Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
through Isidore's writings. If Isidore deserves a place in this history, it is not on account of
the originality or correctness - by today's standards - of his cosmological views. However,
he was part of a tradition that has some scientific merit. To judge from his specification that
the wind is a cause of evaporation, Isidore's hydrologic and meteorologic descriptions were
inspired indirectly by those of Lucretius; they are thus related to the views of the earlier
atomists Demokritos and Leukippos, rather than those of Aristotle.
14.3.3 The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance
These prevailing concepts in natural philosophy remained roughly the same until the begin-
ning of the thirteenth century, when Aristotle's philosophical works began to draw greater
attention in Western Europe. The Latin translations of these works were derived from Greek
originals, as a result of intensified contacts with Constantinople during the crusades, and
from Arabic translations mostly in Moorish Spain (see Jourdain, 1960; Peters, 1968). In
contrast to Western Europe, where his theories had somehow been overlooked until then,
possibly as a result of the emphasis on Epicureanism and Stoicism among the Romans,
in the Arab world Aristotle had been held in high esteem once his works had become
available in translation. This is witnessed by the fact (cf. Mieli, 1966; pp 95, 102) that the
famous philosophers Al-Farabi (d. 950) from Turkestan, and the Iranian Ibn-Sina (“Avi-
cenna,” 980-1037) have also been called the second and the third master, respectively,
after Aristotle. The history of Aristotle's theories in the Arabic world, their subsequent
acceptance by the Latins, and their eventual penetration into the vernacular, make for some
fascinating reading. In the case of the
Meteorologica
, the first three topics were translated
early on from a partly abbreviated and corrupted Arabic version by Gerardus Cremonensis
(d. 1187), and the fourth topic, which does however not deal with meteorologic phenom-
ena, directly from Greek by Henricus Aristippus [d. 1162] (Grabmann, 1916). Roughly a
century later, around 1260, a more faithful version of the first three topics was produced
from the original Greek by Guillelmus de Morbeka (Willem van Moerbeke,
c
. 1215-1286)
(Brams and Vanhamel, 1989). As a result, in the course of the thirteenth century, copies
of these Latin translations started to appear in Western Europe, and gradually made their
influence felt. Also, not long after the Latin translation by Willem, toward the end of the
thirteenth century a Norman cleric, Mahieu le Vilain, made a translation of the
Meteoro-
logica
into the French vernacular. An indication of the tremendous influence Aristotle's
works must have had, is the fact that for the period between 1200 and 1650 Lohr (1967-
1973) lists more than 85 commentaries on the
Meteorologica
, some of them by famous
scholars like Alfred of Sareshel (1988), Albertus Magnus, Thomas de Aquino, Johannes
Buridanus, Nicholaus Oresme, Themo Judaei de Monasterio (Munster) and others (see also
Thorndike, 1954; 1955; Ducos, 1998). Aristotle's influence continued for the next three
centuries and at the height of the Renaissance European literature had become fully imbued
with many of his physical theories. These theories served not merely as physical explana-
tions, but they were also used as a rich source of metaphors and poetic imagery (Heninger,
1960).
But while Aristotle's ideas were ubiquitous and known by most scholars, they were
far from universally accepted. The main effect of Aristotle's
Meteorologica
, like his other
works, it seems, was that it generated a common vocabulary, within a coherent system of
logic, which stimulated more thorough discussion and the formulation of new questions,
but not necessarily the answers, about the nature of the Universe. Thus, contrary to what is
