Abraham Ibn Ezra was “reborn” in the Latin West in the last decades of the thirteenth century thanks to a plethora of authored and anonymous Latin translations of his astrological writings. The present volume offers the first critical edition, accompanied by an English translation, a commentary, and an introductory study, of Liber nativitatum (Book of Nativities) and Liber Abraham Iudei de nativitatibus (Book on Nativities by Abraham the Jew), two astrological treatises in Latin that were written by Abraham Ibn Ezra or attributed to him, and whose Hebrew source-text or archetype has not survived. The first is undoubtedly an anonymous Latin translation of the second version of Ibn Ezra’s Sefer ha-moladot (Book of Nativities), whose Hebrew source text is otherwise lost. The second is the most mysterious specimen among the Latin works attributed to Ibn Ezra that have no extant Hebrew counterpart. The present volume shows not only that the Liber Abraham Iudei de nativitatibus underwent a significant metamorphosis over time and was transmitted in four significantly different versions, but also that its date of composition is not that previously accepted by modern scholarship. "These volumes represent a major achievement in the history of medieval astrology and it is no wonder that they have already become classics, often referred to by specialists in the field, including by this reviewer." -David Juste, Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus, Munich, Journal for the History of Astronomy 51 (I) (2020)

The present volume offers the first critical edition, accompanied by an English translation, a commentary, and an introductory study, of the Liber electionum, the Liber interrogationum, and the Tractatus particulares, written by or attributed to Abraham Ibn Ezra.

The present volume focuses on Henry Bate, the first scholar to bring Ibn Ezra’s astrological work to the knowledge of Latin readers, and offers critical editions of all six of Henry Bate’s complete translations of Ibn Ezra’s astrological writings.

This volume makes available two hitherto unpublished Latin texts on astronomical tables, written by Abraham Ibn Ezra and Robert of Chester, which together shed new light on the mid-twelfth-century assimilation of Graeco-Arabic mathematical astronomy in Christian Europe.

In On Both Sides of the Strait of Gibraltar Julio Samsó shows that astronomical sources, written in al-Andalus, the Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula, belong to the same tradition and emphasizes the role of al-Andalus and the Iberian Peninsula in the transmission of Islamic astronomy to medieval Europe.

In the year 921/2, the Jewish leaders of Palestine and Babylonia disagreed on how to calculate the calendar. This led the Jews of the entire Near East to celebrate Passover and the other festivals, through two years, on different dates. The controversy was major, but it became forgotten until its late 19th-century rediscovery in the Cairo Genizah. Faulty editions of the texts, in the following decades, led to much misunderstanding about the nature, leadership, and aftermath of the controversy. In this book, Sacha Stern re-edits the texts completely, discovers many new Genizah sources, and challenges the historical consensus. This book sheds light on early medieval Rabbanite leadership and controversies, and on the processes that eventually led to the standardization of the medieval Jewish calendar.

Originally written in Hebrew by Ibn Ezra, "The Beginning of Wisdom" is one of the most important of the basic medieval texts of astrology. It serves as the backbone to an extensive textbook of astrology by Ibn Ezra, which also included "The Book of Reasons, The Book of Nativities," and others.

This work is a complete English translation of the Latin Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville (c.560–636). Isidore compiled the work between c.615 and the early 630s and it takes the form of an encyclopedia, arranged by subject matter. It contains much lore of the late classical world beginning with the Seven Liberal Arts, including Rhetoric, and touches on thousands of topics ranging from the names of God, the terminology of the Law, the technologies of fabrics, ships and agriculture to the names of cities and rivers, the theatrical arts, and cooking utensils. Isidore provides etymologies for most of the terms he explains, finding in the causes of words the underlying key to their meaning. This book offers a highly readable translation of the twenty books of the Etymologies, one of the most widely known texts for a thousand years from Isidore's time.

Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health was composed at an unknown date at the request of al-Malik al-Afḍal Nūr al-Dīn Alī, Saladin’s eldest son who complained of constipation, indigestion, and depression. The treatise must have enjoyed great popularity in Jewish circles, as it was translated three times into Hebrew as far as we know; by Moses ben Samuel ibn Tibbon in the year 1244, by an anonymous translator, and by Zeraḥyah ben Isaac ben She’altiel Ḥen who was active as a translator in Rome between 1277 and 1291. The present edition by Gerrit Bos contains the original Arabic text, the medieval Hebrew translations and the Latin translations, the latter edited by Michael McVaugh.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this long sixteenth century, from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed.