About
34
Publications
2,600
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
33
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
December 2021 - November 2023
December 2023 - December 2024
Publications
Publications (34)
This volume explores the historical relationship between humans and their environments from the perspective of geoanthropology. Focusing on waterscapes, the volume considers the importance of longue durée processes, cross-cultural perspectives, and knowledge production dynamics for understanding the complex conditions behind the Anthropocene and th...
This paper revisits Mortimer Taube's Computers and Common Sense: The Myth of Thinking Machines (1961), positioning his critique of artificial intelligence (AI) within the broader frameworks of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) and science and technology studies (STS). While often recognized for its relevance to early AI debates, Taube's w...
The inaugural lecture, or oration, delivered by Regiomontanus at the University of Padua in 1464 is deemed a document of remarkable significance in the history of science. Although it has attracted much scholarly attention, few efforts have been directed towards identifying the traces of Byzantine influence it might carry; that is to say, the exten...
This book challenges the narrative of the revival of Greek science during the early modern age and offers a global microhistory of the cross‑cultural legacy between the Arabo‑Persian and Hellenistic astronomical traditions, which converged through the efforts of Byzantine émigrés such as Bessarion. An examination of Bessarion’s life and manuscripts...
Around 1518, the Ferrara humanist Celio Calcagnini (1479-1541) wrote an original defense of Earth’s motion, Quod caelum stet, terra moveatur vel de perenni motu terrae (The Heavens Stand, the Earth Moves, or the Perennial Motion of the Earth). It was a short but complex philosophical treatise, written in a sophisticated style, on a topic of undoubt...
This paper offers an introduction to the Renaissance defence of terrestrial motion by the Ferrara humanist Celio Calcagnini, Quod caelum stet, terra moveatur (ca. 1518). It presents its main argument and reconstructs its intellectual context. It also comprises the first modern translation (in Italian). This treatise is an early document of the circ...
The history of the science of the stars (astronomy and astrology) in fourteenth-century Byzantium is significantly intertwined with the implications of theological and philosophical controversies. A less-explored astronomical text authored by the fourteenth-century Byzantine scholar Theorodos Meliteniotes (ca. 1320-1393 CE) provides new historical...
The year 2023 marks the 550th anniversary of the birth of the Polish scholar Nicolaus Copernicus. Usually deemed one of the most emblematic examples of the scientific revolution and the theory of paradigm shift in the history of science, the heliocentric theory proposed by Copernicus in 1543 has fed the minds of philosophers and historians for cent...
Among his several scholarly outputs, Michael Psellos’s De omnifaria doctrina (henceforth OD) is a doxographical work devoted to the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071–78). It is a collection of chapters on theology, philosophy, natural philosophy, and astronomy, written in plain Greek from previous doxographical collections of Plutarch, Oly...
The debate about the foundations of mathematical sciences traces back to Greek antiquity, with Euclid and the foundations of geometry. Through the flux of history, the debate has appeared in several shapes, places, and cultural contexts. Remarkably, it is a locus where logic, philosophy, and mathematics meet. In mathematical astronomy, Nicolaus Cop...
Claudius Ptolemy’s mathematical astronomy originated in Alexandria in Egypt under Roman rule in the second century CE and held for more than a millennium, even beyond the Copernican theories (sixteenth century). To trace the flourishing of such mathematical creativity requires an understanding of Ptolemy’s philosophy of mathematical practice, the a...
In this study I have analyzed the use of Arabic and Persian terminology in a wide range of Byzantine astronomical handbooks from the thirteenth
through fifteenth centuries.
Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436-1476), better known as Regiomontanus, is widely considered as the most influential astronomer and mathematician of 15th-century Europe. He was active as an astrologer and deemed astrology to be the queen of mathematical sciences. Despite this, Regiomontanus's astrological activity has yet to be fully explored. A...
Originating in the field of biology, the concept of the hybrid has proved to be influential and effective in historical studies, too. Until now, however, the idea of hybrid knowledge has not been fully explored in the historiography of pre-modern science. This article examines the history of pre-Copernican astronomy and focuses on three case studie...
Review of Alexandre M. Roberts. Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl(Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), xiii + 357pp. ISBN 978-0-520-34349-8. Price: $95.00 (cloth), £74.00 (e-book)
an introduction to the wheat and chessboard problem and the interplay between chess and mathematics in the several authors and cultural contexts that have inherited, faced, and modified this problem, ranging from Antiquity to the Renaissance, considering a selection of Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Italian, Romance, and Germanic sources.
This paper is a preliminary study focused on the astronomical manuscript Marcianus latinus VIII.31 (2614) and its socio-historical context of use and production, the Venetian
colony of Crete in the 15th century. It is a relevant source for the study of scientific interactions in colonial, multilinguistic, and interreligious contexts in the Eastern...
This article discusses Regiomontanus’s Disputation on the Motion of the Earth (An Terra moveatur an quiescat, Joannis de Monte Regio disputatio). Given Regiomontanus’s ties with late fifteenth-century Vienna and Padua, his text was very likely defended in a university setting. Later on, it was posthumously printed by the German astronomer Johannes...
The history of astronomy in Byzantium poses great problems of interpretation for Byzantinists and historians of science. This interdisciplinary contribution seeks to understand astronomy in Byzantium from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries from the perspective of the Byzantines and to convey it to today's readers. This goal is reached throug...
This review deals with the project "Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus," an interdisciplinary, long-standing, broadly conceived, and still ongoing project (2013–2038), which poses itself at the crossroads of Classics, Arabic Studies, History of Science and Digital Humanities, and copes with a wide range of primary sources as well as translations and crit...
The mathematician Johannes Schöner (1477–1547) published a brief disputation, or quaestio disputata, on the motion of the Earth, entitled An terra moveatur an quiescat, as part of his Opusculum Geographicum in Nuremberg in 1533 and ascribed the text to the renowned astronomer Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller von Königsberg, 1436–76). Although it reje...
This article provides a comprehensive account of the textual tradition of a fourteenth-century Byzantine handbook on Persian astronomical tables, entitled Παράδοσις εἰς τοὺς περσικοὺς κανόνας τῆς ἀστρονομίας (Paradosis). It contains a description of the text, of the manuscripts, of the stemmatic relationships, and an analysis of the phenomena that...
Since the dawn of humanity, people have developed concepts about themselves and the natural world in which they live. This volume aims at investigating the construction and transfer of such concepts between and within various ancient and medieval cultures. The single contributions try to answer questions concerning the sources of knowledge, the str...
This paper is a study of an astronomical text redacted in Greek, contained in the fifteenth-century manuscript Linköping kl. f. 10. This text consists of a coherent group of instructions on how to use a structured set of astronomical tables stemming from Islamic tradition, redacted primarily in Persian in the thirteenth century, then translated by...
This paper shows how Islamic astronomy played a significant role in the education of one of the most important Christian figures in the history of culture between eastern and western Europe, promoter of a crusade against the Ottoman Turks, namely Cardinal Bessarion (1400/1408–72). While the Byzantine polymath has generally been considered a purist...
Recent scholarship on a Byzantine astronomical handbook on how to use a set of astronomical tables stemming from Islamic tradition sheds new light on a transfer of knowledge that occurred in the fourteenth century between the Ilkhanate and Byzantium. As this source was so far unpublished, the present paper gives an outline of the main textual featu...
Nel Marc. gr. Z. 333 (coll. 644), testimone del testo astronomico intitolato Παράδοσις εἰς τοὺς περσικοὺς κανόνας τῆς ἀστρονομίας (di seguito Paradosis), copiato da Bessarione, sono presenti delle aggiunte, dovute all’intervento di Bessarione stesso, che si ritrovano nella tradizione manoscritta dell’opera soltanto nei discendenti del Marc. gr. Z....
This paper provides an update to Roger Pack’s 1972 article “On the Greek Chiromantic Fragment” (TAPA 103: 367-380). The discovery of several new witnesses to the text warrants a reconsideration of the scholarly questions about Greek chiromancy. This paper presents the results of recent scholarship on the Greek chiromantic fragment, alongside a new...
Um bestimmte Festtage wie Ostern oder besondere Himmelsereignisse genauer berechnen zu können griffen Gelehrte im Byzanz des 14. und 15. Jhs. auf zeitgenössische astronomische Tafeln persischer Gelehrter zurück. Die Untersuchung dieser Quellen ermöglicht spannende Einblicke in die Mechanismen des Transfers von Wissen.