Alberto BardiTsinghua University | TH · Department of the History of Science
Alberto Bardi
PhD
About
17
Publications
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Introduction
Alberto Bardi has been a fellow at the Harvard University research institute Dumbarton Oaks, at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and at the Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem, with a teaching appointment at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Publications
Publications (17)
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...
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...
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....
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.
Projects
Projects (2)
Alberto Bardi’s research project, "Philosophy and History of Cross-Cultural Encounters between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Byzantine Astronomy", at the Polonsky Academy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (October 2019 – present) explores the cross-cultural exchanges of scientific ideas and materials between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Eastern Roman Empire and neighbor civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Middle-Ages and early Renaissance. The contacts between Eastern Christians (Byzantines) and Western Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars led to the production of numerous astronomical works, including tables, handbooks, comparisons and translations. This field remains little explored, and there is still much to be assessed in its complexity and consequences for politics, philosophy, and theology. A survey of a wide variety of texts is therefore necessary to assess almost nearly a millennium of scientific exchanges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. This is precisely the span and subject of his project.
Work in progress: a Byzantine handbook on Persian astronomical tables
Critical edition, translation, commentary
