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Lawrence of Amalfi's Mathematical Teaching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2017

Francis Newton
Francis Newton*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

A Venice manuscript of the eleventh century (Marcianus Z. L. 497), containing a handbook of the liberal arts, deserves the attention of students of medieval education, for it is connected with a man who was considered one of the most learned scholars of his day. The man is Lawrence of Amalfi. Information on the life of this scholar is meager, but we have glimpses of his literary activity as a monk of Monte Cassino, through writings of his which were preserved in the abbey; much later, after his elevation to the archbishopric of Amalfi and his subsequent exile, we find him taking refuge in Florence, where he wrote a life of a local saint; still later, we hear of him in Rome, teaching the boy Hildebrand, who was to become pope as Gregory VII; and we see him at the close of his life in affectionate friendship with Odilo of Cluny. Yet the renown of the archbishop suffered an eclipse within a century of his death. At Monte Cassino, almost all knowledge of Lawrence's subsequent history (after his leaving the monastery) was lost, and those elsewhere who recorded the few facts known about the archbishop of Amalfi did not connect him with the ancient monastery from which he came. In modern scholarship, Lawrence the monk and Lawrence the archbishop appeared as two distinct figures. Therefore, until Professor Walther Holtzmann brought together the scattered references and, through stylistic analysis, identified the monk of Monte Cassino with the archbishop of Amalfi, even the main outline of the scholarly churchman's career was obscure.

Type
Miscellany
Information
Traditio , Volume 21 , 1965 , pp. 445 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 New York, Fordham University Press 

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References

1 For example, the description in Iotswald's life of Odilo of Cluny, in PL 144.944.Google Scholar

2 So in U. Chevalier, Répertoire … Bio-Bibliographique II (2nd. ed. Paris 1907) 2769 and 2774.Google Scholar

3 Studi Gregoriani 1 (1947) 207-236. this was reprinted in Beiträge zur Reichs- und Papstgeschichte des hohen Mittelalters (Bonner historische Forschungen 8; 1957) 9-33.Google Scholar

4 ‘Tibullus in Two Grammatical Florilegia of the Middle Ages,’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 93 (1962) 277-280.Google Scholar

5 Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 1.2 (1943) 151-177.Google Scholar

6 Op. cit. (n. 4 supra).Google Scholar

7 Ibid 279, 277.Google Scholar

8 MGH, Libelli de lite 2.376-378.Google Scholar

9 Gerberti Opera Mathematica, ed. by N. Bubnov (Berlin 1899), and L. Thorndike and P. Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cambridge, Mass. 1963). It is to these two works that the abbreviations ‘Bubnov’ and ‘Th.-K.’ refer, wherever they are used in this paper.Google Scholar

10 Both ascriptions have doubt cast on them by C. W. Jones, Bedae pseudepigrapha (Ithaca, N.Y. 1939) 51-52. The same author (51) has a brief note on the treatise De arithmeticis propositionibus, found on fol. 169v of the Venice manuscript.Google Scholar

11 The need for a new edition is emphasized by H. Silvestre in Scriptorium 3 (1949) 133-134Google Scholar

12 Op. cit. (above, n. 4) 279.Google Scholar