ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to recover a wide range of scholars in Renaissance Europe who struggled to locate, translate, and interpret Byzantine science and who contributed to a general conception of science in the period. It examines Nikephorus Gregoras and his text on the astrolabe as a case study that draws attention to the place of Byzantine science in Renaissance Europe. Gregoras and the other Byzantine astronomers appear in Edward Sherburne's "Catalogue of most eminent astronomers" less for the content of their work and more because of the social and intellectual ideals at play in Renaissance Europe, ideals that stretched back to the late fifteenth century. For sixteenth-century scholars, Byzantium represented a font of scientific knowledge and information distinct from classical Greek sources. Renaissance thinkers sought, read, translated, and published Byzantine texts because they offered a linguistically pure tradition and because they provided a means to assert and reinforce their own identity.
