

Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Burnett, Charles. Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996.

Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom, rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Fanger, Claire, ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Flint, Valerie I.J. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Kieckhefer, Richard. European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

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

———. Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Peters, Edward. The Magician, the Witch, and the Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

Stephens, Walter. Demons Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–1958.

MICHAEL D. BAILEY

Maimonides

The Judaeo-Arabic author Moses Maimonides (in Arabic Abu ‘Imran Musa ibn ‘Ubayd Allah ibn Maymun al-Qurtubi, in Hebrew Mosheh ben Maymon, also known by the acronym “RaMBaM”) was born in Córdoba in 1138 and died in Fustat (Cairo) in 1204. He was a leading figure in medieval Jewish culture not only as a jurist, a theologian, and a philosopher, but also as a physician. His interest in medical art seems to have begun rather early (in 1160–1165), while he was in Morocco; but he practiced and taught medicine during the last thirty years of his life, while he lived in Fustat. In this later period, he rose to a high rank as a court physician—first, of the vizir of the Egyptian sultan Saladin al-Qadi al-Fadil, and then of Saladin’s son and successor, al-Malik al-Afdal. His reputation as a practitioner of medicine seems to have been questioned by some of his contemporaries; in any case, medieval sources describe him as a good medical theoretician. As a matter of fact, he wrote a number of medical treatises, following the example of Isaac Israeli (*Isaac Judaeus); these texts, mostly depending on Greek and Arabo-Islamic sources, played a role in spreading the knowledge of ancient and medieval medicine among Jews during the Middle Ages.

Maimonides also displayed a highly-refined knowledge in other fields of science, particularly *astronomy. He appears to have learned astronomy in his youth, while he was still in Spain, by reading the works of such local Arabo-Islamic scholars as *Ibn Bajja and Jabir ibn Aflah, whose pupils he allegedly met; he seems to have given this science a primary role in his own “order of studies.” No Maimonidean treatise specifically devoted to astronomy is extant, but a few treatments of some specific astronomical questions are found in some of his philosophical and theological works. Mathematical and even zoological writings have also been ascribed to Maimonides, but the authorship of most of them is still undecided.

Historical Significance

In science and the history of science, Maimonides’ relevance is not due to the fact that he elaborated and diffused new doctrines of his own: as far as can be concluded from what is currently known about his extant works, as a rule he discussed questions typical of twelfth-century Andalusi Muslim scientists, and in a number of cases he was probably inclined to follow the solutions proposed by those scholars. Only in some circumscribed cases does he give original interpretations of old doctrines. Maimonides’ relevance is rather due to his “canonization” of the study of sciences (the exact sciences in particular) in medieval Jewish culture. First, he gave science a role as a step in the process which should be followed by a Jew for reaching what Maimonides regards as the utmost point of human knowledge—namely, the knowledge of God and of His creation. Second, it should be stressed that Maimonides had a clear philosophical approach to the sciences. In his opinion, they should be generally based on solid logical demonstration, close to Aristotle’s methods, and not only on empirical observation. They progress in a cumulative way, through the continuous correction and refinement of data already acquired by the ancients. In many cases, he departs from the treatment of a scientific subject by drawing conclusions which are relevant for some fields of Aristotelian philosophy (*metaphysics, ethics, human *psychology). In this way, he gave an important stimulus to the development of Jewish science in Middle Ages, and in medieval Europe in particular, in the way traced by such other Spanish Jewish scholars as *Abraham bar Hiyya and *Abraham ibn Ezra.

Maimonides as a Physician

Ten medical treatises at least, in the Arabic language, are commonly ascribed to Maimonides, and most of them were written in consequence of the author’s personal connections to some members of the Egyptian elite. The minor ones are short monographs on specific illnesses: the Treatise on Asthma, the Epistle on Hemorrhoids (written around 1187), and the Book on Coitus (written in 1190 or 1191). Some others are systematic treatises of diet, hygiene, and *pharmacology (poisons and drugs): the treatise On the Regimen of Health and the Treatise on the Causes of Symptoms, both written at the request of al-Malik al-Afdal from 1198 onwards; the Book on Poisons and the Protection against Fatal Drugs; and the Commentary on the Names of Drugs. Most of Maimonides’ major medical writings are commentaries on, or reworkings of, famous works of ancient Greek medicine: a compendium of some of *Galen’s writings (in particular, of the Art of Curing and other texts), written before 1190; a commentary on *Hippocrates’ Medical Aphorisms; a series of “medical aphorisms,” apparently his own, but in reality mostly inspired by Galen’s works (the so-called Medical Aphorisms of Moses, written between 1185 and 1190). Apart from the Galenic compendium (which is still unpublished and has been only partially translated into English) and the work on the names of drugs (first edited by Max Meyerhof in 1940), all these works won some success in late medieval European medicine through their various Latin and Hebrew versions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, Süssman Muntner first published some of these Hebrew versions, and Fred Rosner rendered them into English.

The dependence of Maimonides’ medical works on ancient and medieval Arabo-Islamic sources, in particular Galen, has been stressed by many scholars, but personal achievements in medicine by Maimonides himself, if any, have not yet been made objects of detailed studies. However, it appears that Maimonides dealt with some medical themes owing to their philosophical significance. An example of this is given by the preventive role played by a good medical regimen (*regimen sanitatis) in preserving human health—an idea which was regarded as so important by the author that he specifically devoted to it not only the above-mentioned work, but even some chapters of his Jewish law code, written in Hebrew, the Mishneh Torah (in the book devoted to the Ethical Laws, the Hilkot De‘ot). According to Maimonides, there must be no conflict among the various regimens regulating aspects of man’s life, namely, the rules which govern personal hygiene (i.e., medicine), the regulations concerning social and familiar relationships (i.e., politics), and the system of injunctions and prohibitions which limit involvement in worldly pursuits, so permitting a stronger involvement in intellectual and spiritual activity (i.e., religion and philosophy). This idea of the close connection between medicine and philosophy could have come to Maimonides from Galen, who supported it in some of his works. Maimonides’ reliance on Galen as physician did not prevent him from developing a harsh critique of some of Galen’s philosophical views in Chapter Twenty-five of his Medical Aphorisms. However, this critique is due to ideological reasons: Galen had a low reputation in medieval Arabic philosophy because of his religious agnosticism and his critique of the Judaic and Christian concept of prophecy.

Of course, the philosophical importance Maimonides gave to some aspects of medicine did not prevent him from acknowledging the role played in this science by empirical data. He seems to have accepted the idea—already found in the work of *al-Farabi—that medicine was primarily an “art,” that is, a practical science with a logic of its own. According to him, a physician should be able to follow a particular way of reasoning, typical of medicine, whose rules are not always completely identical to those valid in mathematical sciences; in some particular cases, a medical treatment should be regarded as valid, even though no theoretical explanation of its validity can be found, provided that repeated observations, under the control of more than one physician, show that it really works.

Maimonides as an Astronomer

Maimonides’ contribution to *astronomy, although more limited than that to medicine, has aroused considerable interest, and has been examined by scholars in greater detail. The importance given to astronomy by Maimonides is due to the idea, typical of medieval Jewish and Islamic Aristotelianism, that there is a close connection between knowledge of the nature and structure of the celestial spheres (the main subject of medieval astronomy) and the knowledge of metaphysics, which was regarded as “divine science,” focused on the emanated intellects which rule those spheres.

Page from an edition of the Mishnah with Maimonides’ commentary. The diagrams are designed to clarify complicated points. Printed by Joshua Soncino and Joseph ibn Peso in Naples (1492). (Topham/RHR)

Most of Maimonides’ extant treatments of astronomical subjects are found both in the Mishneh Torah and in his masterpiece, the philosophic-theological work The Guide of the Perplexed (written in 1180–1190). In both cases, as is usual in Maimonides, discussions concerning exact sciences are meant to give an answer to religious or philosophical questions.

The reason why Maimonides devoted a number of chapters of his law code (in the section about the “sanctification of the new moon,” the Hilkot qiddush hahodesh) to a very precise astronomical question—namely, how to calculate if the lunar crescent can be seen on the eve of the thirtieth day of each Hebrew lunar month, or not—is strictly bound to a Jewish religious demand. To reply to this question, Maimonides elaborates his own method for calculating what he calls the “arc of vision,” namely the sum of the difference between the real positions of the Moon and the Sun, and two-thirds of the latitude of the Moon. This method is based on Arabic astronomical sources, but Maimonides seems to have simplified it. Some data about the structure of the heavens and the dimensions of some stars and planets are found also in the general description of the cosmos according to Aristotelian physics given in the first part of the Mishneh Torah (the Basic Principles of the Law, in Hebrew Hilkot yesodei ha-Torah), but these data contain nothing really new.

The other, and best known, Maimonidean passage concerning astronomy is Chapter Twenty-four of Part II of the Guide of the Perplexed. In this passage the author discusses a well-known question debated by twelfth-century Andalusi astronomers, in particular by Jabir ibn Aflah: the problems raised by the contradiction between the principles of Aristotelian physics (according to which the heavenly motions should be circular and uniform) and the doctrines of the epicycles, as found in Ptolemaic astronomy, and of the eccentric spheres. Maimonides reports the two different solutions to these problems proposed by Ibn Bajja in his Treatise on Astronomy (apparently lost), and by *Thabit ibn Qurra. However, he seems to choose neither of them, nor does he explicitely propose any definitive solution of his own. In any case, his discussion is not aimed at reaching a purely scientific conclusion about this question, but has an evident philosophical aim: to show that some conclusions of Aristotelian cosmology can be questioned, as in the case of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo)—which, according to him, can be accepted, although it is at variance with Aristotle’s doctrine of world’s eternity.

Another passage in the Guide concerning an important astronomical subject is Chapter Nine of Part II, in which Maimonides shortly discusses two questions: first, whether Venus and Mercury are placed below the Sun, as affirmed by *Ptolemy, or above it, as supported by “the ancients” and ibn Aflah, and as accepted by himself; second, the number of the celestial spheres. According to Maimonides, the spheres bearing stars are four (one for the fixed stars, one for the five planets, one for the Sun, and one for the Moon). Maimonides apparently adopts this well-known solution for a philosophic-theological purpose: to give a scientific explanation of the cosmological doctrine of the fourfold structure of the heavens which, according to him, was already found in some Biblical texts.

One of the most quoted Maimonidean writings is his Letter to the Sages of Montpellier about Astrology. Although it does not contain a discussion of an astronomical question, it is well known because of its explicit repudiation of *astrology, due to philosophical reasons. Maimonides simply could not accept the view that stars emanate any non-corporeal force—a view which, although agreed on by a number of medieval Jewish scholars, he reputed to be at variance with the principles of Aristotelian philosophy.

Maimonides on Mathematics and Zoology)

According to some medieval Arabic sources, Maimonides wrote and edited a number of texts on mathematics. In particular, he allegedly composed a mathematical treatise, which strictly depended on a well-known Spanish Arabic work on mathematics, the Book of Perfection (in Arabic, Kitab al-istikmal) by al-Mu’taman Ibn Hud (king of Saragossa, 1082–1085). As a matter of fact, however, no mathematical writing explicitly ascribed to Maimonides has been found, apart from a collection of glosses on Apollonius of Perga’s Conical Sections, which has been recently identified. This does not mean that Maimonides was not concerned with mathematics: on the contrary, his interest can be seen in references to mathematical subjects found in his extant works (the Guide of the Perplexed, the Commentary on the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah). However, his approach to mathematics also appears to have been mainly a philosophical one. In the dedication letter of the Guide, he alludes to mathematical studies made together with his pupil, Joseph ben Judah; and in Part I, Chapter Seventy-three, of this work he refers to a passage of Apollonius in order to give a philosophical interpretation of the doctrine of the two asymptotic lines—a passage which seems to have stimulated the translation and diffusion in the Latin and Hebrew Middle Ages (from 1200 onwards) of an anonymous Arabic tract on this very subject. In any case, it seems that Maimonides did not agree with the foundations of the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, which was going to become one of the main bases of the Kabbalah.

The manuscript tradition also ascribes to Maimonides a work on *zoology: this is the Tract Comprising Excerpts from Aristotle’s Book of Animals, first published in 1966. It consists of a series of excerpts, most of which are taken from a medieval Arabic translation of Aristotle’s zoological works, plus some short observations by the author himself. Due to the apparent philosophical insignificance of this text, its Maimonidean authorship has been often questioned. However, there is a possibility that it is really a mutilated collection of notes on zoological themes, made by Maimonides for personal use.

See also Aristotelianism; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Religion and science

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bos, Gerrit, ed. and tr. The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2002–2004.

Pines, Shlomo, tr. The Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Rosner, Fred, ed. and tr. Maimonides’ Medical Writings, 7 vols. Haifa: Maimonides Research Institute, 1987–1995.

Secondary Sources

Bos, Gerrit. “The Reception of Galen in Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms.” In Vivian Nutton, ed., The Unknown Galen. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2002.

Cohen, Robert S. and Hillel Levine, eds. Maimonides and the Sciences. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.

Kraemer, Joel L. “Maimonides on Aristotle and the Scientific Method.” In Eric L. Ormsby ed., Moses Maimonides and His Time. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989.

Langermann, Y. Tzvi. The Mathematical Works of Moses Maimonides. Jewish Quarterly Review (1984) 75: 57–65.

———. “Maimonides and the Sciences.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Lévy, Tony and Roshdi Rashed, eds. Maïmonide philosophe et savant (1138–1204). Leuven: Peeters, 2004.

Rosner, Fred and Samuel Kottek, eds. Moses Maimonides: Physician, Scientist, and Philosopher. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993.

Stroumsa, Sarah. Al-Farabi and Maimonides on Medicine as a Science. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (1993) 3: 235–249.

Zonta, Mauro. “Maimonides as Zoologist?—Some Remarks About a Summary of Aristotle’s Zoology Ascribed to Maimonides.” In Görge K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Freisse, eds. Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004.

MAURO ZONTA

Mark of Toledo

Mark of Toledo was a significant mediator between the cultures of the Almohad Islamic dynasty and Christians of Castile in the early thirteenth century. He is attested as a deacon and/or canon at the cathedral of Toledo in documents dating between March 16, 1193, and March 17, 1216. His father came from Old Castile, but Mark was brought up in Toledo and had sufficient command of Arabic to explore the libraries of the Arabs (armaria Arabum) for texts that would be useful for the Latins. These comprised on the one hand medical texts, on the other hand texts concerning the Islamic religion. He had studied medicine, first from “Arabic books,” then at a “studium” (perhaps Montpellier), and his aim seems to have been to improve the standard Latin curriculum in medicine of his time, that known as the *Articella, compiled in *Salerno in the late eleventh century. Thus he substituted for the first text of the Articella—the Isagoge (“Introduction”) written by *Hunayn ibn Ishaq but thought to derive from Greek—a fuller version of the Arabic text, which preserved the question and answer format, and for the relevant text on pulses (by Philaretus), two texts written by *Galen. D’Alverny identifies as Mark’s translation of the Isagoge the anonymous Latin version in Vat. Pal. Lat. 1098. The other medical texts are firmly attributed to Mark, and follow each other in the manuscripts, being preceded by a general preface: Galen, On Pulses, On the Usefulness of Pulses, and On Liquid Movements or On Obvious and Hidden Movements (a text lost in Greek concerning muscular movements, such as that of the tongue, the diaphragm, respiration, swallowing, the role of the nerves proceeding from the brain, and voluntary movements). In making these translations Mark was attempting to find the “doctrine of Galen and others… which the Arabs had led off from the stream of the Greeks.” Another translation of Galen’s On Pulses had been made contemporaneously by *Burgundio of Pisa, but, as often happens, the Arabic-Latin version is easier to read than the over-literal Greek version. While Mark prepared the medical translations on the insistence of the masters and students of the medical college he attended, his other contribution to knowledge resulted from the initiative of his own archbishop, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (archbishop of Toledo 1209–1247) and Mauritius, an archdeacon of the cathedral. This was the translation of the Qu’ran, accompanied by the principal texts of the Mahdi (religious leader/prophet) of the Almohads, Ibn Tumart. The earlier translation of Robert of Ketton was evidently unknown in Toledo. Mark’s translation is very faithful to the Arabic text, and served archbishop Rodrigo for his own Historia Arabum. In his preface Mark shows that he knew other Arabic texts concerning Muhammad, and is remarkably objective (for his time) in the way he discusses the Muslim faith. Ibn Tumart belonged to the school of *al-Ghazzali (as Mark acknowledged), and Mark sees his Creed (‘Aqida) as providing valuable philosophical arguments for the unity of God. His translation is the earliest specimen of Islamic theology in Latin. Mark completed his translation of the Qu’ran between July 1209 and June 1210, and of the Creed and two shorter Spiritual Guides and Laudations by Ibn Tumart on June 1, 1213, just after Mauritius’s election to the bishopric of Bruges. A translation of an invective against Islam written by a Christian Arab in Toledo—the Contrarietas Alpholica—which immediately follows Mark’s version of the Qu’ran in a late manuscript, is probably not by Mark.

While writing a highly literary Latin in his prefaces, with several allusions to Classical works, in his translations he follows the verbum de verbo technique, to such an extent that he often reproduces the rhythm of the Arabic phrases, while his terminology sometimes coincides with that of an Arabic-Latin/Latin-Arabic dictionary written in Spain in the thirteenth century (the so-called “Vocabulista in arabico,” ed. C. Schiaparelli, Florence 1871).

The translations of the three treatises by Galen were included in a Corpus Galenicum that was used widely in the medical schools from the second half of the thirteenth century onward, and the last two were printed in several of the Opera omnia of Galen in the Renaissance. While the Qu’ran was copied a few times, the works of Ibn Tumart survive in only one manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 780, copied in 1400), but there is evidence that they accompanied Mark’s translation of the Qu’ran in a manuscript belonging to the popes in Avignon in 1369.

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Toledo; Translation movements;

Bibliography

Corpus Galenicum. Ed. G. Fichtner. Tübingen: Institut für

Geschichte der Medizin, 1992 (see items 61, 32 and 278). Burman, Thomas E. Exclusion or Concealment: Approaches to Traditional Arabic Exegesis in Medieval Latin Translations of the Qur’an. Scripta Mediterranea (1998–1999) 19–20: 181–197.

———. Tafsir and Translation: Traditional Arabic Qur’an Exegesis and the Latin Qur’an’s or Robert of Chester and Mark of Toledo. Speculum (1998) 73: 703–732.

D’Alverny, Marie-Thérèse. La Connaissance de l’Islam dans l’Occident medieval. Aldershot: Variorum Reprints 1994, articles I (Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyan Age), II (Marc de Tolède, traducteur d’Ibn Tumart) and VII (Marc de Tolède).

CHARLES BURNETT

Marsilius of Inghen

Marsilius of Inghen was one of the leading thinkers of the late medieval period. His works were read at many *universities in France, Italy, and Germany, and were occasionally even part of the regular curriculum. Together with *John Buridan, *Nicole Oresme, and *Albert of Saxony he belonged to the so-called “Parisian School” of natural philosophy, which contributed substantially to the development of the theory of motion in the Middle Ages. It was through the writings of Marsilius that many ideas of the “Parisian School” spread across Germany in the fifteenth century (Heidelberg, Erfurt, Basel, Kraków).

Central to his thinking was the belief that the natural philosopher (philosophus naturalis) should describe the world without reference to any miracles, basing himself exclusively on principles which every human being could affirm to be necessary. However, while he accepted the consequence that human reason, relying on its own principles, may come to conclusions which differ from those of faith, this did not mean that he questioned faith. For he remained convinced that faith revealed truth and was therefore necessary as a source in the search for truth. But as a natural philosopher he wished to argue solely within the limits of human reason, bracketing revelation. Using this methodology, he foreshadowed the principles of modern natural science.

Life and Writings

As is the case with many medieval authors, the early life of Marsilius of Inghen remains obscure. In all probability, he was born around 1340 in the city of Nijmegen, where he most likely also received his early education. In any case, many of his later students came from Nijmegen and during the latter stage of his career he had further contacts with the city.

In 1362 he became Master at the Arts Faculty in Paris. He was a colleague of Geert Groote, the initiator of the Devotio Moderna, with whom he shared the opinion that there was a tension between faith and natural reason. Unlike Marsilius, however, Geert Groote later left academic life, urging Marsilius to do the same, albeit unsuccessfully. At the University of Paris Marsilius had a flourishing career. His lectures attracted many students and he held several administrative posts, including the rectorship of the university. He left Paris for an unknown destination in 1379, probably due to problems caused by the Great Schism. In 1386 he became the first rector of the University of Heidelberg, which he had helped to found. Here he was again Master of Arts and held numerous administrative offices, acting as rector of the university no fewer than nine times. In Heidelberg he also finished his study of theology, which he had begun in Paris, and was the first theologian to be promoted at this university. He died at Heidelberg on August 20, 1396. His colleague Nicholas Prowin made the funeral oration, characterizing him as a devout man. The text of this speech was published in 1499 by masters of the University of Heidelberg, along with humanist epigrams on Marsilius and a defense of nominalism which they attributed to him.

Marsilius left a great number of academic writings, which have survived in manuscripts and printed versions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A small part of them is available in modern critical editions. His writings are the fruit of his teachings at Paris and Heidelberg, which consisted mainly of commentaries on the works of Aristotle, Scripture, and the Sentences of *Peter Lombard. They are modeled according to the format of the late medieval scholastic quaestio (question), in which each step of the argument is summarized in a separate propositio or conclusio (statement).

Marsilius’s writings cover a wide range of the subjects that were taught at the medieval universities. He wrote treatises on logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and theology, some of which have come down to us in different versions. A number of treatises bear in the title the word “abbreviatio” (summary). These are no summaries of the regular commentaries, however, but independent treatises, characterized by a condensed style of reasoning. The identification of his writings is sometimes difficult, since the questions discussed and the wording of many conclusiones (statements) are often similar to those found in the works of John Buridan and Nicole Oresme.

Basic Ideas

In the medieval period, Marsilius was regarded as a nominalist. Although he did not label himself as such, not long after his death he became depicted as a nominalis (nominalist) and a modernus (modern). This happened in the context of the debates between the old way (via antiqua) and the modern way (via moderna)—a discussion about the correct interpretation of Aristotle, which took place at many universities in Germany. The defenders of the new way considered the writings of Marsilius their model, even identifying the new method with the way Marsilius had commented on the writings of Aristotle (via marsiliana).

The key notion of Marsilius’s nominalism is his theory of universals, which is similar to that of John Buridan. According to Marsilius, universals are products of human thinking. No universals exist outside the human mind, for in reality there are only individuals. Even universals, considered as concepts in the human mind, are individuals. The universal concept “man” is a singular concept, which signifies universally; that is, it refers to every individual man outside the human mind.

If the natural philosopher draws the conclusion “all fire is hot,” he does so not because there is a universal nature “fire” existing in all singular instances of fire, but because of empirical observation, which shows every instance of fire to be hot. Such repeated observations, if they cannot be questioned, urge the human intellect to form the universal proposition “all fire is hot,” even though it has not seen all possible instances of fire. Marsilius accepts the Aristotelian notion that scientific knowledge must be universally true. Since there are no universals in physical reality, the immediate object of natural science cannot be the singular thing as such, but only the proposition. Natural science according to Marsilius is therefore the description of singular physical things by means of propositions which the human mind accepts as being universally true.

Among the basic principles of natural philosophy, Marsilius counts the theorem “nothing comes from nothing.” According to him this principle is based on sense perception and the judgment of the human intellect that universally “all things come from other things.” Natural philosophers cannot deny this principle without contradicting themselves. If this principle is accepted, however, it is impossible to hold that the universe is created from nothing, that time and motion have a beginning, and that God is almighty—statements which are accepted by faith. The underpinning of these articles of faith by *natural philosophy is therefore impossible, Marsilius argued, both in his philosophical and theological writings, even if according to faith and truth (secundum fidem et veritatem) God has created the world from nothing indeed.

Marsilius solved this seeming contradiction between faith and reason by pointing out that man in his earthly life has only partial access to truth, since man, being dependent on sense perception, has only a limited number of principles on which to base his arguments. Only faith can show whether or not natural reasoning has any value when touching on issues beyond the realm of physical reality, such as creation. Physically, one can prove that there is a singular first cause of reality, which has intellect and will. But that this first cause can freely resurrect dead bodies is impossible to show by means of natural arguments. According to Marsilius, therefore, the discussion of these issues should be avoided in natural philosophy and limited to theology only (dubitatio theologicalis non spectat ad praesens negotium).

This notwithstanding, sometimes Marsilius does adduce evidence from faith as an argument in his physical writings. But he does this only when faith does not contradict the arguments put forward by the natural philosopher. A good example is the way in which he defends the theory of *impetus. According to this theory, the movement of a body is not caused by one or more bodies pushing on it, as Aristotle had claimed, but by a power, or impetus, which has been transmitted to that body by the initial agent. In support of this theory, Marsilius puts forward many empirical observations, such as that of a ball falling down and bouncing back from the floor. The bouncing could not be accounted for by Aristotle’s theory, because the air which initially pushed the ball downward would keep it on the floor, but was perfectly comprehensible according to the theory of impetus. That his opinion contradicted Aristotle’s, Marsilius countered by stating that he did not feel himself bound to Aristotle where Aristotle held views which according to natural reason were not true. In a different way, he considered an argument from faith, taken from the *Condemnation of 1277, that God could move the whole universe in one straight line. Marsilius used this argument as evidence for the theory of impetus. He felt no hesitation about doing this in his physical writings because, as he remarked, it confirmed what all empirical data (omnes apparentiae) about impetus had shown and because as a statement from faith it was true, although the statement itself could not be proven by human reason.

In his theological works, however, Marsilius accepted revelation as an extra source of information which, independent of confirmation by natural arguments, could be used in theological reasoning. As in his other writings, here he also showed that natural reasoning could not prove basic tenets of faith. To counterbalance this lack of natural proof, he referred to evidence from Scripture, which he considered to be undeniably true, and from tradition, which he broadly interpreted, including the Fathers, the Councils, Canon Law, and theologians such as *Aquinas whose writings were accepted as trustworthy. This gives his theology an undertone of eclecticism; however, to denounce his theology as such would miss the point, since it is indeed the consequence of his methodology: where natural reason fails, faith as revealed in Scripture, as accepted by the Church, and as explained by theologi approbati (approved theologians) must count as evidence.

See also Aristotelianism; Miracle; Scholasticism

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Abbreviationes super octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis. Venice, 1521.

Quaestiones super libros Priorum Analyticorum. Venice, 1516. Reprint Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1968.

Quaestiones super quattor libros Sententiarum. Mainz, 1501. Reprint Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1966.

Quaestiones super quattuor libros Sententiarum, 2 vols., ed. Manuel Santos Noya. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000.

Treatises on the Properties of Terms, ed. Egbert P. Bos. Dordrecht: D. Reidell, 1983.

Secondary Sources

Caroti, Stefano and Pierre Souffrin, eds. La nouvelle physique du XIVe siècle. Firenze: Olschki, 1997.

Hoenen, Maarten J.F.M. Marsilius of Inghen, Divine Knowledge in Late Medieval Thought. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.

Marshall, P. Parisian Psychology in the Mid-Fourteenth Century. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge (1983) 50: 101–193.

Reina, Maria E. Hoc hic et nunc. Buridano, Marsilio di Inghen e la conoscenza del singolare. Firenze: Olschki, 2002.

Ritter, Gerhard. Studien zur Spätscholastik I: Marsilius von Inghen und die okkamistische Schule in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1921.

MAARTEN J.F.M. HOENEN

Martianus Capella

Martianus Capella is known from only one work: De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a handbook of ancient knowledge embellished by the tale of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. Martianus was probably born in Carthage. His work, which cannot be dated more precisely than sometime in the fifth century, is divided into nine books: the first two deal with the narrative of Mercury’s and Philology’s wedding; the following seven are dedicated to the seven liberal arts, which present themselves as bridesmaids and explain their own functions. Books Three, Four, and Five are introductions to the arts of the trivium: Grammatica, Dialectica, and Rhetorica; Books Six to Nine deal with the arts of the *quadrivium: Geometria, Mathematica, Astronomia, and Harmonia (or Musica). In modern scholarship the book has long been scorned, especially because Martianus summarizes the ancient knowledge of the seven liberal arts in such a way that he sometimes betrays insufficient knowledge of the subject matter. It has been regarded as a flawed collage, written in a style so embellished that it has become impenetrable.

Despite its undoubted shortcomings, the work is important for several reasons. Firstly, De nuptiis is probably the best source of knowledge of Varro’s work on the mathematical disciplines. Martianus explicitly but not exclusively bases his books on the mathematical arts on Varro’s works, and forms a starting point for a reconstruction of the ancient Roman mathematical disciplines. Secondly, it is considered a crucial work for the foundation of the medieval curriculum. With his limitation of the arts to seven, and his deliberate division of these arts into three language-related arts, and four number-related arts, Martianus was the earliest authority for the canonization of the seven liberal arts. His example was widely followed throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Thirdly, De nuptiis appears to have been the most popular textbook on secular knowledge in the Middle Ages, especially in the Carolingian period. Its popularity is attested by the overwhelming number of manuscripts and commentaries on the text. Both the production of manuscripts and the compilation of commentaries began early in the ninth century. The commentaries form the earliest sources for the reception of ancient learning on several of the liberal arts. The work also had a profound influence on medieval treatises on the arts.

The books on the arts of the quadrivium open with Geometria, the art of measurement. The book contains, as expected, a short digest of Euclidean geometry, but, due to the applicability of geometry to land surveying, it actually devotes more pages to a geographical description of the Earth. Martianus bases his work mainly on Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and Solinus’s Collectanea. For Book Seven, dedicated to Arithmetica, the art of mathematics, Martianus used Nicomachos’s Introduction to Arithmetic, and *Euclid’s Elements, or, more likely, Latin primers based on these works. It contains classifications and definitions of the kinds of number, series of numbers, different kinds of calculations (multiplication, division, etc.), and classifications of the ratios of numbers. Rather simple examples are given, which do not exceed the level of elementary *arithmetic. Martianus also includes a translation and illustration of many Euclidean propositions.

Book Eight is devoted to the ars astronomia, and describes the celestial sphere, the (eccentric) circular orbits of the planets, the constellations of the stars, and the planets themselves. The account is far from systematic. For example, Martianus states that there are eleven constellations in the zodiac, but adds that it is not necessary to list the zodiacal signs. He gives the lengths of days and nights at the solstices, but does not locate them at a specific latitude. Of particular importance in Martianus’s planetary theory is his assertion that five of the seven planets circle around the Earth, the center of the universe, but the other two, Mercury and Venus, orbit the Sun. This element of circumsolarity was picked up by Carolingian scholars (notably *John Scottus Eriugena, who explored this subject in his Periphyseon), who studied Martianus next to Pliny, *Macrobius, Calcidius, *Isidore of Seville and *Bede. In the commentaries the planetary doctrines of these writers were compared to each other or, at times, used to interpret each other.

In Book Nine, De Harmonia, the study of music is approached as a technical discipline which is essentially Pythagorean in nature, explaining music in terms of mathematical ratios. Martianus introduces the main concepts of the discipline, and treats seven subjects separately: soni (pitches), spatia (intervals), systemata (systems), genera (modes of tetrachord division), modi (various modes: Dorian, Lydian, Phrygian, etc.), commutatio (modulation), and modulatio (melodic composition). Finally the subject of quantative verse is treated. In the mythological narrative in Books One and Two, and in the introduction to Book Nine, the subject of harmony is given greater prominence: in line with Platonic and Pythagorean traditions music is revealed to contain truths about the order of the cosmos. The subject of music, the scientific measurement of ratios, and the mathematical harmony of consonance can equally be applied to the divine order of the cosmos, which uses the same principles.

In the earlier Middle Ages, Martianus’s books on arithmetic and music were fundamental, surpassed only, perhaps, by *Boethius’s manuals on these subjects. Martianus’s book on astronomy remained important throughout the Middle Ages. More importantly, however, De nuptiis offered a perspective on classical learning which was full of pagan, (Neo-) Pythagorean and (Neo-) Platonic elements, but which was nevertheless easy to adopt in a Christian society. The allegory, in which the elevation of man through knowledge and learning is illustrated, is as much a defense of the classical tradition of the seven liberal arts as a successful plea for their place in the ideal Christian education.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Martianus Capella. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Ed. Willis, J., Leipzig, Germany: Teubner, 1983. Trans. and intr. by Stahl, W.H. and Johnson, R. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.

Secondary Sources

Eastwood, B.S. “The astronomies of Pliny, Martianus Capella and Isidore of Seville.” In Science in Western and Eastern Civilization in Carolingian Times. Eds. P.L. Butzer and D. Lohrmann. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1993, pp. 161–180.

———. Astronomical Images and Planetary Theory in Carolingian Studies of Martianus Capella. Journal for the History of Astronomy (2000) 31: 1–28.

Guillaumin, J.-Y. Martianus Capella, Les noces de Philology et de Mercure. Livre VII: L’aritmétique. Paris: Belles Lettres, 2003.

Leonardi, C. I codici di Marziano Capella, parts I–II. Aevum (1959) 33: 443–489, and Aevum (1960), 34: 1–99 and 411–524.

Lozovsky, N. “The earth is our book”: geographical knowledge in the Latin West, ca. 400–1000. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Lutz, C.E. “Martianus Capella.” In Catalogus Translationum et Commentatorium. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides. Eds. Cranz, F.E., Kristeller, P.O., et alii. Vol. II, Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1971, 367–381. “Addenda et corrigenda,” Vol. III (1976), 449–452 and Vol. VI (1986), 185–186.

Teeuwen, M.J. Harmony and the Music of the Spheres. The ars musica in ninth-century commentaries on Martianus Capella. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.

MARIKEN TEEUWEN

Masha’allah

Masha’allah ibn Athari, or Ibn Sariya, was a Jewish astrologer of Persian origin, from Basra (Iraq), although he is sometimes considered Egyptian due to the easy confusion, in Arabic script, between misri (Egyptian) and basri (Basrian). He was active in Iraq between the caliphate of al-Mansur (754–775) and that of al-Ma‘mun (813–833) but the last secure date in his life is 809, for his work Fi qiyam al-khulafa’ shows his knowledge of the date of the death of Harun al-Rashid (786–809).

Together with Nawbakht, ‘Umar ibn Farrukhan al-Tabari and al-Fazari, he cast the horoscope to establish the propitious moment for the foundation of Baghdad on July 30, 762. The planetary positions of this horoscope were computed using the Pahlavi text of the Zij al-Shah, called in Persian Zij-i Shahriyaran, “The Royal Astronomical Tables,” which were translated into Arabic c. 790. The Zij al-Shah was also used by Masha’allah to compute the sixteen horoscopes preserved by Ibn Hibinta (fl. Baghdad 929) in his abridgement of Masha’allah’s Fi’l-qiranat wa’l-adyan wa’l-milal (“On conjunctions, religions and doctrines”). These horoscopes have been used by Kennedy and Pingree to establish the parameters of the mean motions of Saturn, Jupiter, and the lunar nodes according to the Zij al-Shah. This is a clear example of how important astronomical information can be gathered from astrological sources.

Masha’allah represents an early stage in the introduction of foreign sciences in Arabic culture and he is the author of one of the first syntheses of Iranian, Indian, and Greek traditions. Thus, he is one of the channels through which Iranian astrological ideas were introduced in Abbasid Baghdad: these ideas, as shown in Fi’l-qiranat, were based, on the one hand, on the Sassanian doctrine which explains great changes in human history using Saturn–Jupiter conjunctions which take place approximately every twenty years. To this Masha’allah adds the Zoroastrian doctrine of the thousands, by ascribing one thousand years to each planet from the moment of the creation of the world (8291 B.C.E.). The cycle ends in 3709 C.E., twelve thousand years later. This kind of astrological history was officially supported by the Abbasid Caliphate because it presented its dominion as the result of a scheme governed by the stars and as the legitimate continuation of the great empires of Mesopotamia and Iran.

According to Masha’allah a millenium governed by Mars began in year 709 C.E., forty-one years before the accession to power of the Abbasids (750) who were protected, therefore, by the beginning of a cycle. On the other hand, a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 749 announced, according to him, the victory of the dynasty.

Masha’allah’s sources were also Indian and Greek. He may have had access to the former through the Indian astronomer who arrived to Baghdad in 771 or 773 with an Indian embassy, and worked with al-Fazari in an Arabic translation of a Sanskrit astronomical text. As for his Greek sources, he could have used Sasanian translations or very early Arabic versions of Syriac texts. Both a Latin text (*Hugh of Santalla’s Liber Aristotilis) and a Byzantine Greek one preserve a bibliography, compiled by Masha’allah, of some one hundred twenty-five books on astrology written by twelve authorities including Aristotle, Hermes, *Ptolemy, Dorotheus of Sidon, Democritus, *Plato, and Vettius Valens. The influence of Dorotheus, whose work was accessible in a Persian translation, is clear in Masha’allah’s Kitab al-mawalid (“Book on nativities”) and in another work of his extant in a Latin translation (Super significationibus plantarum in nativitate). Another remarkable influence is that of Aristotle: like *Abu Ma‘shar (787–886) after him, he was interested in Aristotelian Physics—available to him in Syriac sources—which he summarized in chapters one to seven of his De scientia motus orbis, known in *Gerard of Cremona’s translation.

Masha’allah wrote on all branches of astrology. Pingree has collected information on twenty-eight works of his related to astrological history, nativities and anniversaries, astrometeorology, projection of rays, interrogations and elections etc. Apart from the aforementioned Fi’l-qiranat, his interest in astrological history led him to compile Fi qiyam al-khulafa’ wa ma‘rifat qiyam kull malik (“On the accession of the caliphs and the knowledge of the accession of every king”), which includes the horoscopes of the spring equinoxes of the years in which the Prophet Muhammad and eighteen caliphs (from Abu Bakr to Harun al-Rashid) acceded to power. He also studied questions related to the prediction of rains and winds (Kitab al-amtar wa’l-riyah): his disciple Abu ‘Ali al-Khayyat probably wrote a recension of this work which was the source of the Liber novem iudicum compiled in the court of *Frederick II of Sicily. A Moroccan astrologer of the early fifteenth century, Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Baqqar, quotes texts of his related to the prediction of the oscillation of the prices of olive oil. Eclipses were another topic dealt with by Masha’allah in a work which is only extant in Latin and Hebrew translations. This text contains a curious reference to magnetism, also found in Indian sources, which compares the influence of heavenly bodies in the sublunar world to the attraction of iron by a magnet. This is another example of an attempt, which we find mainly in Abu Ma‘shar, of justifying astrology with physical arguments.

He does not seem to have felt a great interest in pure astronomy although biographical sources ascribe to him a non-extant book on the armillary sphere as well as another one on the construction and use of the astrolabe. The latter was considered to be the Arabic original of two extremely popular Latin texts on these two topics which were the main source used by the authors of the first treatises on this instrument in Spanish (*Alfonso X), English (*Geoffrey Chaucer), and French (Pelerin de Prusse). Kunitzsch has proved that the aforementioned Latin treatises are unrelated to Masha’allah and that their Arabic source is a work by the Andalusi astronomer Maslama al-Majriti (*Maslama of Madrid) (d. 1007). Finally, his De scientia motus orbis contains an introduction to astronomy (chapters 8–24) in which Ptolemy and Theon of Alexandria are mentioned, although the planetary models described are pre-ptolemaic and seem to be influenced by Indian sources.

See also Astrolabes and quadrants; Astronomy, Islamic; Planetary tables

Bibliography

Burnett, Charles and David Pingree. The Liber Aristotilis of Hugo of Santalla. London: The Warburg Institute, 1997.

Goldstein, B.R. “The Book on Eclipses by Masha’allah.” Physis (1964) 6: 205–213.

Gutas, Dmitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Kennedy, Edward S., and David Pingree. The Astrological History of Masha’allah. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Kunitzsch, Paul. On the Authenticity of the Treatise on the Composition and Use of the Astrolabe Ascribed to Messahalla. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (1981) 106: 42–62. Reprint in Kunitzsch, The Arabs and the Stars. Northampton: Variorum Reprints, 1989.

Levi della Vida, G. Un opuscolo astrologico di Masha’allah. Rivista degli Studi Orientali (1933–1934) 14: 270–281.

Pingree, David. “Masha’allah: some Sasanian and Syriac sources.” In Essays in Islamic Philosophy and Science, edited by G.F. Hourani. Albany: State University New York Press, 1975, pp. 5–14.

———. Classical and Byzantine Astrology in Sasanian Persia. Dumbarton Oaks Papers (1989) 43: 227–239.

Thorndike, L. The Latin Translations of the Astrological Works by Messahalla. Osiris (1956) 12: 49–72.

JULIO SAMSÓ

Medicine, Practical

The division of medicine into theory and practice, while not unknown in the early Middle Ages, was of limited interest in a period when medical education was largely informal. By contrast, the conceptual bedrock of Scholastic medicine is the distinction between medicina practica and medicina theorica, and the subordination of the former to the latter. (The article *Medicine, theoretical outlines some of the main trends of thought on this issue.) *Galen’s Tegni supported the concept of practical medicine as the conservation and restoration of health, i.e., hygiene and therapeutics. Practice, in this sense, was defined by the goal of preventing or curing mala complexio or disrupted humoral balance. The main instrument of hygiene was regimen, which aimed to adjust or mitigate the “non-naturals” (environmental or behavioral factors such as climate, diet, etc.). Regimen was also, in principle at least, the initial stage in therapy: since the body’s humors shared elemental qualities of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness with the natural world, they could be augmented or diminished by foods of particular qualities, or by activity such as exercise. In preventive regimen, the body’s complexio was supported by providing it with food etc., which matched its temperament similia similibus (“like with like”). Used as therapy, however, regimen cured by counteracting dominant qualities in order to restore balance contraria contrariis (“contraries with contraries”). In the words of the thirteenth-century physician *Taddeo Alderotti, “all conservation is by similarity, all cure by contrary.”

If efforts to rectify humoral disequilibrium through regimen failed, the next step was drugs. Drug therapy was conceived in two ways: either the drug was a more intense and concentrated form of diet therapy designed to produce effects of a generic nature (e.g., a carminative drug expelled flatulence) or on a particular organ (e.g., “cordials” strengthened the heart); or the drug was a means of evacuating corrupt humors from the body through vomiting or purgation. The literature on drug therapy ranged from theoretical consideration of the nature of drug action to more practically oriented manuals of materia medica and instructions for compound remedies.

Should the use of drugs fail to rectify or eliminate corrupt humors, the physician would then prescribe “surgery,” i.e., evacuation by opening a vein (phlebotomy or blood-letting), by cautery, or by cupping (the application of heated cups to the skin in order to draw diseased matter from the interior of the body to its surface). Evacuative surgery formed part of the wider field of surgery, which also encompassed the repair of trauma (solutio continuitatis).

Choice and management of therapy were in principle the prerogatives of the learned physician, who possessed knowledge of the hidden causes of complexional disease, could interpret its signs, and on this basis predict its outcome. University-trained physicians aimed to distinguish their cognitive activity of clinical judgment and prescription from the manual work of drug preparation or surgery. These were to be delegated to subordinate apothecaries and surgeons or barbers. This hierarchy defined practice not with reference to its object, but with reference to its epistemological status as a intellective act, not mere “operation.” It underpinned the more or less successful attempts by learned physicians to control other kinds of practitioners, and to qualify learned “practice” as uniquely rational and safe, especially with respect to diseases inside the body. The concern with professional boundaries of practice was often proportional to the economic and social stakes. Apothecaries were warned that they should only dispense, not prescribe; surgeons were admonished that they dealt only with the surface of the body: neither were to act without the physician’s direction. Midwives attracted less attention, although assisting during normal birth might easily glide into the physician’s domain if the midwife treated gynecological disorders or advised on the regimen of the pregnant woman. Finally, the medical care given to the sick poor in *hospitals by nursing sisters and brothers, even when it involved administration of drugs, was never the target of physicians. Doctors might serve hospitals for motives of piety, or be called in as consultants, but they had neither the opportunity nor the motivation to control the activities of charitable medicine.

Genres of Literature on Medicina Practica

The literature of medical practice is highly various in audience, format, and language. Scholastic classroom genres include glosses on Galen’s treatises on diseases, symptoms, and treatment, or commentaries on the relevant portions of the great Arabic synopses, e.g., the section on fevers from *Ibn Sina’s Canon, or books nine to twelve of *al-Razi’s Liber ad Almansorem. At the “bedside” end is the physician’s folding girdle-almanac, containing calendars, astrological information, blood-letting indications, and also perhaps a colored chart of urine types.

Manuals of general practica normally arranged diseases according to the body part affected, from head to toe (a capite ad calcem), with additional sections on fever and conditions such as paralysis that affected the whole body. *Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae, a typical practica by an academic physician, adopts a systematic analytical grid for each disease, comprising definition, etiology, symptoms, prognosis, treatment, and clarificatio (related issues and controversies). Besides general practica, medical writers composed treatises on particular disease categories including fevers, individual diseases such as gout, and disorders of particular organs (e.g., the uterus). While practica are prescriptive rather the descriptive, the author’s experience is often invoked to illustrate and val date the principles derived from Galen and the Arab medical authorities: the ars of medicine followed its scientia. But the literature of practical medicine also encompassed genres which thrust experience into the foreground. Experimenta are collections of tried-and-true remedies, devoid of theoretical explanation, but elevated above mere empiricism by the status of the author (e.g., *Arnau de Vilanova), and even the status of the patient who received the treatment. *Consilia were letters or reports of advice to individuals which diagnosed an ailment and prescribed regimen and adjuvant drug therapy: professor-practitioners often collected their consilia for teaching purposes. Customized regimina for individuals, such as Arnau’s Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum, or for classes of people (soldiers on campaign, pregnant women, etc.) could also serve as instructional material.

Texts on medical practice, and particularly pharmacy and surgery, were also of interest to those practitioners who operated outside the ranks of the academically trained; this is increasingly the case in the later Middle Ages. Translations helped to disseminate practica to this wider audience. For example, the Latin Compendium medicinae of *Gilbertus Anglicus was translated into English, and condensed in the process through omission of theoretical material. The Antidotarium of *Nicholas of Salerno, a standard school text, was also translated and adapted for the working apothecary. Recipe collections are particularly widespread in both Latin and the vernacular, and seem to have interested every level of literate medieval society. Scholastic encyclopedias of surgery, such as the Inventarium of *Guy de Chauliac, were translated into various vernacular languages; indeed, *Henri de Mondeville composed his surgical treatise in both Latin and French versions. This is also the case with more modest productions, such as technical manuals on blood-letting. The dissemination of information on practical medicine was also allied to charity. Clerical authors bulk large in this sub-genre, such as *Petrus Hispanus (author of the Thesaurus pauperum, a handbook of cheap and simple treatments for the poor, or rather, for the parish priest to whom they turned for assistance), and John Mirfield (author of the Breviarium Bartholomei). The angelical conjunction of religion and medicine assumed a rather exceptional form in the writings of *Hildegard of Bingen.

See also Botany; Calendar; Elements and qualities; Gynecology and midwifery; Herbals; Instruments, medical; Medicine, theoretical; Pharmaceutic handbooks; Pharmacy; Pharmacology; Regimen sanitatis; Surgery

Bibliography

Agrimi, Jole and Chiara Crisciani. Les consilia médicaux. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 69. Turnhout: Brepols, 1994.

Demaitre, Luke. Scholasticism in Compendia of Practical Medicine, 1250–1450. Manuscripta (1976) 20: 81–95.

———. Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1975) 30: 103–119.

García-Ballester, Luis, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Getz, Faye Marie. Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1990) 64: 1–17.

———, ed. and trans. Healing and Society in Medieval England: a Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Jacquart, Danielle. “‘Theorica’ et ‘practica’ dans l’enseignement de la médecine à Salerne au XIIe siècle.” In Vocabulaire des écoles et des méthodes d’enseignement au moyen âge, edited by Olga Weijers. Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du moyen âge 5. Turnhout: Brepols, 1992, pp. 102–110.

Jacquart, Danielle. “La pratique dans les oeuvres médicales de la fin du moyen âge.” Colloque international d’histoire de la médecine médiévale. Orléans, 4 et 5 mai 1985. Orléans: Société orléanaise d’histoire de la médecine—Centre Jeanne d’Arc, 1985. Vol.1, pp. 55–63.

———. Theory, Everyday Practice, and Three Fifteenth-Century Physicians. Osiris (1990) 2nd ser., 6: 140–160.

McVaugh, Michael R. Medicine Before the Plague. Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

———. Arnald de Vilanova’s Regimen Almarie (Regimen castra sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine. Viator 23 (1992): 201–213.

———. The Experimenta of Arnald of Villanova. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (1971) 1: 107–118.

———. Quantified Medical Theory and Practice at Fourteenth Century Montpellier. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1969) 43: 397–413.

Riddle, John M. Theory and Practice in Medieval Medicine. Viator (1974) 5: 157–170.

Voigts, Linda E. and Michael R. McVaugh. A Latin Technical Phlebotomy and its Middle English Translation. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74, 2. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984.

FAITH WALLIS

Medicine, Theoretical

In the Hellenistic period, Aristotle’s division of philosophy into theory (knowledge pursued as an end in itself) and practice (knowledge directed toward action) was applied to medicine. Herophilus of Calcedon divided medicine into three parts, corresponding to three epistemic objects: health, disease, and “neutral things” or factors capable of changing health into disease and vice versa. He called the category “health,” comprising the study of the human body, its parts and processes, to logikon, or the “rational part” of medicine. His contemporary Erasistratus of Ceos distinguished the study of the body and of the causes of disease from the activities of diagnosis and therapy: the former he termed to epistemikon (“what is known with certainty”), the latter to stochastikon (“what is probable”). In his Art of Medicine (known to medieval readers as the Tegni), *Galen merged and refined these two schemes. Medicine is “the science which considers health, disease and the neutral state,” but with respect to three things: (1) Body (broadly comprising the modern categories of anatomy and physiology); (2) Signs (medical semiology): and (3) Causes (disease etiology). The Arabic medical encyclopedists, notably *Hunayn ibn Ishaq, influenced by Aristotle, identified this triad as the theory of medicine. The practice of medicine comprised hygiene or preventive medicine (the regulation of the “neutrals”), and therapeutics. Philosophically oriented physicians such as *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), on the other hand, defined practice in epistemological terms: the practice of medicine is not the physician’s action, but rather the knowledge which enables him to “form an opinion,” that is, to decide on a plan of treatment (Canon of Medicine 1, fen 1, doctrine 1). Avicenna’s formulation allowed western academic physicians to claim that practical medicine, while less epistemologically certain (being “opinion”) than theory, was nonetheless a cognitive category, and therefore within the domain of philosophy.

Medieval Galenic Medical Theory

Early medieval medicine was rich in practical literature, but like the medicine of late antiquity apparently indifferent to or reserved about theory. Some theoretical texts of the Alexandrian curriculum were translated into Latin in or near *Ravenna in the sixth century, but they account for no more than a small percentage of surviving medical writings. In the Carolingian period, however, scholars speculating on the division of knowledge and the nature of the arts tentatively identified theoretical knowledge associated with medicine, particularly physiology, with natural philosophy (physica). Interest in medicine as physica intensified at the end of the tenth century. The historian Richer of Reims wrote a famous account of his own efforts to locate and study the logica—that is, the medical theory—of *Hippocrates. In the last decades of the eleventh century, *Constantine the African translated into Latin (and significantly adapted) the Mas’il fit-tibb, a schematic introduction to fundamental concepts of Galenic medical theory by *Hunayn ibn Ishaq, known in the West as Johannitius. This Isagoge (purportedly an “introduction” to Galen’s Tegni) became the prefatory text of the *Articella, and was studied by generations of medieval medical students. Its introduction into the Western canon of medicine, along with the first part of the Kitab Kamil as-sin’a at-tibbya (Complete [or Perfect] Book of the Medical Art) of *‘Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi (Haly Abbas), also translated by Constantine, signals a “theoretical turn” associated with the writings of Salernitan masters. The Isagoge is therefore an influential guide to the basic concepts and terms of medical theory, and the discussion of theory which follows here is largely based on it.

Medicine comprises the “naturals,” i.e., the body and its parts; the “non-naturals,” i.e., environmental or behavioral factors affecting the body for good or ill; and the “contra- naturals,” i.e., disease conditions. The seven naturals represent a spectrum from the most material to the most “subtle” components of the body. They are: (1) the elements of the world (earth, air, fire, water); (2) their qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry); (3) their microcosmic cognates, the four bodily humors (blood, red bile, black bile, phlegm); (4) the solid members of the body formed from those humors; (5) the body’s energies; (6) its operations; and (7) the “spirits” which control vital functions. To these, Johannitius adds the “accidental” factors of age, color, bodily shape, and sex.

The body is a macrocosm of the physical universe, and its life cycle replicates the seasons. This system of correspondences is held together by the elemental qualities: hot and wet (air, blood, childhood, spring), hot and dry (fire, red bile, youth, summer), cold and dry (earth, black bile, maturity, fall) and cold and wet (water, phlegm, old age, winter). Nonetheless, life is primarily sustained by heat and moisture (an idea borrowed from Aristotle’s biology). Aging, for example, is understood as the gradual, natural qualitative change from hot and moist to cold and dry. Death is the extinction of the body’s congenital quantum of innate heat and “radical moisture.”

The humors combine to form the “homogeneous members,” i.e., solid tissues such as bones and muscle, and liquids such as blood (the blood in the veins being a mixture of the humors). The homogeneous members combine to form heterogeneous members, i.e., organs such as the stomach or the hand.

The “principal” members are lodged in the three main cavities of the body: the brain within the skull, the heart (with its auxiliary member, the lungs) in the chest, and the liver (with digestive and reproductive members) in the abdomen. The principal members are the seats of the spirits (spiritus: subtle yet material entities which direct the functions of life) which manifest specific energies (virtutes). The liver is the instrument of the natural spirit (spiritus naturalis), whose action is the natural energy (virtus naturalis) that accomplishes nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Blood is manufactured in the liver from food, and distributed through the veins, from which it is taken up as nutriment by the various parts of the body at need. Digestion is a multi-stage process of transforming food into body, and at each stage, waste products are produced: feces from the first digestion in the stomach, urine from the second digestion in the liver during the process of blood production, and various material extrusions such as hair and earwax from the third digestion in the veins, and the fourth in the members (women, being naturally colder and wetter than men, and hence incapable of complete digestion, also produce a residue of menstrual blood). This entire process is conceptualized as “coction” or cooking. The body’s actions in gaining mastery over corrupt or excessive humors, or in repairing a wound, are also understood as a kind of digestion, which produces waste products such as pus. The heat required for coction is furnished by the vital spirit (vitalis spiritus), whose seat is the heart. Air drawn in by the lungs is transformed by the heat and vital spirit in the heart into inspirited air, which is distributed to the body through the arteries, mixed with blood. On reaching the brain, this inspirited air is transformed into “animal spirit” (spiritus animalis, i.e., the spirit responsible for anima, the functions of sensation, motion, and cognition) and conveyed by the nerves (conceived as hollow vessels) to the members.

The organs of the body also possess “faculties” (operationes, facultates). For Galen, the faculties were the pneumata or spirits, as manifest in their workings or effects. Arab writers connected four of these to the general physiological model through a pair of qualities: the “appetitive faculty” is hot and dry, the “digestive faculty” hot and moist, the “retentive faculty” cold and dry, and the “expulsive faculty” cold and moist. For example, the uterus is understood to draw in semen through its “appetitive faculty” in order to conceive; its “retentive faculty” allows it to contain the growing fetus, while its “expulsive faculty” is activated during birth. The arteries throb because the vital spirit endows them with a “pulsatile faculty.”

Health is the proper balance (complexio or temperamentum, translating the Greek krasis) of the qualities, and the proper symmetry (compositio) of the heterogeneous members. Strictly speaking, complexio is the balance of qualities, but most medical writers (especially Avicenna) thought of it as a balance of humors. Balanced complexio is relative and individual, leading to the notion of “latitude of health.” Medieval writers speak of individual temperament not as absolutely balanced, but as “justly” balanced (ad iustitiam), and often compare it to a well-governed kingdom. Hence, rather than thinking in terms of “the normal” they prefer to speak of what is “natural” to the individual, age group or sex. Finally, the different parts of the body have their proper complexiones: e.g., the brain is cold and moist. Soft organs are usually identified as wet, hard organs (such as the sinewy heart) as dry.

Galen’s phrase for “non-naturals” is “necessary (i.e., unavoidable) things.” This is the third of his three categories of “corruption,” the first two being natural and unavoidable qualitative change (i.e., aging) and accidental and avoidable change (poison, wounds, etc.). The only area over which medicine claims some control is the third category of “accidental, unavoidable things,” the non-naturals. The first aim of medicine is therefore to prevent illness and maintain health.

The non-naturals are environmental and behavioral factors influencing health and disease: air, food and drink, elimination and retention, exercise and rest, sleep and wakefulness, psychological states (Johannitius adds sexual activity to this list). The science of the non-naturals belongs to medical theory; precepts based on this science are conveyed through regimina sanitatis.

In manuals of theory such as the Isagoge, the contra-naturals or disease states are classified into three broad categories: (1) Mala complexio or disorders of temperament (humoral balance); (2) Mala compositio or congenital defect; and (3) Solutio continuitatis, “breach of continuity” or trauma. Thus disease was not precisely an entity in Galenic medicine, but an event (“accident”) or state. Drawing on Aristotelian *hylomorphism, doctors defined health and disease as “forms determining matter”; hence medieval physicians regarded as disease what a modern doctor would term clinical presentation or symptom. Such disease specificity as exists in medieval medical theory lies closer to the modern concept of the syndrome: hence, a morbus was a disease of mala complexio with a proper name designating a particular cluster of symptoms (e.g., gout, leprosy, migraine). Ontologically, this was a fairly weak concept, because a morbus could manifest differently in patients of different complexion, and one morbus could change into another. Leprosy presented an interesting challenge to this model. Particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and apparently in response to increasing demands on the medical profession for expert opinion in accusations of leprosy, authors such as *Gilbertus Anglicus and Jordanus de Turre concentrated on cataloguing the features of leprosy that were definitive and invariable. The Black Death posed a different type of problem, for its universal scope defied the Hippocratic model of an “epidemic” as a local outbreak of acute and virulent disease. Learned commentators invoked cosmological and astrological explanations based on the notion of a global infectio or tainting of the atmosphere, with consequent poisoning of the soil, water, foodstuffs, etc., over wide regions. Although plague might be caused by environmental factors, it was understood to spread through contact (contagio).

All morbi are diseases of mala complexio or humoral imbalance leading to the “putrefaction” or “corruption” of the humors. The Hippocratic root of this image seems to be a septic wound, which not only looks and smells like rotting meat, but is also accompanied by swelling and heat. Hence fever and swellings (“apostemes”) are the two basic genera of morbi, a fever being the expression of an internal humoral putrefaction.

Diagnosis rested on the decoding of signs which revealed the body’s state, and identified the disease-event. The physician laid great store on inspection of the patient’s excreta, especially the urine, since waste products of digestion indicated the state of the natural spirit. Of equal importance was the pulse, seen as the direct action of the vital spirit in the arteries. Supplementing these were a wide array of signals which could be read in the face, eyes, posture, comportment, and skin color of the patient, as well as in the presence or absence of clinical events such as sweating and seizures. While the Isagoge of Johannitius provided the overall conceptual framework of semiology, the other books in the Articella—Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and Prognostics, On Pulses by Philaretus, and On Urine by Theophilus—furnished its substance. The Scholastic physician’s concern to rationalize prognosis focused increased attention on mathematical techniques, such as calculating the “critical days” when the disease would take a turn for better or worse. In the later Middle Ages, universities, especially in Italy, promoted medical *astrology as a technique for more precise and reliable diagnosis and prognosis.

Diagnostic classification of fevers according to their seat was a very important part of medieval pathology, as it affected both prognosis and therapy. An “ephemeral fever” was located in one of the three principal spirits discussed above; a “putrid fever” was caused by the corruption of one of the four humors; a “hectic fever” was seated in the solid members. Putrid fevers in turn were classified according to the humor affected, which was revealed by the fever’s periodicity: corrupt blood produces continued fever (synochus); red bile produces tertian fever (paroxysm every three days, counting inclusively); phlegm produces quotidian fever (i.e., recurring every day); and melancholy produces quartan fever (recurring every four days).

“Swellings” covers inflammation, as well as tumors or boils. These are classified according to the responsible humor; cancer, for example, is an aposteme caused by burnt or “adust” melancholy.

Other classification schemes allowed physicians to nuance the idea of disease localization. A “similar” disease is a condition which can occur in any member, e.g., “aching.” A “universal” disease affects the whole body, e.g., paralysis. An “official” disease acts on a specific member, e.g., gout. Johannitius’s subdivision of official diseases shows how this schema cuts across the distinctions of mala complexio, mala compositio, and solutio continuitatis. He distinguishes official diseases according to the following criteria: (1) shape, including what we would consider normal variations in shape, e.g., a long head, or flat feet, as well as pathological conditions, e.g. “roughness of the trachea or bronchi”; (2) size; (3) number, defined as any abnormality of augmentation or diminution, e.g., polydactylism, but also worms and warts; (4) position, i.e., removal of a member from its proper place or some defect in relation to neighboring parts (e.g., hare lip).

The Literature of Theorical Medicine

Western scholars took their first steps towards original thinking on medical theory in the twelfth century by composing commentaries on the Articella texts. The earliest are anonymous, but after mid-century they are signed by authors including *Bartholomaeus of Salerno, *Maurus of Salerno, *Urso of Calabria, and later *Petrus Hispanus. The thirteenth century saw the expansion of the canon of medical theory. The principal works studied and commented on in the universities were now the first book of Canon of Ibn Sina, and a number of newly available texts by Galen, including On Accident and Illness (De accidenti et morbo), On Complexions (De complex-ionibus), On Illness of Diverse Complexion (De malicia complexionis diverse), Distinguishing Fevers (De differ-entiis febrium), Critical Days (De diebus criticis), On Affected Parts (De locis affectis, known in the Middle Ages as De interioribus), and an adapted version of The Usefulness of Parts entitled De iuvamentis membrorum. The last two works were important in the development of academic anatomy based on human dissection; *Mondino de’ Liuzzi structured his dissection lessons as “material commentaries” on these treatises.

Commentary, together with its offshoot, the quaestio, was a principle genre of Scholastic writing on medical theory. A commentary on the Isagoge, one on the first book of the Tegni, another on books One and Two of the Canon, and perhaps one on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates were de rigueur for academic physicians. By the end of the medieval period, theory was taught and debated not only through these primary texts, but in the light of authoritative commentaries by *Taddeo Alderotti, Tommaso del Garbo, *Torregiano de’ Torregiani, *Gentile da Foligno, Jacopo da Forlì, and Jacques Despars. There was, however, a parallel stream of reflection on physiology associated with the study of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, particularly the biological writings, De anima, and the Problemata. Aristotle’s attention to medical issues attracted philosophers to medical theory, and physicians to Peripatetic philosophy. One of the best-known medieval analyses of conception and embryogenesis is by the theologian *Giles of Rome, while in the Italian universities, where arts and medicine were taught in the same faculty, physician-philosophers such as *Pietro d’Abano found fertile ground for speculation in the Problemata.

Issues in Theoretical Medicine

Aristotle’s influence also determined which questions connected with medical theory attracted sustained interest. Perhaps the most important was the nature of medicine and medical knowledge itself. Although properly speaking a debate on epistemology or method rather than theory, this question functioned typically as an opportunity to define and defend medicine’s identity as theory, and to clarify its relationship with physica. The question itself is invariably formulated in Aristotelian terms. Is medicine a scientia? If so, is it a speculative scientia, or a practical one? Or is medicine an ars, i.e., an intellectual skill employed in doing or making something? What medicine was had implications for how it should be taught, its doctrina. Galen in the Tegni seems to state that medicine’s doctrina comprises resolutio and compositio, terms which he himself does not clearly define, but which were interpreted as equivalent to Aristotelian induction and deduction. Ibn Sina likewise reduced the “naturals” and “non-naturals” to Aristotle’s four-fold schema of causation. Commentaries on the Tegni and the opening chapter of the Canon were therefore the classic occasions for addressing this issue.

The second zone of debate encompassed issues where Aristotle’s views of the body and its processes seemed to conflict with those of Galen and the Arab medical writers. The primacy of the heart in Aristotelian physiology apparently conflicted with Galen’s Hellenistic model of three principal members; similarly, Galen’s understanding of conception as the union of male and female seed was impossible to reconcile with Aristotle’s doctrine that the male contributed form alone, and the female only matter to the act of generation. Although somewhat atypical, the Conciliator of Pietro d’Abano stands as an eloquent symbol of the intense dialogue of Aristotle and Galen in the medical faculties.

See also Anatomy, human; Aristotelianism; Articella; Elements and qualities; Galen; Hippocrates; Medicine, practical; Nature: the structure of the physical world; Plague tractates; Psychology; Regimen sanitatis; Salerno; Scholasticism; Universities

Bibliography

Bono, James J. Medical Spirits and the Medieval Language of Life. Traditio (1984) 40: 91–130.

Bylebyl, Jerome J. The Medical Meaning of Physica. Osiris (1990) 2nd ser. 6: 16–41.

Cadden, Joan. “Albertus Magnus’ Universal Physiology: the Example of Nutrition.” In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays. Edited by James Weisheipl. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980.

Campbell, Anna. The Black Death and Men of Learning. New York: AMS, 1966. Reprint of 1931 ed.

Demaitre, Luke. The Description and Diagnosis of Leprosy by Fourteenth-Century Physicians. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1985) 59: 327–344.

French, Roger. De iuvamenis membrorum and the Reception of Galenic Physiological Anatomy. Isis (1979) 70: 96–109.

Jacquart, Danielle. “Medical Scholasticism.” In Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Edited by Mirko D. Grmek. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

———. La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien. Paris: Fayard, 1998.

———. “La question disputée dans les Facultés de médecine.” In Les questions disputées dans les Facultés de Théologie, de Droit, et de Médecine. Edited by B.C. Bazàn, G. Fransen, D. Jacquart and J.W. Wippel. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 44–45. Turnhout: Brepols, 1985.

Jacquart, Danielle and Françoise Micheau. La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiévale. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990.

Jordan, Mark D. Medicine as Science in the Early Commentaries on ‘Johannitius’. Traditio (1987) 43: 121–145.

Lawn, Brian. The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic ‘Quaestio Disputata’ with Special Emphasis on its Use in the Teaching of Medicine and Science. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.

McVaugh, Michael. The Humidum Radicale in Thirteenth Century Medicine. Traditio (1974) 30: 259–283.

Ottosson, P.-G. Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy. A Study of Commentaries on Galen’s “Tegni” (ca. 1300–1450). Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984.

Rather, L.J. The ‘Six Things Non-Natural’: a Note on the Origins and Fate of a Doctrine and a Phrase. Clio Medica (1968) 3: 337–347.

Schöner, E. Das Vierschema in der antiken Humoralpathologie. Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 4. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1964.

Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

FAITH WALLIS

Metaphysics

To the medieval mind, metaphysics was that science or body of learning which stood at the head of all other branches of human knowledge because it was the source of their ordering principles. The term was first used by early editors of the works of Aristotle to designate the books that came after the books on nature—literally meta ta physika (“after the physics”). Later thinkers, perhaps influenced by Neoplatonism, read much more into it than that. Since Aristotle speaks of metaphysics as the investigation of the ultimate causes of things and as the “science of first principles,” it made sense to think of it as prior to the other, more specialized sciences, as the source of their principles, and therefore, as constituting the highest form of human wisdom. By late antiquity, the concept of metaphysics as the ordinatrix, or active ordering principle, of all other knowledge was already well established.

Metaphysics is a theory about what ultimately exists. This was important for medieval scientists because it told them the kinds of things that could figure in the explanation of natural phenomena. Metaphysics also provided the rationale for dividing the special sciences into an orderly system reflecting the rationality and goodness of its creator: physics, for example, is concerned with bodies insofar as they move; its subaltern or derivative science of psychology with movement insofar as it is animate. This tended to favor teleological explanations, since most thinkers subscribed to the principle that at least in its normal operations, which are what God has ordained for the world, Nature never acts frustra (without a purpose). Of course, unexplained deficiencies in the natural order could implicate God’s goodness, or omnipotence, or both, so their working assumption was that our failure to understand a phenomenon must be due to individual human ignorance, or fallibility, or both.

Universals and Particulars

Because they believed that the existence of absolutely everything other than God depends on God’s having freely chosen to create it, medieval philosophers were much more interested than their Greek and Roman counterparts in determining the nature of being. At issue here was not only the nature of God’s necessary being as opposed to the contingent being of creatures, but also the question of whether the categories we use to classify created beings have any reality over and above our concepts of them. Surely if it is true to say that my dog and my house are both brown, they must have something in common, some real nature or quality that makes them so? Porphyry (c. 232–304) was the first to raise the question of the ontological status of the concepts of genus, species, difference, necessary attribute, and accident in his Isagoge or introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, although he sets it aside as too difficult for his audience. Two centuries later, *Boethius reexamined the question in his commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry, developing what has become known as the moderate realist view that universals are real without being entities or things. His treatment determined the agenda of the medieval debate, which waxed and waned for the next thousand years in a wide variety of contexts and disciplines.

The debate was complicated by the fact that its participants did not always distinguish clearly between the linguistic question of the function of universal predicates (e.g., the notion “is brown”), which Aristotle had discussed in De interpretatione, from the metaphysical question of the nature of universal attributes, which is what Porphyry and Boethius had added to the mix. Sometimes this led to an author advancing two theories. *Peter Abelard, for example, seems to have a nominalist account of universal names or terms (i.e., universals “name” only particular things, such as particular dogs and houses), and a realist account of universal attributes (i.e., things having the same color share the status, e.g., the status of being brown, without having anything in common). These theories tended to be very sophisticated and went far beyond similar discussions in antiquity. It is worth noting that *Plato’s theory of exemplar universals, according to which universals have an eternal mode of existence that transcends the things of this world, was known but widely rejected, again because it clashed with the assumption that everything in the universe, from mud to angels, depends for its existence on God’s creative act.

From a scientific point of view, what was at stake in the debate over universals was the status of scientific knowledge. The nominalist who claims that universals are merely linguistic or conceptual categories can avoid the embarrassment of having to posit real entities that do not really exist, which is what the defender of real attributes seems committed to. No one has met brownness all by itself, apart from brown dogs and brown houses. But nominalism has its own embarrassments. In the absence of real causal relations, for example, a strict nominalist would have no way of explaining how one thing could be the cause of another, since every instance of cause and effect would be a unique event. In the fourteenth century, *John Buridan argued that common concepts are based on the fact that particular things just naturally resemble each other, and that although our intellects are capable of recognizing such similarities, we are not acquainted with anything in the particulars that justifies this. Here it was customary to cite a passage from the Liber Sex Principiorum (Book of Six Principles, referring to the last six of Aristotle’s ten categories) of Gilbert of Poitiers (1076–1154): “Nature operates in a hidden fashion [occulte] with regard to universals.” Buridan tries to anticipate skeptical worries by arguing that it is not possible to achieve absolute certainty in this life, and that, in the absence of compelling reasons to think otherwise, our empirical judgments are reliable enough to justify our claim to have knowledge of the external world.

By the mid-fourteenth century, nominalism—or what is more accurately called conceptualism—had become the default position of most philosophers who thought about these questions, so that in the later medieval period it is more accurate to think of nominalism as a parsimonious way of doing philosophy than as a doctrine denying the existence of real universals. The manifesto of later medieval nominalism has come down to us in the form of “Ockham’s razor,” which states that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). Of course, nominalists disagreed about how many entities one must posit. *William of Ockham, for example, believed that everything can be explained with the categories of substance and quality, but Buridan rejects this, claiming one also needs the category of quantity, since it is not possible to “qualify” quantity.

Metaphysics was completely transformed in the Latin West by the recovery of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the middle of the eleventh century. Along with this important text came translations of commentaries on Aristotle’s works from the Islamic intellectual tradition. Medieval philosophers relied extensively on commentators such as *Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and later, *Ibn Rushd (Averroes), to make sense of Aristotle’s difficult remarks. Together, these new sources provided metaphysicians with a whole new range of analytical tools that could assist them in their study of the natural world. The most influential of these were the distinctions between form and matter, substance and accident, and essence and existence. Aristotle’s four “causes” or principles of explanation were also appropriated, which allowed them to distinguish between inquiries into the matter or “stuff” of which something is made (material cause); its form or pattern (formal cause); its maker or agent source (efficient cause); and its end or purpose (final cause). Although Aristotle seems to have regarded final cause as a local principle, concerned with the particular ends of living things (apple seeds tend to become apple trees), medieval thinkers read it globally as well, in terms of the orderly structure of a natural world which they saw as filled with signs of divine providence. The application of these concepts can be seen in the Five Ways of *Aquinas, which seek to demonstrate the existence of God using the notions of efficient, formal, and final cause.

By the fourteenth century, however, explanations in terms of efficient causes came to dominate natural philosophy, whereas teleological explanations were viewed with suspicion (except in accounts of human action, which seemed obviously purposive). This was due in part to the popularity of nominalist methods in natural philosophy. For Ockham, Buridan, and *Nicole Oresme, teleological argumentation moves in the wrong direction, beginning with the assumption (mistaken, in their minds) that we have special access to the seminal reasons God used to create the world. They could not square this with the fact that the world we encounter is everywhere filled with particular things whose structure and relationships can only be surmised from experience—an experience that is also limited and fallible. Accordingly, they argued that the principles of natural science must originate from the things whose operations they seek to explain, even if this means we can no longer view them as self-evident. This subtle shift in orientation helped set the stage for modern empirical science.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bosley, Richard, and Martin Tweedale (eds.). Basic Issues in Medieval Philosophy. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997.

Frank, William A., and Allan B. Wolter, ed. & tr. Duns Scotus: Metaphysician. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Hyman, Arthur, and James J. Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

Spade, Paul V., ed. and tr. Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

Tweedale, Martin. Scotus vs. Ockham: A Medieval Dispute over Universals. Texts Translated into English with Commentary. 2 vols. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Adams, Marilyn McCord. William Ockham. 2 vols. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

Henninger, Mark. Relations: Medieval Theories, 1250–1325. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Jordan, Mark D. Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.

King, Peter. “Abelard on Metaphysics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Edited by Jeffrey Brower and Kevin Guilfoy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 65–125.

Zupko, Jack. John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

JACK ZUPKO

Meteorology

During the Middle Ages meteorology was typically considered to be the science of material change in the sublunary region, which comprises the Earth and the area between the Earth and the Moon. This subject was far more inclusive than it is in modern times and included not just the weather, but also all atmospheric phenomena, including phenomena such as comets and the Milky Way, which we no longer consider to be atmospheric, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the motions of the sea and rivers, such as tides and flooding. From antiquity and throughout the medieval period, meteorology was a standard part of the study of *natural philosophy. As a result, a large number of the most widely read natural philosophers wrote specific treatises on meteorology or included discussions of this subject in encyclopedic works or handbooks. Unlike today’s meteorology, the field was not dedicated primarily to prediction but rather to causation and explanation. Some authors, however, investigated how future weather phenomena could be inferred from signs; one prominent method, astrometeorology, used observations of celestial bodies as a means for forecasting the weather. While frequently derivative of Aristotle’s writings, especially in the Islamic world and the later Middle Ages in Christian Western Europe, meteorological works showed a wide range of approaches and utilized a variety of sources. Since it was believed that the cause of weather phenomena was connected to the motions of celestial bodies and because of the weather’s manifest connections to human health, astronomy, *astrology, and medicine were often closely tied to meteorology.

Ancient Sources

Medieval meteorology was heavily influenced by ancient writings. Which ancient authors were most influential depended on place, time, and linguistic and philosophical culture. The first three books of Aristotle’s Meteorology provided the framework for many treatments of meteorology. Additionally, it was a subject for commentaries and university lectures. Other influential ancient texts included Seneca’s Natural Questions, which had particular currency during the early Middle Ages in the Latin West, the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, which explained how changes in weather and climate affect health, and the Aristotelian Problemata.

Aristotle’s Meteorology was known and transmitted through translations. In the ninth century, Yayha ibn al-Bitriq translated into Arabic a paraphrase of this work that was subsequently circulated throughout the Islamic world. Several new translations were made during the thirteenth century, when Samuel ibn Tibbon rendered the work into Hebrew and *Gerard of Cremona made a Latin translation from the Arabic version. In the 1260s, Gerard’s version was superseded by *William of Moerbeke’s translation composed directly from the Greek. This version remained the standard for centuries. Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary, written in the second century C.E., was also known in the Islamic world and in the Christian West after William of Moerbeke’s translation of it, again in the 1260s. Mahieu le Vilain translated the work into French vernacular around the end of the thirteenth century.

General Framework

By and large, medieval accounts of meteorology were informed by Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, and Neoplatonic understandings of geocentric *cosmology. It was held that the cosmos could be conceptually and spatially divided; the Earth and the space below the sphere of the Moon, the sublunary region, is the center of the universe and characterized by physical instability and perpetual change. All substances in this region are compounds of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Under the influence of the active primary qualities, the hot and the cold, these elements transform into each other. Meteorology is the science of these transformations. For Aristotle, unlike other kinds of knowledge regarding nature, meteorological explanations had little recourse to teleology or formal causes. Rather, material and efficient causation accounts for meteorological change. The Sun is the efficient or moving cause that acts on matter, composed out of the four elements. Precisely how the Sun affects the sublunary region, whether from heat generated by motion or transmission of heat rays, remained a subject of debate from antiquity throughout the Middle Ages. In any case, the Sun causes the elements to form into two exhalations, one moist and similar to vapor, the other dry and smoky. These exhalations circulate from the surface of the Earth to sphere of the Moon. Their motions and mutual transformations result in weather phenomena, such as clouds, precipitation, lightning, and thunder, as well as meteor showers, comets, the Milky Way, and other “fires” in the sky. The irregular nature of these phenomena confirms their sublunary status. Analogous exhalations move underneath the surface of the Earth and are responsible for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hot springs, the formation of metals, and other subterranean and what we would describe as seismic events. While the exhalations are the unifying causes of change in the sublunary region, geometrical explanations are given for the rainbow. As a result, Aristotle’s text became a key source for those who desired to apply mathematical optics to the natural world.

For Aristotle, the knowledge of meteorology is imperfect. Because of the irregularity of happenings in the sky and the difficulty in observing them accurately, Aristotle presented his explanations with caution and noted the inconclusiveness of his theories. In general Aristotelian concepts were prominent in medieval writings on meteorology, although they were frequently adapted, altered, and transformed. In both antiquity and the Middle Ages, naturalistic explanations for the weather were favored. As a result, the idea that lightning and thunder had divine origins was widely rejected or ignored.

Early Latin Medieval Meteorology (Pre-1200)

Because of the centrality of meteorology to natural philosophy, a large number of authors addressed these issues from antiquity onwards. In the early Middle Ages many prominent authors took up these questions. *Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, *Bede’s On the Nature of Things, Pseudo-Bede’s On the Constitution of the Heavenly and Terrestrial Worlds, the *Salernitan Questions, *William of Conches’ On Philosophy, and *Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions either defined or explained meteorological issues, such as winds, thunder, lightning, tides, flooding, and the division of the world into climatic zones. It was most commonly held that the world was divided into five zones, a middle zone that was excessively hot, two temperate inhabited zones, and two zones of extreme cold. These authors theorized without the benefit of direct access to Aristotle’s writings, rather informing themselves by late-Roman writings, Calcidius’s abbreviated version of *Plato’s Timaeus, and perhaps some Arabic sources.

Islamic Meteorology

Practitioners of falsafa, a form of Islamic philosophy inspired by the Greek tradition, wrote numerous works on meteorology. Some of the most heralded Islamic philosophers took up this field. The fifth book of the Kitab al-Shifa by *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the Short and Middle Commentaries on the Meteorology of *Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and the Commentary on the Meteorology of *Ibn Bajja (Avempace) should be counted among these. Islamic authors developed interpretations found not only in al-Bitriq’s paraphrase of Aristotle, but also in a compendium by *Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a paraphrase of Olympiodorus’s Commentary on the Meteorology written in Greek in the sixth century C.E., and a version of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Commentary on the Meteorology. These works had different approaches and goals. For example, Ibn Rushd tried to reconcile Alexander and Aristotle, while Ibn Sina’s approach was more critical and included additional explanations and appeals to experience not found in ancient texts. Both of their works were translated into Latin and had significant influence on medieval Christian authors.

Latin Meteorology in the Later Middle Ages

Soon after the translation of Aristotle’s Meteorology into Latin in the first part of the thirteenth century, an Englishman, *Alfred of Sareschel, wrote the first Latin commentary on this work. By the end of the century, Aristotle’s work had found a fixed place in university curricula. Public lectures and disputations on this text proliferated, as is evidenced by the more than one hundred known authors who commented on this text between 1200 and 1500. Following *al-Farabi, many medieval scholars considered meteorology to follow thematically the abstract discussions of the elements and qualities as found in On Generation and Corruption and to lead to treatments of biology and the soul. *John Buridan labeled the subject of this work “imperfect mixtures,” meaning compounds of elements that had not received a substantial form and thus were easily subject to *generation and corruption. Buridan’s label stuck, and commentators, even as late as the seventeenth century, described the book’s contents in a similar fashion. Among the other more influential commentators on this work were: *Albertus Magnus, *Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Auvergne, *Nicole Oresme, Themo of Judea, Walter Burley, *Pierre D’Ailly, and Blasius of Parma. While Aristotelian commentary literature dominated the field, meteorological questions were also treated in encyclopedic works, such as *Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maior, hexaemeral literature, and commentaries on *Peter Lombard’s Sentences.

Astrometeorology and Medicine

The field of astrometeorology, while existing in antiquity, was renewed in the medieval Islamic world. Many Christian scholars appropriated and added to this Islamic intellectual tradition. Intimately tied to astrology, the premise of astrometeorology is that because of connections between astral bodies and sublunary substances, it is possible to prognosticate the weather on the basis of the position of the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars. While the effects of the Moon and especially the Sun on the terrestrial region seem obvious, the powers of planets and stars were attested to in theoretically sophisticated writings, such as those by Avicenna and *Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi (Albumashar), who explained how celestial intelligences and emanations affected and created terrestrial substances. *Al-Kindi’s On Rains, which directly addressed prognostication, continued to be widely circulated in Latin during the fifteenth century, as did *Robert Grosseteste’s De impressionibus aeris (On Things Seen in the Air). Grosseteste also authored a work that explained the tides as being caused by lunar influences. While astrometeorology was potentially a field with practical applications, for instance for agriculture or military campaigns, the audience for these treatises was most likely professional scholars.

Meteorological studies were extremely pertinent to medical sciences. Because the dominant humoral theory of disease was based on the premise that health was the result of balance of four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm) that were characterized and affected by the sensible qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry, the understood effects of weather and climate on health were legion. Following Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s Isagoge (Introduction to Medicine), air was widely considered to be one of the non-naturals, that is, something external to the body that affects health. Thus changes in the temperature and quality of air were seen to be major determinants of disease and part of the larger notion of *regimen sanitatis, whereby patients altered their patterns of eating, drinking, sleeping, in order to secure better health. Portions of the Aristotelian Problemata also deal with the relation between health and weather. Most notably the Italian physician *Pietro D’Abano wrote a lengthy commentary on this work that discussed this issue in detail.

See also Aristotelianism; Elements and qualities; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Universities

Bibliography

Boyer, Carl B. The Rainbow from Myth to Mathematics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Ducos, Joëlle. La météorologie en français au Moyen Age (XIIe-XIVe siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998.

Jenks, Stuart. Astrometeorology in the Middle Ages. Isis (1983) 74: 185–210.

Lettinck, Paul. Aristotle’s Meteorology and Its Reception in the Arab World. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999.

Taub, Liba. Ancient Meteorology. New York: Routledge, 2003.

CRAIG MARTIN

Michael Scot

Unidentified man sitting on a throne with a book. From late-twelfth/early-thirteenth century manuscript of a work by Scottish magician Michael Scot. (Topham/The British Library/HIP)

Michael Scot evidently was from Scotland. Our earliest knowledge of him, however, is as a magister in the entourage of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. On August 18, 1217, he completed a translation of *al-Bitruji’s On the Movements of the Heavens, with the help of a certain “Abuteus Iudeus.” Before 1220 he had translated in *Toledo the nineteen Arabic books of Aristotle’s De animalibus (On Animals), which consisted of the Description of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals. In the 1220s we find him in Bologna (1220) and winning the support of Popes Honorius III (1224–1225), who praised him for his “singular learning” (singularis scientia), and Gregory IX (1227), who credited him with knowing Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin. Both popes obtained for him benefices in England and Scotland (he refused the archbishopric of Cashel in Tipperary on the grounds that he did not know Irish). He dedicated a translation of Averroes’ (*Ibn Rushd’s) Large Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens to Stephen of Provins, who, in 1231, had been appointed by Pope Gregory IX to head a commission for purging the newly translated works of Aristotle from statements incompatible with Christian belief.

By the late 1220s Michael Scot was in the court of *Frederick II of Sicily and describes himself as the “astrologer” (astrologus) of the Emperor. He dedicated to Frederick a translation of *Ibn Sina’s Summary concerning Animals (Abbreviatio Avicenne de animalibus), and wrote his sprawling three-part Introduction to Astrology (Liber introductorius ad astrologiam) for him. It is also likely that he continued to translate the Large Commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle’s works on natural science, and Averroes’ On the Substance of the World, although only the commentaries On the Heavens and On the Soul (among the works on natural science) are specifically attributed to him directly in the manuscripts. Other attributions include works on urines, and on alchemy. He also maintained close contacts with other leading scholars of the time, such as *Fibonacci, who dedicated the second edition of his Liber abaci to him (1228), and Jacob Anatoli, a translator of philosophical works into Hebrew, who was “bound to” Michael Scot for a while in Naples in the early 1230s, and who records discussions with Michael and the Emperor concerning passages in *Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. A visit to Paris is mentioned by *Roger Bacon, and this may have been the occasion for him writing a commentary on a popular work of cosmology: the Sphaera of *John of Sacrobosco. According to Henry of Avranches, writing in 1236, Michael Scot was already dead by then, but a reference to “the time of Pope Honorius IV” (1243–1254) in the title of the Liber particularis in some manuscripts (if it is not a later addition) would suggest that he lived longer.

Michael’s avowed aim was to make scientific and philosophical doctrine comprehensible even to a beginner by writing in a “vernacular” form of Latin (vulgariter in grammatica). In the case of the Introduction to Astrology this meant writing a kind of Latin which was very close in syntax and vocabulary to Italian. In the translations from Arabic it meant slightly departing from a literal translation in order to make the Latin readily intelligible. Even so, his original writings differ considerably in style from the translations attributed to him, which may be due to the fact that he relied on interpreters to help him translate (as he explicitly states in the case of the translation of al-Bitruji). The Introduction to Astrology draws on a remarkably wide range of sources, both original Latin texts and the full range of translations from Arabic from the tenth-century Alchandreana to texts of Averroes and Maimonides. It includes within its three books a physiognomy (the last book), a set of questions posed by Frederick II, and texts on the constellations, the planetary system according to the Ptolemaic model, on the astrolabe, on the soul, on music, and wonders of the world. Other topics dealt with in passing are definitions of philosophy, angels, demons, divination from thunder, how to produce the most healthy and successful children and the therapeutic qualities of various hot springs. Michael’s innovation lies in adapting the doctrine of Arabic astrological texts to a Christian and Imperial society, his imaginative elaboration of received material, and a lavish use of illustrations and technical diagrams. His illustrated catalogue of the constellations was frequently copied, and his Book on Physiognomy was printed several times already before 1500. Of more fundamental influence, however, were his translations: Aristotle’s On Animals, and the Large Commentaries of Averroes, which became essential texts within the curriculum in natural sciences in medieval universities.

See also Aristotelianism; Magic and the occult

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Al-Bitruji, De motibus caelorum. Edited by Francis J. Carmody. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952.

Averroes, De caelo et mundo. Edited by Francis J. Carmody and Rüdiger Arnzen. 2 vols. Leuven: Peeters, 2003.

Michael Scot, Ars Alchemie. Edited by S. H. Thomson. Osiris (1938) 5: 523–559.

Secondary Sources

Ackermann, Silke. “Habent sua fata libelli.” In Wissen an Höfen und Universiten: Rezeption, Transformation, Innovation. Akten der Tagung in Frankfurt am Main, 5.-6. Oktober 2001. Frankfurt: 2005.

Burnett, Charles. Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Micrologus (1994), 2: 101–126.

Edwards, Glenn M. The Two Redactions of Michael Scot’s Liber Introductorius. Traditio (1985), 41: 329–340.

Thorndike, Lynn. Michael Scot. London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1965.

———. The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

CHARLES BURNETT

Microcosm/Macrocosm

The doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” implies the existence of a close relationship between the world as a whole (macrocosm) and part of it, usually man (microcosm), in their structure and contents, as well as of a strong influence of the former on the latter and vice versa, due to a sort of “universal sympathy.” Therefore, in the Middle Ages it was usually employed, both in Europe and the Near East, in many fields of science: *alchemy, *astrology, medicine, and magic. It was also found in Medieval Hermetic religious writings. However, “macrocosm” and “microcosm” are primarily philosophical terms related to *cosmology, and systematic treatments of them are found in some works of medieval Latin and in those of Arabic and Hebrew philosophers that tackle anthropological and cosmological themes. According to most of these treatments, the various corporeal and spiritual parts and characteristics of man have a precise correspondence in the world, usually in mathematical terms: e.g., the two eyes correspond to the Sun and the Moon, the four humors (blood, phlegm, red bile, black bile) correspond to the four cosmic elements (fire, air, water, earth), the twelve orifices of the human body correspond to the twelve zodiacal signs, etc. Of course, part of this doctrine is based on the Pythagorean idea that the world and its parts are made and ruled according to a numerological system. One of the main consequences of the doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” is that the world has—like man, life, soul, and intellect—an organicist vision of the cosmos which connects such doctrine to one of the most successful trends of medieval philosophy in Europe and in the Near East: Neoplatonism. However, the medieval theory of “microcosm/macrocosm” has independent origins in different geographical and cultural areas, and reflects different sources. Some of them are Greek: Empedocles, *Plato’s Timaeus and Philebus, Stoicism, Plotinus, and Gnosis; traces of “microcosm/macrocosm” are found in Aristotle’s physics too, where this doctrine is usually rejected. Other sources are ancient Indian (the Rig Veda), which influenced Persian thought on “microcosm/macrocosm” during the Sasanid era (from the third to the seventh century), especially through the main religions of that area: Manicheism and Mazdaism.

Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin cultures

In the early medieval Syriac literature from the Persian area (Mesopotamia and Iran), some traces of the doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” are found in such authors as Ahudhemmeh (sixth century), Theodor Bar Koni (c. 900 C.E.), and the writer of The Syriac Book of Medicine. However, the first systematic treatment of this doctrine in the Near East is found in the philosophical-scientific encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-safa’), written in tenth-century Iraq. In the twenty-sixth and thirty-fourth epistles of this work, bearing the respective titles of Man as a Little World and World as a Big Man, the doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” is explicitly defended and explained, and innumerable and detailed particulars about the correspondences between man and the world, mostly in numerological terms, are given. According to the Brethren of Purity, the world is a sort of immense animal having a general soul, and whose body consists of the heavens; and this doctrine permeates the whole text of their encyclopedia. Of course, significant signs of knowledge of this doctrine appear also in later Arabic authors: astrologers such as *Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi (Albumasar), and physicians such as *‘Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi (Haly Abbas), who hints at it in his Pantegni.

The doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm,” possibly through the interpretation given to it by the Brethren of Purity, strongly influenced many aspects of medieval Hebrew thought. Traces of it are found in a number of texts, bound to the Jewish religious tradition and written in various parts of the Mediterranean: in commentaries on the Sefer Yezirah by Saadiah Gaon (Mesopotamia, first half of the tenth century) and Shabbetai Donnolo (Italy, mid-tenth century), and in the theological works by Bahya Ibn Paquda (Spain, second half of the eleventh century) and Judah Halevi (Andalusia and Near East, first half of the twelfth century). Further significant signs of the doctrine appear in the works of Jewish philosophers pertaining to Neoplatonism. In the Book of Definitions by Isaac Israeli (*Isaac Judaeus), philosophy is defined as a form of self-knowledge, since all is known through the knowledge of man; *Ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae examines the parallelism of spiritual and material worlds, leading to the new doctrines of the “spiritual matter” and of the “categories of the spiritual world.” The Hebrew fortune of the doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” culminates in the Book of the Microcosm by Joseph Ibn Zaddik (Spain, first half of the twelfth century), in which not only the idea of man as a replica of both the corporeal and the spiritual worlds is explained, but also detailed lists of comparisons between man and the world are given.

After 1150, although *Maimonides admitted the existence of an elaborate analogy between the whole of the being and man in Chapter Seventy-two of Part I of his Guide of the Perplexed, the influence of the doctrine on Hebrew culture decreased. Consistent traces of it survived only in authors and works still influenced by Neoplatonism, e.g., in Natanael Ibn al-Fayyumi (Yemen, second half of the twelfth century), and in late-medieval Kabbalah as well.

In the Latin Middle Ages, a Christian version of the doctrine developed. It was based on the key role of man in the world according to Christian anthropology: according to it, man (and Jesus Christ as a man) epitomizes the entire scale of beings, spiritual and material ones, due to his superiority and dignity. Of course, the first two chapters of the Genesis were seen as one of the main sources of this doctrine.

The most significant period when the doctrine of “microcosm/macrocosm” spread in Medieval Latin culture was the twelfth century, and this should be connected both to the diffusion of Neoplatonism in France and elsewhere, and to the influence of Arabic medicine through *Constantine the African and the school of *Salerno. In this period, a good knowledge of this doctrine is witnessed by many authors: *Hildegard of Bingen and Godefroy of Sanct Victor (died 1194) in their religious writings, *Bernard Silvester in his cosmological treatise bearing the significant title De mundi universitate sive megacosmus et microcosmus, the Philosophia of Daniel of Morley (an Englishman who studied in Toledo), and Alain de Lille (active in England or in Paris) in his De planctu naturae. Later on, in the thirteenth century some traces of it are found even in *Robert Grosseteste’s cosmological and cosmogonical works.

See also Aristotelianism; Medicine, theoretical

Bibliography

Conger, George P. Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922.

Allers, Rudolph. Microcosmus. From Anaximandros to Paracelsus. Traditio (1944) 2: 319–407.

Finckh, Ruth. Minor mundus homo. Studien zur Mikrokosmos-Idee in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 1999.

Schipperges, Heinrich. “Einflüsse Arabischer Medizin auf die Mikrokosmosliteratur des 12. Jahrhunderts.” In Antike und Orient im Mittelalter, edited by Paul Wilpert and Willehad P. Eckert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962.

Philippe Gignoux. “Microcosm and Macrocosm.” http://www.iranica.com/articles/ot_grp5/ot_microcosm_20040616.html (2004).

MAURO ZONTA

Military Architecture

Man has always needed to defend himself by keeping his attackers out of his domain, and thus both the need for societal protection and the building of walls to provide this protection predate the Middle Ages. This meant choosing a site that was in the first place geographically and physically difficult to reach and then improving those hindrances with the addition of man-made barriers. General historical studies have established an incredibly lengthy chronology for the study of fortifications. Walls, such as those found around Jericho, Troy, Duras Europas, Tyre, Rome, and elsewhere in the ancient world, were famous for sustaining defenses, and sometimes ultimately failing, against often overwhelming numbers of determined attackers.

The Roman Empire’s peace and stability depended on its defenses, a fact well understood by its leaders, and perhaps no other civilization has ever devoted so much effort or money to the construction and upkeep of its defenses. By the second century C.E., the very extensive Roman empire was nearly surrounded by fortifications. Fortresses were built along the Danube, Rhine, and Euphrates rivers, and lengthy walls were built in Scotland, Numidia, and Germany. These were supplemented with watchtowers, outpost forts, and signal towers. Within these borders were walled towns—some surrounding as much as 500 acres (about 200 hectares)—and fortified garrisons. All of these fit into the grand military strategy of the Roman Empire, one that by the second century was less interested in outside conquest than in preserving internal peace and prosperity.

This peace of the Roman Empire, the pax romana, was to be short-lived, however, as the third century brought invasions from outside and civil war from inside the Empire. Not only in Europe, but everywhere, the borders began to fail. The problem with the border fortifications was not that they were too few or too weak. They had never been built to withstand invasions, merely to impede the progress of invading armies until the legions garrisoned behind them could respond. When Roman legions did not respond, either because of their lack of numbers or because of the enormity and frequency of these invasions, the fortifications failed to keep out the enemy invaders; during the fourth and fifth centuries, “barbarian” invaders almost completely overran the Empire.

Still, Roman fortifications remained the primary defensive strongholds of Europe during the early Middle Ages. There were several reasons for this. They were well constructed—built 10–14 feet (about 3–4.3 m) thick of cut facing stone over earth and stone rubble, and held together by concrete. New fortifications were expensive to build, and, perhaps most important, although least considered, the walls surrounding most of the Roman cities had actually protected their citizens quite well. Despite possessing what should have been adequate siege technology, the barbarians suffered some spectacular failures in attempting to take the towns of the Empire.

Most barbarian leaders refused to destroy the walls of a captured town unless they feared that the walls might harbor later resistance against them. The Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other barbarian occupiers of the western Empire did not add any town walls of their own. They did keep the existing walls in good repair. What the barbarian conquerors of the western Empire added instead of new town walls were rural fortifications, precursors of medieval castles. Details about these early castles are at best limited. There is not even any way of determining exactly how many were built in the early Middle Ages. They were largely earth-and-wood fortifications, sometimes referred to simply as ring-works; and because there was little stone construction involved, few archeological remains survive. They also did not often rely on walls or towers for their protection, but on the inaccessibility of their location. Many were built on high places, some on rocky promontories or isolated buttes. At other times, their defense was aided by a wall or rampart. Only rarely was this a stone wall; more frequently it was an earthen rampart crowned by stacked stones and wood. These castles also stood apart, and in some instances quite a distance apart, from the urban areas already defended by town walls, making them in effect the protectors of the rural regions of western Europe. Several were constructed to protect agricultural and economic centers, serving as refuges for farmers and other agricultural workers during times of war. Others were sanctuaries or ecclesiastical centers. However, many castles were built and controlled by wealthy individuals, and in these cases served as proto-feudal manors, both as residences for these “nobles” and as defenses for the people who worked on their nearby agricultural lands.

Motte and Bailey

These castles were especially important in the face of raiding forces, such as the Vikings or Hungarians, especially as these raiders were often not numerous or serious enough to undertake the effort to attack or besiege such a fortress. Alfred the Great thus found in his earth-and-wood burhs safety from Vikings invading his kingdom, while German and French marcher lords secured their borders from similar invasions with similar fortifications. Eventually these earth-and-wood fortifications were replaced by the motte-and-bailey castles. In its simplest form, the motte part of the motte-and-bailey castle was little more than a tall earthen mound topped by a superstructure of wood. The bailey was an enclosed yard, often quite large, surrounding the motte and separated from it by a ditch. As such, the motte-and-bailey castle provided protection to its inhabitants and potential refugees from the size of the bailey, the depth and width of the ditch and from the height of the mound. They were also not expensive to build, although the amount of labor needed to construct one would have been significant.

It was the Crusades that introduced European leaders and fortification builders to the styles, techniques, and uses of precipitous terrain as added defense that would become the characteristics of all high and late medieval fortifications. While by the time of the First Crusade Europeans had already been constructing castles in stone, William the Conqueror’s White Tower and Colchester Castle being two of the most famous of these structures, the paucity of wood in the Middle East necessitated that all Crusader fortifications be constructed in stone. Additionally, as so few Crusaders remained in their captured “kingdoms” after their initial conquests, with perhaps as many as one-half to two-thirds of those still alive at the fall of Jerusalem—estimated to be fewer than 25,000—returning to Europe, and few newer Crusading recruits taking their place, numerous fortifications needed to be built there. Scholars have been unable to put a definitive total on the number of castles that were built during the time of the Crusaders’ Middle Eastern occupation. However, it is clear that the number lies above one hundred, if not two hundred.

In deference to those fortifications being built in Europe at the same time, Crusader castles built in the countryside used the harshness and inaccessibility of the Middle Eastern terrain to add to the defensibility of the structures. These castles were built on the summits of precipitous crags or next to steep ravines. The Crusaders even fortified caves. Most castles had thick walls—usually more than 16 feet (5 m) in width—faced with large stones and intricate, well-defended entryways. They were also incredibly large, essentially castle complexes, able to shelter and provide all of the necessities of life for a large number of people for a long time. Because their inhabitants anticipated long sieges that might last until reinforcements could arrive from Europe, the castles were provided with reservoirs for water supply and large cellars for food storage. For example, at the castle of Margat it is estimated that there were sufficient food and water supplies to feed a garrison of one thousand men for five years.

It seems logical, although this logic can also be confirmed by empirical, archeological, and written evidence, that soldiers returning from the Crusades were deeply impressed by the security provided by the fortifications there, for only at the end of the Crusades, from the middle of the thirteenth century on, were these castles even threatened by enemy troops. Indeed, most Crusader castles withstood almost all attempts to attack or besiege them, with many surrendering only when the numbers of defenders inside fell so low as to make abandonment more prudent than resistance. These returning soldiers then transferred this fortification construction knowledge to Europe where it influenced the building of castles and urban fortifications for the remainder of the Middle Ages, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called “golden age” of medieval fortifications.

The construction of any medieval fortification was extremely expensive. Whether it was an earth-and-wood construction built using only the expense of forced labor, a large stone castle complex that served both as royal residence and fortification, or a town wall to extend around the urban area of even a small town, let alone a city the size of Bruges, Ghent, Milan, Florence, Naples, Paris, or Constantinople, such a construction was a major economic endeavor. Sometimes the cost of a medieval fortification is known, for example, the cost of Caernarvon Castle, built by Edward I in Wales at the end of the thirteenth century, is recorded as having cost the English king £20,000, with a total for all of his castle construction projects in Wales costing between £62,000 and £80,000. At other times, the expense can be seen from a more indirect means, such as the punishment so often levied by conquering generals of having the urban fortifications of a defeated town pulled down, the cost of rebuilding a perceptible deterrent against disputes with the conqueror.

These medieval fortifications, with their straight, tall stone walls, also did not fall easily. If those inside a fortification, whether a castle or a town, wanted to withstand an attacking army they generally did, and little could dissuade them from this determination. Attacking the walls of such fortresses was costly in terms of men and was generally only accomplished with the use of large numbers of artillery pieces and other siege machines, and generally also if there was no army friendly to the besieged that could bring relief. Thus time in these situations was very important; the army with time on its side usually won or lost the siege. Time also allowed conquest more frequently by the old means of mining, starvation, negotiation, or treachery. This meant that almost all sieges took a very long time to accomplish, if they were accomplished at all: Rome took ten years to fall in 410; Château Gaillard was besieged for more than a year in 1203–1204; Calais took nearly the same amount of time in 1346–1347; and Constantinople held out for almost a year in 1453; while Neuss did not fall after more than a year’s siege in 1474–1475. Additionally, despite the contrary thought prevailing, gunpowder weaponry did not alter this situation decisively, as the siege of Neuss, among others, proved.

Although castles continued to be built throughout the end of the Middle Ages, fortification builders began more and more to disregard the defensive aspects of the structure and to emphasize comfort and luxury in their place. A late medieval castle, now better described as a fortified residence, had to be architecturally beautiful. No longer would a simple, plain keep or a castle complex hidden behind huge and ugly walls suffice to meet the aesthetic demands of its owner. Defense was not entirely forgotten, however. Rural fortified residences often continued to be built in inaccessible places, and walls were still large, crenellated, and lined with towers. Nevertheless, most of these late medieval fortresses were no more than small-scale imitations of earlier fortifications, and even those meant to withstand foreign attack or to inhibit civil war could not compare with the castles built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Fortified residences were also built in towns, where wealthy individuals, both noble and non-noble, desired a security for their families and possessions similar to that of the rural castle.

Yet fortified residences were not the primary fortification construction of the late Middle Ages. This was instead the town wall. Before the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, few new town walls had been constructed. Even Paris, the largest and most populated town of western Europe, went without a complete enclosure until the mid-fourteenth century. By then, however, town governments had begun to recognize the need for new fortifications. Local violence, civil war, and foreign invasion all threatened the security and prosperity of those living within their boundaries. The solution to the problem was to build new walls surrounding the towns. Indeed, during the late Middle Ages so many towns built protective walls around their boundaries that by the end of the fifteenth century few notable population centers were without a sizeable fortification surrounding them.

See also Arms and armor; Catapults and trebuchets; Water supplies and sewerage

Bibliography

Bradbury, Jim. The Medieval Siege. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992.

Brown, R. Allen. English Castles. 3rd ed. London: B.T. Batsford, 1976.

Bur, Michel. Le château. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 79. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.

Coulson, Charles. Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DeVries, Kelly. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002; update, 2004.

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

Higham, Robert and Philip Barker. Timber Castles. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1995.

Kennedy, Hugh. Crusader Castles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kenyon, John R. Medieval Fortifications. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Pounds, N.J.G. The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Social and Political History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Taylor, Arnold. The Welsh Castles of Edward I. London: Hambledon Press, 1986.

Thompson, M.W. The Decline of the Castle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Thompson, M.W. The Rise of the Castle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Toy, Sydney. A History of Fortification from 3000 BC to AD 1700. London: W. Heinemann, 1955.

KELLY DE VRIES

Mineralogy

Mineralogy is usually believed to have begun in the early modern period, and the medieval study of minerals is often regarded as a “proto-mineralogy,” an unscientific discipline about the supposed properties of minerals, which included notions of petrography, crystallography, and metallurgy, as well as the study of such non-minerals as pearls, acids, and alcals. As a matter of fact, in the Middle Ages mineralogy was both descriptive and theoretical. Descriptive mineralogy consisted mostly of *lapidaries, lists of precious stones and metals with supposed medical or magical properties; moreover, descriptions of minerals were inserted into various *encyclopedias or *pharmaceutic handbooks. Theoretical mineralogy was mainly devoted to the geological question of the origin of minerals, and connected with mining, metallurgy, and *alchemy. Medieval accounts of the formation of minerals were usually given in organic terms, according to which minerals were fossil bodies, grown within the body of the Earth; their generation was ascribed to a sort of sexual process of fusion between two different substances. In medieval mineralogy extensive use was made of Greek and Latin sources: a key role was played by Book Five, Chapter Six of Aristotle’s Meteorology, according to which minerals are produced from earth and water in the subsoil through the action of two different exhalations, a dry one for stones and a moist one for metals. Other sources were Theophrastus’s and Xenocrates of Ephesos’s treatises on stones, Book Five of *Dioscorides’ Materia Medica, and books Thirty-three to Thirty-seven of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.

Mineralogy in the Near East

In the early Middle Ages, mineralogy aroused the interest of Near Eastern Christian scholars. Descriptions of stones and metals, in which the question of their formation was discussed according to Aristotle’s doctrine, are found in Syriac encyclopedic works such as James of Edessa’s Hexaemeron (seventh century) and Job of Edessa’s Book of Treasures (817 C.E.). *Pseudo-Aristotle’s De Lapidibus, a lapidary that won great success in medieval Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew literature, was probably composed in a Christian Arabic milieu in the ninth century.

Mineralogy was deeply studied in medieval Arabo-Islamic culture. Of course, many lapidaries were written dealing with gemmology and the use of precious stones in practical medicine and in magic, and special sections of medical and cosmographical encyclopedias were devoted to mineralogy (e.g. al-Qazwani’s treatment of stones in the thirteenth century); but there were also numerous writings dealing with minerals from a theoretical point of view.

Epistle Nineteen of the philosophical-scientific encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’), written in tenth-century Iraq, is probably the first systematic medieval Arabic treatise of mineralogy. According to it, Nature is the efficient cause, and planets are the formal causes of minerals. The Brethren divide minerals into two categories: those generated in the soil (sulfur and salts) or in the seabed (pearls and corals) in a short time (approximately one year), and metals, which are generated in several years in the bowels of the Earth, as a result of the fusion of mercury and sulfur. This doctrine, which is found also in thirteenth-century Hebrew science, was based on *Jabir ibn Hayyan’s and *al-Razi’s alchemical works, where “stones” and “bodies” (namely metals) were classified among minerals together with “spirits” (mercury, ammoniac, sulfur, etc.), vitriols, borax, and salts.

In eleventh-century Arabic literature, a detailed, often original, description of minerals is found in *al-Biruni’s Book of the Knowledge of Precious Stones, which also contains a table of their specific heights. Another important contribution to medieval Arabic mineralogy was made by *Ibn Sina, who devoted chapter five of the section On Meteorology and Minerals of his encyclopedia, The Cure, to the formation and classification of minerals. According to Ibn Sina, who re-elaborated the doctrine of Aristotle, minerals derive from different mixtures of water and earth: the strongest mixture, resulting from the action of dryness, produces “stones”; a less strong mixture, resulting from the action of heat and cold, produces “fusible substances,” namely metals; weak mixtures of water and earth produce either oily minerals, which are not easily soluble—i.e., “sulfurs”—or salty minerals, which are easily soluble—i.e., “salts.” Ibn Sina explains the formation of metals as a result of the fusion, in the bowels of the Earth, of two basic constituents, mercury and sulfur, having various degrees of purity and combustiveness. His work had great success: it was the key source for mineralogical treatments by the Arabic followers of Ibn Sina, as well as by the Syriac philosopher Gregory Bar Hebraeus (thirteenth century); in around 1200 it was translated into Latin with a commentary by *Alfred of Sareschel, and was added to the medieval Latin translation of Book Four of Aristotle’s Meteorology, thus being regarded as an unofficial Aristotelian treatment of mineralogy. Ibn Sina’s mineralogy seems to have had had no rival in later medieval Arabic philosophy.

Mineralogy in Europe

In Europe, a systematic theoretical study of minerals began mainly as a result of the translation and diffusion of Arabic mineralogical and alchemical works after 1200; but many lapidaries, in various languages including Latin, French, and Old English, existed long before this date. The most successful of them was that by Marbode of Rennes (eleventh century). Special sections about stones, where some reflections concerning the formation of minerals are found, were included in *Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of the Different Natures of Creatures (in which minerals are credited with medical and religious properties, even with life), as well as in twelfth- and thirteenth-century encyclopedic cosmologies by *Alexander Nequam, *Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and *Vincent of Beauvais. However, the most systematic treatment of mineralogy in the Latin Middle Ages, where the philosophical methods of *Scholasticism were applied, was *Albertus Magnus’s Book of Minerals. This work, based on Ibn Sina’s doctrine as interpreted in the light of Albertus’s personal reflection and experience, is divided into five books: Book One describes the general characteristics of “stones”; Book Two includes a traditional lapidary; Book Three deals with metals in general, while Book Four describes each of them; Book Five is devoted to what Albertus calls “middle bodies” (salts, vitriol, sulfurs, etc.). What is more significant in Albertus’s work is the application of the Aristotelian doctrine of causes to mineralogy: according to him, minerals should be studied by looking for their material, efficient, and formal causes, which he identifies in water and earth, heat and moisture, and what he calls the “mineral virtue,” respectively.

See also Alchemy; Aristotelianism; Lapidaries

Bibliography

Goltz, Dietlinde. Studien zur Geschichte der Mineralnamen in Pharmazie, Chemie und Medizin von den Anfängen bis Paracelsus. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972.

Holmyard, Eric J. and David C. Mandeville. Avicenna, De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum, being sections of the Kitab al-Shifa’. Paris: Geuthner, 1927.

Mieleitner, Karl. Zur Geschichte der Mineralogie im Altertum und im Mittelalter. Fortschritte der Mineralogie, Kristallographie und Petrographie (1922) 7: 427–480.

Nobis, Heribert M. “Der Ursprung der Steine: zur Beziehung zwischen Alchemie und Mineralogie im Mittelalter.” In Toward a History of Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry, edited by Bernhard Fritscher and Fergus Henderson. München: Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1998.

Wyckoff, Dorothy. Albertus Magnus’ Book of Minerals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Zonta, Mauro. Mineralogy, Botany and Zoology in Medieval Hebrew Encyclopaedias. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (1996) 6: 263–315.

MAURO ZONTA

Monsters

For medieval writers, the word “monster” (monstrum and its cognates) referred in the first instance to a human being or animal that deviated significantly from the form usual for its kind. Monsters included creatures with extra or missing parts, as well as conjoined twins, people of ambiguous sex, and beings that appeared to straddle the boundary between two animal species—between human and pig, for example, or between goat and ox. By extension, monsters also included human races of unfamiliar physiognomy, such as pygmies, people with dog’s heads, people with no head or one enormous foot, who where thought to inhabit Africa and Asia, on the fringes of what was for Europeans the known world. A third category of “monster” comprised dangerous species of animals, some of them apparent hybrids, such as the whale or the basilisk (a creature halfway between a rooster and a snake). What all these creatures had in common was their menacing nature; not only were they unusual and unfamiliar, but they were also objects of well-deserved fear. Pygmies were hostile to outsiders, while whales could swallow men alive, like Jonah, and the basilisk could kill a person with a glance.

The most frightening monsters of all, however, were animals and humans of unusual conformation, now commonly described in terms of “birth defects.” Understood as signs of God’s anger at sinful human behavior, these were interpreted as terrifying omens of his impending vengeance, presaging epidemics and devastating wars. Thus monsters were associated with the broader category of divine prodigies, inherited from Greek and Roman religion, which also included comets, earthquakes, celestial apparitions, and rains of blood. For centuries, medieval European chroniclers, moralists, and theologians were content to record the birth of such creatures for the edification and eventual reformation of their readers, as divine (or sometimes demonic) interventions in the natural order.

Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, European natural philosophers began to focus on secondary causes—chains of natural cause and effect—as part of the revival of Greek ideas concerning the natural world. Instead of attributing the existence of monstrous races, species, or even individuals to divine will or demonic action, they began to use principles from the works of *Galen and Aristotle, particularly their theories of *generation, to offer natural explanations for unusual creatures. Thus, for example, some argued that beings of intermediate sex (also known as “hermaphrodites”) should not be seen as judgments on human sinfulness; rather, they resulted when an animal’s internal complexion fell midway between hot (male) and cold (female), or when the father’s seed did not succeed in “mastering” the seed or matter contributed by the mother. Similarly, conjoined twins were born when the maternal matter was more than enough for one fetus but not enough for two. At the same time, they debated the theological status of the so-called monstrous human races, concluding for the most part that they lacked fully rational human souls.

The most difficult types of monster to explain were apparent hybrids between different animal species or between humans and animals; these were generally interpreted as the products of interspecies sex—a contravention of the natural order itself seen as deserving of divine punishment. In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle had denied the possibility of such hybrids, arguing that crosses between significantly dissimilar species were naturally impossible, because their gestation periods were too unlike; thus creatures that appeared to be hybrids must spring from some other cause. *Albertus Magnus was the first medieval writer to explore this and other problems concerning the generation of monsters in detail. Like Aristotle, he argued that hybrids did not arise from mixing two kinds of seed, but were produced when the father’s seed was too weak to shape the matter supplied by the mother. Instead, like an arrow that missed its target, it might produce a child that did not resemble its father at all. In some cases, he argued, the influence of an animal constellation, such as Taurus or Pisces, might substitute for the formative power missing from the father’s seed, producing the effect of bull or fish.

Not everyone was convinced by this explanation, however, and other accounts of such hybrids were proposed. In the second half of the fourteenth century, for example, *Nicole Oresme proposed a variant on Albertus’s theory, rejecting the astrological explanation and substituting for it a causal account based on the order of the formation of the fetus. According to Aristotle (in an early version of the phylogenetic principle), this developed sequentially in the course of gestation, progressing from inanimate mass to plant to animal to human status. Oresme speculated that the fetus might also progress by smaller steps through all the species of animal. Thus if the father’s seed was too weak to push the entire body of the fetus to the appropriate stage for its species, the offspring might resemble a lower animal in whole or in part; in this way, for example, a sow might give birth to something that looked partly like a dog. Later natural philosophers continued to refine these kinds of explanations to produce ever more nuanced natural explanations of unusual births.

These late medieval attempts to demystify monsters formed part of a broader philosophical movement to rethink the physical world in terms of natural regularities, if not yet in terms of natural laws. These regularities, instilled by God in His Creation, made the world at least in part predictable and amenable to scientific exploration. This permitted authors such as Albertus Magnus and Oresme to distinguish phenomena with natural causes from demonic interventions and divine miracles. Although natural philosophers and theologians continued to debate the exact location of the boundary between these two realms, the result was dramatically to expand the former. Rather than being the frighteningly unpredictable product of daily intervention by God and other supernatural intelligences, monsters, like most other natural phenomena, reflected causal regularities that were subject to human understanding if not human control.

See also Aristotelianism; Miracle; Religion and science; Zoology

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Albertus Magnus. On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. Translated and annotated by Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Gerald of Wales. History and Topography of Ireland. Translated by John J. O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Liber monstrorum. Edited and translated into Italian by Franco Porsia. Bari: Dedalo, 1976.

Oresme, Nicole. “De causis mirabilium.” In Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: A Study of his De causis mirabilium with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1985.

The Benedictine abbey at the summit of the 1,703 feet (519 m) Monte Cassino in central Italy. (Corbis/Bettmann)

Secondary Sources

Céard, Jean. La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 1977.

Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750. New York: Zone, 1998.

Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Rousset Paul. Le sens du merveilleux à l’époque féodale. Le Moyen Age (1956) 62: 25–37.

Wittkower, Rudolf. Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1942) 5: 159–197.

KATHARINE PARK

Monte Cassino

Around 529 C.E., the abbey of Monte Cassino was founded by St. Benedict of Nursia on a craggy hilltop overlooking the valley of the Garigliano near Naples. The importance of this foundation for medieval religious history is enormous but beyond our purview. However, the role of Monte Cassino in intellectual history is grounded in the religious life of the monastery.

Benedict’s own life was typical for a late antique nobleman: he studied the liberalia studia: grammar, rhetoric, and law. Like Gregory the Great and Caeserius of Arles, Benedict was ambivalent about secular studies; he knew he needed a certain amount of study to be able to devote himself to his true goal, the lectio divina, as it came to be called. Each monk, following Benedict’s foundational rule, was required to read one codex each Lenten season. Consequently, the monastery had to possess books—at least one for each monk present—and the monks needed to know how to write them and to read them. Because of this provision, Monte Cassino became an intellectual center with school, scriptorium and library. At the same time, in the Roman world outside the monastery, intellectual life was moribund if not in serious decline. As Reynolds and Wilson put it: “It was the monastic centers which were destined, often in spite of themselves, to play the major part in preserving and transmitting what remained of pagan antiquity.” While Monte Cassino itself was of only limited importance for the copying and preserving of pagan literature, it inaugurated this important practice, required by its rule, which led other monasteries to follow its example.

In spite of this tradition, very few manuscripts of scientific interest survive from the early Middle Ages: from the sixth century we have only remnants of the Natural History of Pliny. Some other texts, most notably Macrobius’s Somnun Scipionis, must have been preserved, but we do not know where or by whom they were copied. Despite this lack of surviving texts, there is evidence that Monte Cassino has been a center of medical practice in the sixth century utilizing pagan medical texts. Monte Cassino was itself in an oft-contested area and was destroyed in 580 and 883 C.E. After both destructions, the monastery was abandoned for long periods.

However, as Reynolds and Wilson have stated: “The most dramatice single event in the history of Latin scholarship in the eleventh century was the phenomenal revival of Monte Cassino.” The resurgence of Monte Cassino seems to have begun in 1058: at the start of that year its former abbot, Frederick, was Pope, Desiderius became the new abbot, and in the second half of the year the Norman rulers of south Italy extended their power over the abbey and its lands, Robert Guiscard becoming its protector. Guiscard’s benefactions greatly enriched the abbey, allowing it to become the premier monastic house in all of Italy: his generosity to the abbey was eighteen times the amount he proffered to the Papacy! With this level of support, the monastery was able to support a wide range of scholarly activities. Under the abbacy of Desiderius (1058–1087), the most important figure in the history of science at Monte Cassino flourished: *Constantine the African. Like the translators who later worked in Norman Sicily, Constantine introduced his own versions of Arabic science to the Latin West. A native of North Africa (one tradition suggests Tunis), Constantine, who was probably a convert from Islam, became aware of the paucity of medical texts in the Norman lands. His contribution to Western medicine has been characterized by McVaugh as “the most extensive and important group of texts… which for the first time communicated the expanded Arabic medical tradition.” This group of texts included his own works as well as translations of *Galen, *Hippocrates, Haly Abbas (*Ali ibn al-Abbas), *Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and others. His translating was not woodenly literal, as much of the medical corpus was, but instead was filled with explanatory expansions to aid those unfamiliar with the Arabic tradition. His influence was felt not only at Monte Cassino and nearby *Salerno where there was a circle of scholars related to him, but also in Sicily, Spain, and at Montpellier.

After this high point the monastery declined in the twelfth century as serious and talented monks began to join more austere and reformist orders. As a consequence, Monte Cassino did not become a beacon of medical study as Salerno and Montpellier did.

Bibliography

Bloch, Herbert. Montecassino in the Middle Ages. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Cowdrey, H.E.J. The Age of the Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the Normans in the Eleventh and early Twelfth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Lecercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. New York: Fordham University Press, 1961.

Lindberg, David L. The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Loud, G.A. Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest. London: Longman, 2000.

Newton, Francis. The Scriptorium and Library of Monte Cassino, 1058–1105. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Reynolds, L.D. and N.G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

MICHAEL C. WEBER

Music Theory

In the Middle Ages, the term musica chiefly referred to the theoretical exploration of music rather than to the object itself. Basically, there were two ways of exploring music, only one of which can be said to have been part of the history of sciences. On the one hand, music theory introduced the practice of music (musica practica). On the other hand, music theory developed as a mathematical discipline (musica theorica or musica speculativa). Both variants had their origin in antiquity, but with *Boethius’s De musica the standard text for the medieval musica theorica had been established.

Boethius was the first author to assign music theory to an ensemble of mathematical sciences that he named the *quadrivium, and which encompassed *arithmetic, music theory, geometry, and astronomy. The concept was pedagogically motivated and influenced by Pythagorean and Platonic ideas. While geometry and astronomy dealt with continuous quantity (either immobile or mobile), arithmetic and music dealt with discrete quantity, i.e., number, either per se or as related to another number (ratios).

Referring to a string as a unit, any interval could be expressed through numerical ratios. The octave (2:1), for example, resounds if one hits the half in relation to the whole string. The Tetraktys—the numbers 1 2 3 4 or 6 8 9 12, that represented octave, fifth, fourth, and whole tone—was taken as an axiomatic point of departure (illustrated by the Pythagoras legend) from which all other intervals were deduced exclusively through arithmetical principles: whole numbers, addition and subtraction. The relationship between number and sound was vague. It is clear, however, that numbers were not simply understood as a theoretical means that would help to explain nature. The whole tone, for example, could not be divided into two equal halves because this division could not be expressed through arithmetical means.

Musica theorica was not subject to any significant changes during the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Instead, music theorists concentrated on the explanation of musica practica, i.e., plainchant and organum. With the reception of Aristotelian *logic, however, the subject of music theory was reconsidered. Indeed, the discussion started within the commentaries on Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora by *Robert Grosseteste (1170–1253) and *Robert Kilwardby (1215–1279). Only now, a consistent subject was to be constructed.

At this time the quadrivium, while still an oft-used term, was dissolving into a much more complex network of sciences (for example represented by the arts faculties of the early *universities). Within the actual lectures, music theory obviously played a marginal role, although there exists some evidence that it was taught. The subject of music theory as well as its place within the system of sciences was now described referring to the related concepts of either subalternatio (Grosseteste and Kilwardby) or scientia media (*Thomas Aquinas). These concepts described the position of the music-theoretical subject between arithmetic and physics confirming its subordination to arithmetic. They led to a more precise definition of the subject which was now called numerus sonorous or numerus relatus ad sonum.

Acoustics

Soon after the articulation and definition of the numerus sonorus (most comprehensively by Jacques de Liège c. 1330), however, authors such as *Thomas Bradwardine and Johannes Boen (d. 1367) questioned the fundamental decision about this subject. They could not understand why the whole tone could not be divided into two equal halves since sound was a continuum. For them, numerical ratios apparently were a means to explain natural phenomena; their concept of the subject of music was fundamentally different and could have yielded a quantitative acoustics had it been applied consequently. However, it was only Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) who scrutinized the Pythagoras legend, discovering that the deduction of the ratios from the weight of hammers would not work acoustically.

Yet, there was an acoustics in the Middle Ages, and it formed part of natural philosophy. In a highly abbreviated way, Boethius had absorbed many elements of classical acoustics and even went beyond that. He defined sound as “vibration [percussio] of air which is unresolved up to the ear,” and considered the relationship between the tension of a string, its speed of reverberation, and the height of the resulting sound. This observation seemed to be the basis of his music theory, for, he argued, one could relate one sound to another (higher or lower) sound using numerical ratios because of those vibrations. However, the way his treatise developed did not follow this idea but preferred the simpler model of the monochord. It was not until the twelfth-century “Renaissance” in France and Italy put new life into natural philosophy that acoustical questions were resumed. Authors including *Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Chartres, *William of Conches, and the anonymous writer of the Salernitan Questions dealt with phenomena such as echo, sound’s penetration of walls or the behavior of bells. Often acoustic theories depended on the theory of visual rays. In the early thirteenth century, Grosseteste developed his highly original theory of sound in which he described it as “encapsulated light.”

Meanwhile John Blund (c. 1175–1248) had initiated the tradition of De anima-commentaries. Despite its originality, his interpretation (which considered psychological factors of consonance perception) was not continued by later authors. However, a framework was established within which acoustical theories began to unfold. Elaborating on Aristotelian thought, including its Arabic interpretations by *Ibn Sina and *Ibn Rushd, they developed mostly within commentaries on De anima as well as De sensu et sensato, De caelo, and the spurious Problemata. These commentaries (by, among others, *Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, *Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus), and *John Buridan) discussed the generation of sound, its medium, its ontological status, its reception (focusing on multiplicatio specierum, a theory about the distribution of sense objects), whether celestial bodies can produce sound and so on (the physiology of the ears only later being considered). With the formation of the universities, this tradition persisted well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It can be observed that its regional center shifted from Oxford and Paris to Bologna and Padua in the second half of the fourteenth century. *Pietro d’Abano’s commentary on the Problemata can be considered as an important source foreshadowing this shift.

Thus, acoustical theories were hardly developed in texts that would be considered as music theory. Of course, a certain influence can be detected in the works of *Jean de Meurs, Jacques de Liège and others. Most original in that sense were the Questiones musice from late-fourteenth-century Italy, which were only received by Ugolino de Orvieto (1380–1452) in the fifteenth century. The separation between music theory and acoustics became plausible by a comparison of music theory and optics. Only music theory was part of the quadrivium. Thus, Kilwardby asked why optics was not considered a fifth mathematical discipline. He emphasized the relation of its subjects (eye, visual rays, and the visible) to natural philosophy rather than mathematics. Although optics is in some sense subordinate to geometry, this subalternatio differs from that of music to arithmetic. While music theory considers number as such, optics does not consider the straight line as such but as the representation of a physical entity only. Thus, while optics included geometrical methods in order to explain natural phenomena, music theory referred to natural phenomena in order to apply arithmetical facts. Music theory does principally exclude natural phenomena which are not related to arithmetic. These elements were subjects of acoustics. Thus, the sciences dealing with sound fell into two disciplines: music theory and acoustics (as a sub-discipline of natural philosophy).

In spite of this separation yet another form of acoustics developed within musical writings, first of English, then of Italian origin. It obviously developed from musical practice and considered intervals that did not fit the Pythagorean tuning. The earliest source describing this phenomenon is the treatise of Theinred of Dover (twelfth century). In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century Walter Odington (c. 1260–1346) explained that some singers used the ratios 5:4 and 6:5 for the major and minor thirds respectively. These are the first signs of the emergence of a discourse on interval ratios that were designed to find tunings which helped to avoid the practical shortcomings of the Pythagorean. Only in the fifteenth century were new tunings, temperaments, and interval divisions proposed at greater length. Unlike the authors of musica theorica, most authors of this tradition were also composers. They included Ugolino de Orvieto, Ramis de Pareia, and Franchinus Gaffurio. Thanks to these and other authors, practical acoustics had become an advanced topic of music theory in its broader sense. However, it must not be seen as a further stage of musica theorica but rather as another discipline. Hence the first sources of an acoustics in the modern sense can be found precisely beyond the scientific borders of musica theorica.

Influence of Exact Sciences on Music Theory

By the thirteenth century musica practica embraced in addition to the theory of plainchant a rather complex theory of rhythm and notation (musica mensurabilis) as well as a theory of counterpoint. These, of course, were practical disciplines. However, they deserve mention here as they were influenced by Aristotelian concepts of time and motion. This impact was very strong on authors such as Jean de Meurs and Jacques de Liège. Indeed, it has not only been suggested that Jean’s theory of rhythm needs to be interpreted along the lines of scientia media but also that he was influenced by the mathematicians of Merton College, Oxford.

Such intersections are not surprising. Most of the theoretical musical treatises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are either anonymous or can be related to persons about whom hardly anything is known. However, there is at least some biographical evidence about two authors whose writing included musica theorica. Both reveal strong ties to scientific research in other fields. Walter Odington was also astronomer and especially known for his alchemical treatise Icocedron, and Jean de Meurs was just as important in the fields of geometry and astronomy as in music theory. Also, investigation of the scientific network in which Jean de Meurs was embedded has revealed connections with *Nicole Oresme.

There was also influence toward the opposite direction. It has been claimed that music theory influenced structures of philosophical and scientific argumentation. What is more, music theory took the place of an ideal of order. Indeed, the purpose of musica theorica can be seen in its function to demonstrate the idea of cosmos, harmony, and order that was essential also for natural philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics. Jacques de Liège’s Musica coelestis described the harmony of Aristotle’s categories, and Thomas Aquinas referred to ideas of harmony when explaining the possibility of experience. Hence the importance of musica mundana.

See also Aristotelianism; Arithmetic; Astronomy, Islamic; Astronomy, Latin; Logic; Nature: diverse medieval interpretations; Optics and catoptrics; Scientia

Bibliography

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Lindley, Mark. Fifteenth-century Evidence for Meantone Temperament. Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1975/6) 102: 37.

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Münxelhaus, Barbara. Pythagoras Musicus: Zur Rezeption der pythagoreischen Musiktheorie als quadrivialer Wissenschaft im lateinischen Mittelalter. Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1976.

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Sachs, Klaus-Jürgen. Mensura Fistularum. Die Mensurierung der Orgelpfeifen im Mittelalter. 2 vols. Murrhardt: Musikwissenschaftliche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1970–1980.

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Tanay, Dorit Esther. Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation, 1250-1400. Holzgerlingen: American Institute of Musicology; Hänssler Verlag, 1999.

Taschow, Ulrich. Die Bedeutung der Musik als Modell für Nicole Oresmes Theorie. Early Science and Medicine (1999) 4: 37–90.

Wittmann, Michael. Vox atque Sonus. Studien zur Rezeption der Aristotelischen Schrift “De anima” und ihre Bedeutung für die Musiktheorie. 2 vols. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1987.

FRANK HENTSCHEL

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