ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Loud Manuscripts vs. Quiet Texts: Traditions of Euclid’s Elements in the Post-Classical Islamicate World

• In Event: Pluralizing the Heritage: Ancient Authors Between Transmission, Contestation, and Reinvention

English Abstract

The transmission of Euclid’s Elements in Arabic from Greece to Europe has been the subject of intense historical investigation and debate by historians, mathematicians, and philologists since at least the 19th century. However, modern historiography still all-too-often continues to study these Arabic manuscripts as either Greek texts or as mathematical texts that can be abstracted from the culture that produced them. In this talk, I use the Arabic manuscript traditions of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry (his Uṣūl al-handasah) as a case study in intra-Islamicate world genealogies of knowledge and post-classical (~1250-1800) epistemology. By looking at these later and more numerous post-classical manuscripts, we see many diverse traditions of mathematics that had increasingly little to do with Euclid, despite often being cataloged as such. Marginalia and expansive traditions of commentary reveal that mathematicians and scholars debated not only individual proofs but also methods and standards of proof, both from ancient Greek authorities, which they often deemed inadequate, and other “modern” Islamic authorities. I argue that in the post-classical period (as opposed to the classical period), Arabic mathematics continued to evolve enmeshed in distinctly non-Greek, post-Avicennan epistemologies of mathematics with shared epistemic and discursive practices with the Islamic “rational” sciences (i.e., rational theology, jurisprudence, dialectic, logic, etc.). Ultimately, I show that these were dynamic, generative, and polyphonic traditions of knowledge that were productive on their own terms.

Author

• Julia Tomasson, Rice University