The Impact of Arabic Sources on European Astrology: Some Facts and Numbers By David Juste

https://www.academia.edu/105229354/The_Impact_of_Arabic_Sources_on_European_Astrology_Some_Facts_and_Numbers?nav_from=6ab83906-510d-4f38-b4da-bd449991d358 Towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the Speculum astronomiae offered to its readers the most complete, accurate and detailed bibliography of the science of the stars to date. The authorunknown to us, because he deliberately concealed his identity-provided authorship, title and incipit of no less than 80 treatises, of which 21 deal with astronomy and 59 with astrology (including astral magic). Among these 59 astrological works, 26 (44 %) are unambiguously Arabic in origin 1. This, of course, does not come as a surprise, as it has long been acknowledged that Arabic sources formed an essential part of medieval European astrology. But the question I would like to address here is how this figure compares with the facts. As far as I am aware, no systematic evaluation of the impact of Arabic sources on any field of European learning has been conducted. Such an evaluation will be attempted here for astrology. This will be done on the basis of the 50 most popular works available in Latin before c. 1500 A.D. These works will be classified according to origin (Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin), author, date and topic, and their popularity measured by the number of extant manuscripts.