Conferenciante: Fabio Acerbi(CNRS, UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée)
Título de la conferencia: Appropriation and Naturalisation of Foreign Astronomical Traditions in Palaeologan Byzantium
An overview of all foreign astronomical traditions introduced in Byzantium is proposed, along with an interpretive framework that inserts the resulting process of appropriation and naturalisation in its literary-theoretical context. The core of the appropriation process is made of the so-called “Persian Astronomy”, namely, astronomy framed and practised in the Islamicate world and transmitted from the Ilkhanate to Byzantium via Trebizond. A couple of decades before the fall of Constantinople, the Byzantines turned to the Jewish astronomical tradition that had developed in Spain and Southern France during the 14th century. Two isolated attempts, one of which strikingly unsuccessful but highly significant, sought to naturalise well-known products of the Latin astronomical tradition.Foreign astronomical traditions were imported simply because Ptolemy’s theoretical framework—expounded in the Almagest and set out for use in the Handy Tables—could no longer do a decent job without refreshing its observational basis and possibly improving its models and the resulting tables. These renovations were mainly carried out in the Islamicate world. They took the form of sets of tables of the kind of the Handy Tables and of primers thereon; any coupled item of this kind was called Zīj. The Jewish astronomical tradition focused on the Sun-Moon configurations, a subject-matter particularly appealing to Byzantine scholars.
The proposed exegetic framework looks at the works produced during the entire process of appropriation and naturalisation from the point of view of the expository format and of the stylistic code employed to convey the intended pieces of information. An accident in the transmission of the Greek astronomical heritage to the Islamicate world made a crucial reference work unavailable to the Zījes appropriated by the early Byzantines, who strove to naturalise them. As tables are an essential tool of Ptolemaic astronomy, the main transformations they underwent when they were naturalised are also traced.
Lugar y hora: 29 de abril 2026, a las 12 horas, Sala Julián Ribera, módulo 1C, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y SocialesC/ Albasanz 26, 28037 Madrid