ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Multiplicity of Medieval Editions: Digital Approaches to the “Middle Books” of Astronomy

• In Event: DH in the History of Premodern Sciences 2

English Abstract

In the medieval Islamicate world, the "Middle Books" (Kutub al-Mutawassiṭāt) were a corpus of mathematical and astronomical treatises so-named because they were the works to be read between Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest. The original core of this curricular canon was a series of ancient Greek works translated into Arabic in the ninth century CE, and evidence suggests that the Middle Books grouping already existed in the lifetimes of their translators.

The Middle Books were not static over the subsequent centuries: rather, their didactic usage motivated the addition of new works to the grouping as well as the production of new editions of the component texts. The renowned astronomer Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī notably produced his own edition of the Middle Books in the thirteenth century, and he was not the only scholar to transform these texts.

This talk presents how methods from the digital humanities support research with the full multiplicity of the versions of the Middle Books extant across Arabic manuscript collections. Machine-learning tools like custom segmentation and handwritten text recognition (HTR) models facilitate working with the mathematical texts and diagrams at scale, even including treatises which lack modern critical editions. Text alignment algorithms and other approaches find areas of overlap and points of departure between different manuscript texts, quantifying the transformations seen in different editions. Through these investigative tools, we can illuminate the transformations throughout the Middle Books tradition; in these transformations, we find contemporary scholarly and/or pedagogical contributions to the study of astronomy throughout the medieval Islamicate world.

Author

• Christine M. Roughan, Princeton University