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.