Item 7: Ptolemy, Almagest (Latin Translation from Arabic by Gerard of Cremona)

This little-known treasure of the State Library of Victoria has recently attracted fresh scholarly attention. Many of the works of philosophy and science written by Greek scholars were only re-introduced into the West in the 12th and 13th centuries through contact made with the Arab world where they had been respectfully preserved for centuries.

In the second half of the 12th century in Toledo, Gerard of Cremona made a translation from the Arabic of the Almagest, the classic work on mathematical astronomy written by Ptolemy about 150 AD. This early copy of Gerard’s translation was written in the north of Italy and later housed in the library of San Marco in Florence. Its dense text is elegantly written and accompanied by equally elegant diagrams and tables of the movements of the planets, some of which are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. The ornamentation of the text focused on its clear articulation, and is indicative of the quality of this finely crafted manuscript. Sections are signalled by a system of finely pen-flourished initials and paragraph markers, while the foliate initials introducing the summaries and opening chapters of the 13 books are framed against raised gold grounds.

Scholar Charles Burnett has recently shown that this translation draws on the two known 9th-century Arabic versions of the Almagest, and that the revision of certain passages appearing in the margins are based on the alternative text. He also comments that the addition of several short supplementary works in a 14th-century hand indicates the continuing use of the manuscript by ‘mathematicians of the highest calibre’.