Gerard of Cremona. New Perspectives.

The reason for organising a conference on Gerard of Cremona is that a number of discoveries have been made about his scholarly activities in recent years. Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) has long been known as the most prolific translator from Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages. He translated over 70 scientific and philosophical texts, in the fields of logic, geometry, astronomy, natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy and divination, among which his greatest achievements are perhaps the translations of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Avicenna’s Canon.

However, recent research conducted at Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus has shown that Gerard was not only a translator, but also an author, a commentator and a revisor of previous translations. The starting point was the discovery by Stefan Georges that Gerard produced a massive commentary on the Almagest. This discovery in turn led to the identification of similar commentaries on Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Centiloquium, and there are reasons to suspect that the same was done for other texts yet to be identified. We can also confirm earlier suggestions that Gerard revised and corrected preexisting translations, by Plato of Tivoli and others. Finally, in 2023, Stefan Zieme showed that in his translation of the Almagest, Gerard did not simply adopt the numerical tables as they appeared in his Arabic models, but recalculated them.

These new perspectives invite us to reconsider Gerard’s scientific activity as a whole and to highlight his multifaceted scholarly endeavours.

Organisation and Contacts

David Juste (djuste@ptolemaeus.badw.de)
Colette Dufossé (cdufosse@ptolemaeus.badw.de)

Participation 

Free Entrance, no registration required. More information can be found on the conference flyer.