ABSTRACT
In a recent paper Paul Kunitzsch has explicitly formulated the hypothesis of a relation between the works on the astrolabe made by Maslama al-Majriti and his disciples and the interest in this instrument which is clear in the early Arabic-Latin translations made in Catalonia towards the end of the tenth century. Kunitzsch has proved that this attribution has no basis and that a part, at least, of the materials contained in the pseudo-Masha’allah’s treatise derive from Maslama’s school; this leads us to interpret that the similarities between the pseudo-Masha’allah’s treatises and the “Old Corpus” should be considered as a result of the use, by our early translators, of sources related to the school of Maslama. Some more evidence can be found in the treatise De mensura astrolabii which explains, in a confused way, how to project stars on the rete of an astrolabe.
