ABSTRACT
On the move from his birthplace in Cremona, a wandering scholar by the name of Gerard settled down in recently reconquered Toledo in or about 1140 and translated from Arabic into Latin, first, the Almagest and then, over four decades, seventy more works of Greek or ‘Islamic’ provenance. Until then, nature-knowledge in medieval Europe had been confined to texts stemming from the effort at simplified translation of selected portions of the Greek corpus that had been undertaken from Cicero to Boethius (p. 31). These texts survived in the few centers of learning that managed to hold their own in Western Europe once this partly Romanized, thinly populated, raiders-battered region was cut off by the early Islamic conquests from its center, the Mediterranean, and found itself willy-nilly compelled to set off on a path of its own.
