This book describes and analyses, for the first time, the astronomical tables of Giovanni Bianchini of Ferrara (d. after 1469), explains their context, inserts them into an astronomical tradition that began in Toledo, and addresses their diffusion.

During the Middle Ages and early modern times tables were a most successful and economical way to present mathematical procedures and astronomical models and to facilitate computations. Before the sixteenth century astronomical models introduced by Ptolemy in Antiquity were rarely challenged, and innovation consisted in elaborating new methods for calculating planetary positions and other celestial phenomena. Essays on Medieval Computational Astronomy includes twelve articles that focus on astronomical tables, offering many examples where the meaning and purpose of such tables has been determined by careful analysis. In evaluating the work of medieval scholars we are mindful of the importance of applying criteria consistent with their own time, which may be different from those appropriate for other periods.

This is a survey of the numerous astronomical tables compiled in the late Middle Ages, which represent a major intellectual enterprise. Such tables were often the best way available at the time for transmitting precise information to the reader.

The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, which provided the basis for the civil and Western ecclesiastical calendars still in use today, has often been seen as a triumph of early modern scientific culture or an expression of papal ambition in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. Much less attention has been paid to reform's intellectual roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to learned culture, as impressively documented by the survival of relevant texts and tables in thousands of manuscripts copied before 1500. For centuries prior to the Gregorian reform, astronomers, mathematicians, theologians, and even Church councils had been debating the necessity of improving or emending the existing ecclesiastical calendar, which throughout the Middle Ages kept losing touch with the astronomical phenomena at an alarming pace. Scandalous Error is the first comprehensive study of the medieval literature devoted to the calendar problem and its cultural and scientific contexts. It examines how the importance of ordering liturgical time by means of a calendar that comprised both solar and lunar components posed a technical-astronomical problem to medieval society and details the often sophisticated ways in which computists and churchmen reacted to this challenge. By drawing attention to the numerous connecting paths that existed between calendars and mathematical astronomy between the Fall of Rome and the end of the fifteenth century, the volume offers substantial new insights on the place of exact science in medieval culture.

The poet-king without a throne appears here in an entirely new light. In The Politics of Culture in Quattrocento Europe: René of Anjou in Italy, Oren Margolis explores how this French prince and exiled king of Naples (1409-1480) engaged his Italian network in a programme of cultural politics conducted with an eye towards a return to power in the peninsula. Built on a series of original interpretations of humanistic and artistic material (chiefly Latin orations and illuminated manuscripts of classical texts), this is also a case study for a 'diplomatic approach' to culture. It recasts its source base as a form of high-level communication for a hyper-literate elite of those who could read the works created by humanist and artistic agents for their constituent parts: the potent words or phrases and relevant classical allusions; the channels through which a given work was commissioned or transmitted; and then the nature of the network gathered around a political agenda. This is a volume for all those interested in the politics and culture of later medieval Europe and Renaissance Italy: the kings of France and dukes of Burgundy, the Medici, the Sforza, the Venetians, and their armies, ambassadors, and adversaries all appear here; so do Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Guarino of Verona, and their respective intellectual and artistic circles. Emerging from it is a challenge to conventional interpretations of the politics of humanism, and a new vision of the Quattrocento: a century in which the Italian Renaissance began its takeover of Europe, but in which Renaissance culture was itself shaped by its European political, social, and diplomatic context.

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.

This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space. The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience. Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science.