Abstract
The collected volume under review is the first entry in a newly inaugurated series on “Alfonsine Astronomy,” which will serve as the main venue of publication for the results yielded by ALFA, an ERC-funded research project hosted at the Observatory of Paris (“Shaping a European scientific scene: Alfonsine astronomy,” 2017–2022). Its members, among which are the volume’s three editors—Matthieu Husson being the principal investigator, with Richard Kremer and José Chabás serving on the advisory board—, have set out to explore late medieval Latin astronomy through the prism of its most influential computational tool: the Alfonsine Tables—a set of computational tables thus called because of their association with the scientific patronage of King Alfonso X (“el Sabio”) of Castile and León (1252–1284). Together with their numerous local variants and derivations, the Alfonsine Tables profoundly shaped the way mathematical astronomy was practiced in most of Latin-speaking Europe between c.1320 and the middle of the 16th century. To study the transmission, regional ramifications, and applications of Alfonsine astronomy is therefore tantamount to studying a very large portion of the history of European astronomy during the two centuries that immediately precede the Copernican Revolution.
According to its subtitle, this first outing of the new ALFA series is there to address the The Written Record, which here refers to the manuscripts and manuscript contexts in which Alfonsine astronomy is represented. As the editors themselves inform us in their introduction (pp. 7–17), studying this material in a systematic fashion is a mammoth undertaking, one that must confront a corpus of “more than 900 manuscript codices and dozens of printed editions” (p. 7). The main body of the present volume is made up of 11 contributions, which are grouped into two parts. The five chapters in Part 1 (“Contexts of Practice and Diffusion as Attested by Manuscripts and Manuscript Collections”) pay detailed attention to individual manuscripts as a means of shedding light on the exceptionally rich reception history of Alfonsine astronomy, whereas the six chapters that make up Part 2 (“Authors, Texts and their Receptions in Various Milieus”) shift their focus toward the transmission of specific works or corpora of works within the Alfonsine tradition.
Part 1 opens with a wide-ranging essay by Laura Fernández Fernández, whose starting point is provided by the 16th-century MS Madrid, Biblioteca nacional de España, 3306, famous for containing canons to the original Castilian version of the Alfonsine Tables, which has not survived. Her contribution considers the available indirect evidence for the one-time existence of this version and studies the pathways by which such material may have reached France and Italy during the decades around 1300. She also discusses the surprisingly subdued reception of the Alfonsine Tables in the Hispanic kingdoms until the end of the 15th century. Other codices examined in this section include MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 176, an astronomical and astrological composite manuscript compiled in the mid-14th century by William Reed of Merton College, Oxford (discussed by Jean-Patrice Boudet and Laure Miolo on pp. 57–105); MS London, British Library, Add. 34603, a collection of astronomical/astrological “tools” assembled by Marcus Schinnagel around 1500 (Richard L. Kremer’s contribution on pp. 107–141); MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 7478, a folded almanac created in 1456 on the basis of John of Gmunden’s widely diffused calendar with mean syzygy times (Alexandre Tur’s contribution on pp. 143–198); as well as three sumptuous codices of astrology and astronomy produced around 1400 for King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (1378–1419), the programmatic cultural and political significance of which is discussed by Eric Ramírez-Weaver (on pp. 199–240).
The first work discussed in Part 2 are the Tables of 1322 composed by the Parisian astronomer Jean de Lignères, which are the object of a new critical edition with commentary by José Chabás and Marie-Madeleine Saby (to be published as vol. 2 of the “Alfonsine Astronomy” series). In their contribution to the present volume (pp. 243–255), Chabás and Saby discuss the copious and complex manuscript transmission of Jean’s tables in relation to the challenges that arose during preparation of their edition. Another piece written in anticipation of a forthcoming source edition comes from Laure Miolo (pp. 343–380), who studies the extant works of John of Genoa, a Parisian astronomer of the 1330s. Meanwhile, an actual editio princeps of relevant material is provided by Alena Hadravová and Petr Hadrava (pp. 257–302), whose chapter presents the critical text and English translation of Jean de Lignères’s canons on the Alfonsine Tables. Jean de Lignères continues to be the center of attention in individual contributions by José Chabás (pp. 303–316), who considers the content and authenticity two tabular works attributed to this important astronomer in codices in Madrid and the Vatican, and Matthieu Husson (pp. 317–342), who looks at the manuscripts of Jean’s Tabule magne of 1325. Part 2 closes with Glen van Brummelen’s detailed study of manuscripts devoted to multiple works by the innovative 15th-century astronomer Giovanni Bianchini (pp. 381–400). What follows is a postface authored by Gala Topalian and Matthieu Husson (pp. 403–426), who give an account of the rationale and methodology behind ALFA’s digital projects to aid the exploration Alfonsine manuscripts, tables, and texts.
While time could be spent on minor niggles, the overall verdict on Alfonsine Astronomy: The Written Record must be that it assembles some first-rate contributions to the study of 14th- and 15th-century astronomical manuscripts and their uses, which have the combined effect of greatly expanding our knowledge of key texts and core players in the elaboration and transmission of the Alfonsine corpus. It is a collection that aims its riches first and foremost at other specialists in the field, who will be familiar with the literature and therefore already in a position to appreciate the importance of the topics at hand. Inevitably, readers who are new to the subject of Alfonsine astronomy may find the volume a good deal less accessible. In fact, some may even experience a level of puzzlement owing to the way in which the editors and authors approach, or fail to approach, core historiographical issues.
By far the most pressing of these issues—a veritable elephant in the room that is medieval astronomy—is the origin of what the editors chose to label “Parisian Alfonsine Tables” (a terminological choice that is mirrored across most of the contributions). As Richard Kremer very helpfully reveals at the beginning of his chapter (pp. 107–108), a preliminary survey of the extant Latin manuscript copies suggests that the title “Alfonsine” was initially reserved for a narrowly circumscribed set encompassing tables for chronology, planetary mean motions (with radices), and equations. This finding goes some way toward vindicating Emmanuel Poulle’s decision to limit his 1984 edition of the Tables alphonsines to these three components, which meant discarding half the content of the 1483 editio princeps. 1 Their history can be traced back at least to 1320s Paris, which was the point of origin for the lion’s share of the Alfonsine Tables’ subsequent European diffusion. As has long been known, however, there are some striking discrepancies between this extant Latin version and the way the tables commissioned by King Alonso X are described in the Castilian canons mentioned above. The most salient of these differences include (i) the outward chronological structure of the tables (ordinary collected- and expanded-year tables for the Christian calendar in the Castilian version, a thoroughly sexagesimalized format in the Latin one, the latter being adaptable to different calendars and eras); (ii) the reference frame for computing planetary longitudes (sidereal in the Castilian version, tropical in the Latin one); (iii) the type of “signs” used to express planetary longitudes (signs of 30° in the Castilian version, signs of 60° in the Latin one); and (iv) the treatment of precession (access-and-recess in the Castilian version, a combination of access-and-recess and steady precession in the Latin one).
Historians of medieval astronomy have offered starkly divergent hypotheses to account for this strange state of affairs. Poulle famously argued that the Latin tables were an original creation of the same Parisian astronomers who began to use them in the early 1320s, meaning that the common attribution of these tables to King Alfonso must be considered an act of pseudepigraphy. 2 A detailed account of this hypothesis—its rationale, flaws, and influence on subsequent scholarship—would go well beyond the constraints of the present review. What deserves to be highlighted, however, is that a more sensible and parsimonious assessment of the problem has recently been made available through Julio Samsó’s magisterial study on medieval Iberian and Maghribī astronomy, On Both Sides of the Strait of Gibraltar (2020). Samsó shows that some peculiar features of the Latin tables, including their mean-motion parameters, are in fact rooted in Andalusī astronomy, which leads him to argue that Alfonso’s astronomers produced two different sets of tables, effectively replacing their initial sidereal set with a tropical one. 3 “The second recension,” he cautiously concludes, “corresponds to the Latin tables which, apparently, reached Paris without canons.” 4
If Samsó is correct, which I believe is very likely to be the case, the label “Parisian Alfonsine Tables,” as used so pervasively in Alfonsine Astronomy, is not without its risks, as it can give a misleading impression of the actual background—geographical, cultural/intellectual, and institutional—of this highly important work of computational astronomy. The volume’s editors do not problematize this choice of terminology. In fact, the first page of their introduction asserts that “[b]eginning in the 1320s, the Castilian Alfonsine Tables were recast in Paris, resulting in what we now call the Parisian Alfonsine Tables” (p. 7). This is potentially a rather controversial statement, protected only by the absence of a clear definition of the “Parisian Alfonsine Tables.” While it is certainly the case that Parisian astronomers of this period used Alfonsine parameters in the casting of their own new sets, such as Jean de Lignères’s Tabule magne, no one has, to my knowledge, ever shown on an evidentiary basis that the Latin Alfonsine Tables—here understood as the three core components discussed by Kremer on pp. 107–108—were themselves the product of any Parisian re-castig. On the contrary, the astronomers in Paris who are our earliest witnesses to these Latin tables consistently credit them to King Alfonso and/or his astronomers, without offering any hint at their own alleged involvement. This being so, it can be mildly troubling to read, in the chapter contributed by Alena Hadravová and Petr Hadrava, that Jean de Lignères was “one of the first authors to have rendered the Alfonsine Tables and the accompanying canons into Latin shortly after the tables, which were compiled in Spain, became available in Paris” (p. 257). It is currently unknown whether the Latin Alfonsine Tables were originally composed in Castilian (though it is not implausible), nor can one tell reliably where their hypothetical translation into Latin would have been carried out. Furthermore, the idea that Jean de Lignères or other Parisians translated any accompanying canons looks highly doubtful in light of the prologue to Jean des Murs’s Expositio intentionis regis Alfonsii circa tabulas eius (1321?), which indicates that no original set of canons had reached his Parisian milieu (Illius autem operis canones . . . nunquam nostris temporibus sunt inventi). 5
More unfortunate than these individual statements is the fact that the one contribution that could have potentially cleared up much of the haze surrounding the relationship between the Castilian and “Parisian” Alfonsine Tables does not live up to this expectation. According to the title of her aforementioned chapter (pp. 21–55), Laura Fernández Fernández intends to provide “new documentary and material sources” concerning the lost Libro de las tablas alfonsiés, but the resulting picture is marred by errors and omissions. One such instance is her failure to mention the star catalogue in MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conv. Soppr. 414, fols. 46r–60r, in which an annotation datable to 1304 (fol. 60r) mentions the “new tables of Alfonso” (nove tabule Alfunsi). Information about this important gloss, which documents a strikingly early arrival of the Alfonsine Tables in either France or Italy, has been available for years thanks to David Juste’s manuscript description on the website of the Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus Project. 6
Fernández’s own treatment of the early Italian transmission of the Alfonsine Tables is dissatisfying. She writes in a footnote that “[i]n his 1318 work Theorica planetarum, Thadeus of Parma provided data that certainly originated from the Castilian Tables” (p. 27 n. 26). Leaving aside that the work she refers to here is not itself a Theorica planetarum, but rather a commentary on the popular Theorica sometimes attributed to Gerard of Cremona, the only relevant data Thadeus provides in this text is that King Alfonso’s astronomers (compositores tabularum regis Alfunsi) combined the access-and-recess of the eighth sphere with linear precession. 7 This is one of the features that is famously not found in the Castilian canons to the Alfonsine Tables, but instead characterizes the Latin version. There are, hence, no grounds to conclude that Thadeus’s data “certainly originated” in a Castilian-language source. On the contrary, Thadeus’s testimony is another reason to be wary of the designation “Parisian” when writing about the Latin Alfonsine Tables.
Even though Fernández shows herself aware of Julio Samsó’s recent intervention in favor of viewing the Latin Alfonsine Tables as a product of Alfonso’s patronage (pp. 27–28), she remains undecided as to “whether there could have been two versions of the tables” (p. 28) and ends up wavering between scenarios to the point of inconsistency. According to p. 29, one idea Fernández finds “indisputable is that in Paris important astronomers assimilated and adapted the tradition of the Alfonsine Tables, whatever their content, with great success, producing new material would [sic] circulate to other European territories (Italy, England, Germany, and Poland) and generate the so-called Parisian Alfonsine Tables” [emphasis mine]. Yet this claim of indisputability seems difficult to square with Fernández’s own remarks on p. 28, which reveal that “the existence of two versions of the tables would fit perfectly with the modus operandi of the scriptorium of Alfonso X.” Here and elsewhere in the volume, the idea that the Latin or “Parisian” Alfonsine Tables were the outcome of some process of adaptation carried out in Paris has the appearance of a dogma, whose justification is never provided.
As these examples are meant to show, one of the complaints a reader might justifiably raise against this important new volume is that it misses an opportunity to take a coherent stance on the actual origins of Alfonsine astronomy, which makes it liable to perpetuate the sort of confusion that has beset historical accounts for the past century. At the same time, fairness demands us to emphasize that Alfonsine Astronomy: The Written Record was evidently not intended as the final word on its subject matter. Rather, it ought to be appreciated as the initial burst in what promises to be a flurry of new publications, which will doubtless enrich our understanding of the history of the Alfonsine Tables, in particular, and the practice of astronomy in late medieval Europe, in general. Its editors deserve our gratitude for spearheading this groundbreaking research. 8
