Department of
Science and Technology Studies
HPSC GA20
Science, Technology and
Medicine in Global Perspective
Syllabus
Session
2014-15
Web site
Moodle site
https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=16368
Timetable
www.ucl.ac.uk/timetable
Description
This seminar studies the transfer of scientific knowledge from the ancient Greco-­‐Roman world to an Arabic context from the ninth century onward and a Western Christian context from the eleventh century to the eve of the Renaissance. We will examine how and why centres of learning, such as Alexandria and Baghdad or southern Italy and Spain, brought both continuity and change to the scientific tradition. By studying geography, astronomy, physiology, contagious diseases, and pharmacology, we will explore the ways in which Muslim, Jewish and Christian views of knowledge influenced each other in the formation of a scientific method and spirit of inquiry into the natural world based on a pagan past. How did the different sciences, such as medicine, geography, astrology, and mathematics, connect with each other and with philosophy and theology? We will also consider the Western spread of scientific knowledge out of the learned Latin-­‐speaking world to a broader audience through translations into the European vernaculars. The primary objective of the seminar is to provide students with an extensive overview of science in the medieval Arabic and Latin worlds, viewed from a comparative analytic perspective. We shall approach the topic from an interdisciplinary angle, addressing medieval science, technology and medicine from historical, sociological and anthropological methodologies. By analysing technical, literary and visual sources, we will explore the medieval understandings of microcosm and macrocosm, the human body and the natural world. HPSCGA20
2014-15
Key Information
Assessment
100%
Research essay, 5000 words
Prerequisites
none
Required texts
readings listed below
Module tutor
Module tutor
Dr Bill MacLehose
Contact
@ucl.ac.uk | t: 020 7679 2929
Web
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/staff/maclehose_iris
Office location
22 Gordon Square, Room 1.2a
Office hours:
Mon 11-12, Weds 12.30-1.30
and by appointment
Aims and objectives
aims
The assignment will allow the student to work with both primary and secondary sources
to study a topic of his or her own choosing. Essays must be submitted via Moodle.
In order to be deemed ‘complete’ on this module students must attempt to develop a
research topic (to be approved by the lecturer), a bibliography and write an analytical
essay of 5000 words. The student must also meet the UCL guidelines for attendance.
objectives
The primary objective of the seminar is to provide students with an extensive overview
of science in the medieval Arabic and Latin worlds, viewed from a comparative analytic
perspective. We shall approach the topic from an interdisciplinary angle, addressing
medieval science, technology and medicine from historical, sociological and
anthropological methodologies. By analysing technical, literary and visual sources, we
will explore the medieval understandings of microcosm and macrocosm, the human
body and the natural world.
Module plan
2
HPSCGA20
2014-15
Schedule
UCL Wk
Date
1
21
2
Topic
Activity
12 Jan
Reorientating the History of Science
Sa’id al-­‐Andalusi; Lindberg 1991
22
19 Jan
Transmission of Scientific Knowledge:East and West
Meyerhof; Guy de Chauliac; Burnett
3
23
26 Jan
The Body Considered: Anatomy and the use of corpses
Park; Savage-­‐Smith
4
24
2 Feb
Sex, Desire and Physiology
De coitu; Trotula; Jacquart and Thomasset
5
25
9 Feb
Magic and Alchemy
Linden; Olsan
Reading Week
no lectures
11
27
16 Feb
Blurred Boundaries: Religion and Science
Lindberg 1995; Condemnations; Perho
12
28
23 Feb
Astronomy and Astrology in society, science and medicine
Saliba; Maimonides; French 1994
13
29
2 Mar
Geography and the Image of the World
Beeston; al-­‐Idrisi online
14
30
9 Mar
Artisans, Architecture and Artillery: Medieval Technologies
Gimpel; Villard online; al-­‐Jazari online
15
31
16 Mar
Epidemics and Infectious Disease: medieval responses
Horrox; Touati; Dols
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Reading list
Seminar Schedule:
Week 1: Reorientating History of Science
Sa‘id Al-Andalusi. Science in the Medieval World: “Book of the Categories of Nations.”
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. (selections on moodle) ***
Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago, UCP, 1992. Chapter 1.
***
Week 2: Transmission of Scientific Knowledge: East and West
Meyerhof, Max. ‘Sultan Saladin’s Physician on the Transmission of Greek Medicine to
the Arabs.’ BHM 18 (1945) 169-178. ***
Guy de Chauliac, Surgery, selection from Grant, Source Book. ***
Burnett, Charles. ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme in Toledo
in the Twelfth Century.’ Science in Context 14 (2001) 249-88. ***
‘From Noah to Galen’ (unpublished text, class handout)
Jacquart, Danielle. ‘The Influence of Arabic Medicine in the Medieval West.’ In
Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science. Ed. Roshdi Rashed. London, Routledge,
1996, 3 vols.
Young, M.J.L., J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant. Religion, Learning and Science in the
‘Abbasid Period. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Gutas, Dmitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London, 1998.
Peters, F.E. Aristotle and the Arabs. New York: NYU Press, 1968.
Pormann, Peter and Emilie Savage Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Plessner, Martin. ‘The Natural Sciences and Medicine’, in The Legacy of Islam, ed.
Joseph Schacht and C.E. Bosworth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Rosenthal, Franz. The Classical Heritage in Islam. Trans Emile and Jenny
Marmorstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Savage-Smith, Emilie. ‘Medicine.’ In Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science. Ed.
Roshdi Rashed. London, Routledge, 1996, 3 vols.
Southern, R.W. ‘From Schools to Universities.’ In The Early Schools: The History of the
University of Oxford, ed. Jeremy Catto. Clarendon Press, 1984. ***
Chenu, M.-D. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century. Lester K. Little, trans.
Chicago University Press, 1968.
Crombie, A.C. Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 11001700. Clarendon Press, 1953
French, Roger and Andrew Cunningham. Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’
Natural Philosophy. Scholar Press, 1996.
Joannitius, Isagogue, tr. H. P. Cholmeley as ‘The Galenic System’ in E. Grant, A Source
Book in Medieval Science, Harvard U.P., 1974, pp. 705-15.
Lindberg, David C, ed. Science in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
Shank, Michael, ed. The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and Middle Ages: Readings
from Isis. Chicago University Press, 2000.
Siraisi, Nancy. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990.
Week 3: The Body Considered: Anatomy and the use of corpses
Park, Katharine. ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Italy.’
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 50 (1995) 111-132. ***
Savage-Smith, Emilie. ‘Attitudes toward Dissection in Medieval Islam.’ Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995) 67-110. ***
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Meyerhof, Max. ‘Ibn An-Nafis (XIIIth Cent.) and His Theory of the Lesser Circulation.’
Isis 23 (1935) 100-20. ***
Park, Katharine. Women’s Secrets: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human
Dissection. New York, Zone Books, 2006. ch. 2.
Conrad, Lawrence I. ‘Usama ibn Munqidh and Other Witnesses to Frankish and Islamic
Medicine in the Era of the Crusades.’ In Amar, et al. eds. Ha-Refu’ah bi-Yerushalayim
(Medicine in Jerusalem) 1999, pp. xxvii-lii.Corner, George W. Anatomical Texts of the
Earlier Middle Ages. Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution, 1927.
Mitchell, Piers D. Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval
Surgeon. Cambridge, CUP, 2004.
O’Neill, Ynez Viole. ‘The Funfbilderserie Reconsidered.’ BHM 43 (1969) 236-45.
Savage-Smith, Emilie. ‘The Practice of Surgery in Islamic Lands: Myth and Reality’, in
Emilie Savage-Smith and Peregrine Horden (eds) The Year 1000: Medical Practice at
the End of the First Millennium. Special volume of Social History of Medicine, 2000,
13.2: 307-321.
Week 4: Sex, desire and physiology:
Delaney, Paul. ‘Constantinus Africanus’ ‘De Coitu’: A Translation.’ The Chaucer Review
4 (1969) 55-65. ***
Green, Monica H. The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine.
Philadelphia, U Penn Press, 2001. (selections) ***
Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages.
Trans Matthew Adamson. Princeton University Press, 1988 [French original, 1985]. ***
Maimonides. On Cohabitation. In Medical Writings of Maimonides.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard
University Press, 1990. Ch. 2, Destiny in Anatomy.
Cadden, Joan. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and
Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 1993.
Gil’adi, Avner. Infants, Parents and Wet Nurses: Medieval Islamic Views of
Breastfeeding and Their Social Implications. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Green, Monica H. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in
Pre-Modern Gynaecology. Oxford, OUP, 2008.
Lemay, Helen Rodnite. Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’
De secretis mulierum with Commentaries. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1992.
Musallam, B.F. ‘The Human Embryo in Arabic Scientific and Religious Thought.’ In G.R.
Dunstan, ed. The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990, pp. 32-46.
Riddle, John. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 108-143.
Solomon, Michael. The Mirror of Coitus: A Translation and Edition of the Fifteenth-­‐Century Speculum al foderi. Medieval Spanish Medical Texts Series 29. 1990. Week 5: Magic and alchemy
Linden, Stanton J., ed. The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac
Newton. CUP, 2003. (selections) ***
Olsan, Lea. ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice.’ Social
History of Medicine 16 (2003) 343-66. ***
Savage-Smith, Emilie. Magic and divination in Early Islam. The Formation of the
Classical Islamic World 42. London: Ashgate, 2004. ***
Bacon, Roger. Roger Bacon’s Letter Concerning the Marvellous Power of Art and of
Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic. Tr. T.L. Davis. 1923.
Flint, Valerie J. ‘The Early Medieval ‘Medicus’, the Saint – and the Enchanter.’ Society
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for the Social History of Medicine 2 (1989) 127-145.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
Maxwell-Stuart, PG, ed. The Occult in Medieval Europe, 500-1500: A Documentary
History. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
McVaugh, Michael. ‘The Humidum radicale in Thirteenth-century Medicine.’ Traditio 30
(1974) 259-83.
Newman, William. ‘An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy.’ In Hackett, J., ed. Roger
Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays. Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 317-36.
Pereira, Michela. ‘Alchemy and the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Late Middle
Ages.’ Speculum 74 (1999) 336-356.
Schwartz, Dov, Batya Stein and David Louvish. Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval
Jewish Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Zambelli, Paola. Astrology and Magic from the Medieval Islamic World to Renaissance
Europe. Ashgate, 2012.
Week 6: Blurred Boundaries: Religion and science
Lindberg, David. ‘Medieval Science and Its Religious Context.’ Osiris 10 (1995) 61-79.
***
Condemnations of 1277. Online resource. ***
Perho, I. The Prophet’s Medicine: A Creation of the Muslim Traditionalist Scholars.
Studia orientalia 74. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1995. ***
Arbesmann, R. ‘The Concept of Christus medicus in St. Augustine.’ Traditio 10 (1954)
1-28.
Bartlett, Robert. The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. The Wiles
Lectures. CUP, 2008.
Ferngren, Gary B. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002.
Grant, Edward. God and Reason in the Middle Ages. CUP, 2001.
Lindberg, David and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on
the Encounter between Christianity and Science. University of California Press, 1986.
Lindberg, David. 'Science and Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition.'
Isis (1987) 518-36.
Yoshikawa, Naoe Kukita. ‘Holy Medicine and Diseases of the Soul: Henry of Lancaster
and Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines.’ Medical History 53 (2009) 397-414.
Ziegler, Joseph. Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. Oxford
rd, Clarendon Press, 1998.
Week 7: Astronomy and Astrology in society, science, and medicine
Saliba, G. ‘The Role of the Astrologer in Medieval Islamic Society.’ Bulletin d’études
orientales 44 (1992) 45-67. ***
Maimonides. Letter on Astrology. In A Maimonides Reader, Isadore Twersky, ed.
French, Roger. ‘Astrology in Medical Practice.’ In García-Ballester, Luis, Roger French,
Jon Arrizabalaga and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Practical Medicine from Salerno to the
Black Death. Cambridge: CUP, 1994, pp. 30-59. ***
Tester, Jim. A History of Western Astrology. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987.
***
Dallal, A. An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.
Duhem, Pierre. Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void and the
Plurality of Worlds. Ariew, Roger, trans. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1985.
Goldstein, Bernard. 'Theory and Observation in Medieval Astronomy.' Isis (1972) 39-47.
King, David. A. Astronomy in the Service of Islam. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993.
Saliba, George. A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden
Age of Islam. New York: NYU Press, 1994.
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Saliba, George. 'Greek Astronomy and the Medieval Arabic Tradition.' American
Scientist 90 (2002) 360-67
Shatzmiller, Joseph. ‘In Search of the “Book of Figures”: Medicine and Astrology in
Montpellier at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century.’ AJS Review 7 (1982) 383-407.
Smoller, Laura Ackerman. History, Prophecy and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of
Pierre d’Ailly, 1350-1420. Princeton UP, 1994.
Zambelli, Paola. The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigmas: Astrology, Theology,
and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. Kluwer Academic, 1992.
Week 8: Geography and travel accounts
Beeston, A.F.L. ‘Idrisi's Account of the British Isles.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (1950) 265-­‐280. Al-­‐Idrisi’s map of the world: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-­‐
bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g3200+ct001903)) Edson, Evelyn. ‘World Maps and Easter Tables: Medieval Maps in Context.’ Imago
Mundi 48 (1996) 25-42.
The Travels of Ibn Battutah. Tim MacIntosh-Smith, trans. Picador, 2003. ***
Marco Polo. The Travels, Ronald Latham, trans. Penguin, 2004. ***
Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.
Praeger Paperback, 1997. ***
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. C. Moseley, trans. Penguin, 2005.
Usamah ibn Munqidh. The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, Paul Cobb,
trans. Penguin, 2008
Eagleton, Catherine. Monks, Manuscripts and Sundials: The Navicula in Medieval
England. Brill, 2010
Harvey, PDA. The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Contexts.
British Library, 2006.
Al-Idrisi. La première géographie de l’occident. Flammarion, 1999.
Kline, Naomi Reed. Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm. Boydell Press,
2005.
Mittman, Asa. Maps and Monsters in Medieval England. Routledge, 2006.
Wright, JK. The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History
of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe. Dover, 1965.
Zadeh, Travis. Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and
the ‘Abbasid Empire. Tauris, 2010.
Week 9: Artisans, Architecture and Artillery: Medieval Technologies
Gimpel, Jean. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages.
Pimlico Press, 1992. ***
Villard de Honnecourt. Sketchbooks. ***
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Villard_de_Honnecourt
The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari.
Donald Hill, trans. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974.
North, John. God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time.
Hambledon and London, 2007.
Bork, Robert, William W. Clark and Abby McGehee. New Approaches to Medieval
Architecture. Ashgate 2010.
Grant, Edward and John Murdoch. Mathematics and its Application to Science and
Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages. 2010
King, David A. In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping
and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization. Vol 1: The Call of the Muezzin.
Brill, 2003
Partington, James Riddick. A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder. Heffer, 1960.
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Varisco, Daniel Martin. Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a
Yemeni Sultan. 1994.
White, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: OUP, 1962.
Wu, Nancy and William W. Clark. Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of
Geometry in Medieval Architecture. 2002
Week 10: Epidemics and infectious diseases: medieval responses
Horrox, Rosemary, trans. The Black Death. Manchester, U of Manchester Press, 1994.
(selections)
Touati, François-Olivier. ‘Contagion and Leprosy: Myths, Ideas and Evolutions in
Medieval Minds and Societies.’ In Lawrence Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk, eds,
Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. ***
Dols, Michael. ‘The Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death in Muslim
and Christian Societies.’ Viator 5 (1974) 269-87. ***
Arrizabalaga, Jon. ‘Facing the Black Death: Perceptions and Reactions of University
Medical Practitioners.’ In Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, pp. 23788. ***
Carmichael, Ann. ‘Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348-1500.’ In
Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, Vivian Nutton, ed. Medical
History Supplement 27. London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine,
2008.
Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early
Renaissance Europe. London: Arnold, 2001.
Demaitre, Luke. Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body.
Baltimore, JHUP, 2007.
McCormick, Michael. ‘Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ancient and
Medieval Ecological History.’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.1 (Summer 2003) 125.
Rawcliffe, Carole. Leprosy in Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006.
Stearns, Justin. Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian
Thought in the Western Mediterranean. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2011.
Reference literature on medieval science in the Islamic and Christian worlds:
The following is a brief list of introductory and reference materials that may be helpful in
preparing for the essays:
Freely, John. Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam helped to shape
the Western World. 2010
Goitein, S.D. ‘Between Hellenism and Renaissance – Islam, the intermediate
Civilization.’ Islamic Studies 2 (1963) 217-33.
Grant, Edward. A Source Book of Medieval Science. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP,
1974.
Lindberg, David C. The Beginning of Western Science: The European Scientific
Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 BC to AD 1450.
Chicago, UCP, 1992.
Kren, Claudia. Medieval Science and Technology: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography.
Garland, 1985.
Long, Pamela. Science and Technology in Medieval Society. New York Academy of
Sciences, 1993.
Pines, S. ‘What was original in Arabic science?’ In Scientific Change, ed. A.C. Crombie,
pp. 181-205. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Saliba, George. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance.
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Turner, Howard R. Science in Medieval Islam. Austin: University of Austin Press, 1995.
Wallis, Faith. Medieval Medicine: A Reader. University of Toronto Press, 2010
Whitney, Elspeth. Medieval Science and Technology. Greenwood, 2004.
Assessment
summary
essay
Description
Deadline
Word limit
Research essay on a topic of your
choosing
5 April 2015
5000 words
9