Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Visions of al-Andalus
- PART I THE SHAPES OF CULTURE
- PART II THE SHAPES OF LITERATURE
- PART III ANDALUSIANS
- PART IV TO SICILY
- 20 Poetries of the Norman courts
- 21 Ibn Ḥamdīs and the poetry of nostalgia
- 22 Michael Scot and the translators
- PART V MARRIAGES AND EXILES
- PART VI TO AL-ANDALUS, WOULD SHE RETURN THE GREETING
- Index
- References
22 - Michael Scot and the translators
from PART IV - TO SICILY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2012
- Frontmatter
- 1 Visions of al-Andalus
- PART I THE SHAPES OF CULTURE
- PART II THE SHAPES OF LITERATURE
- PART III ANDALUSIANS
- PART IV TO SICILY
- 20 Poetries of the Norman courts
- 21 Ibn Ḥamdīs and the poetry of nostalgia
- 22 Michael Scot and the translators
- PART V MARRIAGES AND EXILES
- PART VI TO AL-ANDALUS, WOULD SHE RETURN THE GREETING
- Index
- References
Summary
Less than a century after Michael Scot’s death in about 1235, Dante placed this translator and scientist, who passed his last years at the Sicilian court of Frederick II, in the Divine Comedy, where, rather than being praised for his important Arabic-to-Latin translations, he was unpleasantly consigned to punishment among the sorcerers in hell’s eighth circle (Inferno xx, 115–17) – and this is only the most vivid instance of his posthumous reputation as a magician and alchemist. Yet it was through the intensely active intermediation of such restless souls as Michael that a vast quantity of Arabic writing was made available to Latin-Christian thinkers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Indeed, just as the creative energy of the Hellenized East had flowed into Arabic civilization itself only through the intercession of a peculiar assortment of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and convert translators in the Islamic heartlands, so Arabic scholarship’s considerable impact on medieval European culture required a similar class of cosmopolitan linguists of whom Michael Scot is thoroughly representative in both his labors and his misleading posthumous fame.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Literature of Al-Andalus , pp. 404 - 412Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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