Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture

In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures and their collaborators initiate a new reflection on the dynamics involved in receiving texts and ideas from antiquity or from other contemporary cultures. For all their historic specificity, the western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish civilizations of the Middle Ages were nonetheless co-participants in a complex web of cultural transmission that operated via translation and inevitably involved the transformation of what had been received. This three-fold process is what defines medieval intellectual history. Every act of transmission presumes the existence of some ‘efficient cause’ – a translation, a commentary, a book, a library, etc. Such vehicles of transmission, however, are not passive containers in which cultural products are transported. On the contrary: the vehicles themselves select, shape, and transform the material transmitted, making ancient or alien cultural products usable and attractive in another milieu. The case studies contained in this volume attempt to bring these larger processes into the foreground.  They lay the groundwork for a new intellectual history of medieval civilizations in all their variety, based on the core premise that these shared not only a cultural heritage from antiquity but, more importantly, a broadly comparable ‘operating system’ for engaging with that heritage.  Each was a culture of transmission, claiming ownership over the prestigious knowledge inherited from the past. Each depended on translation. Finally, each transformed what it appropriated. 

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction. Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture — ROBERT WISNOVSKY, FAITH WALLIS, JAMIE C. FUMO, AND CARLOS FRAENKEL

Integrating Greek Philosophy into Jewish and Christian Contexts in Antiquity: The Alexandrian Project — CARLOS FRAENKEL

Theophrastus, Alexander, and Themistius on Aristotle’s De anima III. 4–5  — SARA MAGRIN

The Universal Chronicle in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages  — HERVÉ INGLEBERT

The Heritage of Jewish Apocalypticism in Late Antique and Early Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — GERBERN S. OEGEMA

Prolegomena as Historical Evidence: On Saadia’s Introductions to his Commentaries on the Bible — SARAH STROUMSA

Towards a Natural-History Model of Philosophical Change: Greek into Arabic, Arabic into Latin, and Arabic into Arabic — ROBERT WISNOVSKY

Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Translations from Arabic  — DAG NIKOLAUS HASSE

Why Was the Aphorisms of Hippocrates Retranslated in the Eleventh Century? — FAITH WALLIS

Arabic into Greek: The Rise of an International Lexicon of Medicine in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean? — ALAIN TOUWAIDE

The Introductions of Thirteenth-Century Arabic-to-Hebrew Translators of Philosophic and Scientific Texts — STEVEN HARVEY

Secondary Forms of Philosophy: On the Teaching and Transmission of Philosophy in Non-Philosophical Literary Genres — JAMES T. ROBINSON

Hasdai Crescas’s Aristotle: Transmission, Translation, Transformation  — WARREN ZEV HARVEY

Avicenna’s ‘Vague Individual’ and its Impact on Medieval Latin Philosophy — DEBORAH L. BLACK

William of Thiegiis and Latin Commentary on the Metamorphoses in Late Medieval France — FRANK T. COULSON

Ovid’s New Clothes: Text and Image in Caxton’s ‘Booke of Ouyde’ (1480) and Contemporary Prose Moralizations of the Metamorphoses — JAMIE C. FUMO

Monastic Manuscripts and the Transmission of the Classics in Late Medieval England — JAMES G. CLARK

Greek Roots, Arab Authoring, Latin Overlay: Reflections on the Sources for Avicenna’s Canon — RAPHAELA VEIT

Bibliography

Index