ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Parisian Alfonsine Tables in North-Eastern Italy: Evidence from the MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 10268

• In Event: Tabular Practices and the Cross-cultural Exchange of Knowledge in Ancient in Medieval Astronomy 3

English Abstract

The manuscript Munich, BSB, Clm 10268 preserves the earliest surviving illustrated copy of the long version of Michael Scot’s Liber introductorius, a 13th introduction to the astral sciences divided into three parts (i.e. Liber quatuor distinctionum, Liber particularis and Liber physionomie) and dedicated to Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. The manuscript’s origin in Padua during the first half of the 14th century can be regarded as the consensus of recent scholarship, which considers the stylistic connections to Bologna as well as to Rimini to be entirely plausible (Blume, Haffner, Metzger 2016). Its date of production is placed between about 1320 (Thorndike 1961; Edwards 1978) and 1340 (Bauer 1983). In 1961, Lynn Thorndike noticed beneath the text on f. 76va a marginal addition consisting of tables for the mean motion of the sun, moon, and other planets for the beginning of the Christian era and for the year 1320. These tables are found in the section of the Liber quatuor distinctionum which includes the Theorica planetarum attributed to Gerard of Cremona (Vescovini 1996), and which is introduced by the statement “The Theorica planetarum is not of our own compilation. Rather, we have borrowed it and placed it in this work for the benefit of those who are concerned with determining the positions of the planets” (f. 74r). In this talk, I will show that the table of radices in Clm 10268, appears to have been computed from the Parisian Alfonsine Tables for the meridian of Paris, albeit with a few scribal errors. This discovery provides evidence for the circulation of the Parisian Alfonsine Tables as early as the first half of the 14th century in North-Eastern Italy, and offers a unique insight into the integration of the Alfonsine computational framework within the transmission of a work rooted in the pre-Alfonsine, Toledan tradition.

Author

• Eleonora Andriani, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin