LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 2

      Scientific Transmission

      Outside the University

      As was the case in general for the Iberian Jewish elite, Duran’s education included basic scientific knowledge. But scientific activity, in particular astronomy, was also unusually central to Duran’s thought and made up a large proportion of his writings. He taught mathematics and astronomy at a practical level, studied more advanced texts, and corresponded on astronomical and numerological issues with his peers.

      Histories of early modern science in the Iberian Peninsula depict a rich legacy of empirical, experimental, and practical activity.¹ The imperatives of Spanish and Portuguese overseas commerce and empire building encouraged such fields as cartography and navigational instrumentation.² Redrawing the map of the world, Iberians made extraordinary progress in the utilitarian and commercial sciences of “metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering.”³

      The achievements of sixteenth-century Spain, while spurred by the discoveries of the New World, did not emerge from a vacuum. As early as the end of the thirteenth century, with the colonization of the Balearic Islands, an extensive maritime trade began to be carried out by Catalan merchants in networks centered in Barcelona and Perpignan, reaching beyond the Balearics to southern Italy and Sicily. One result of this political and economic expansion and its consequent technical needs was that by the end of the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Aragon-Catalonia had become a center of scientific activity, and by the fifteenth century Spain and Portugal were the most technically developed countries in Western Europe.⁴ This progress continued until the seventeenth century, when Spanish scholars would choose to rework medieval philosophy and science rather than to replace them with the new theoretical systems of the scientific revolution.

      In the creation of late-medieval Iberian science, the royal court, however peripatetic in reality, was a primary source of patronage.⁵ For in contrast to the rest of Europe, scientific production in Iberia from the first quarter of the fourteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth century seems to have taken place primarily outside the universities.⁶ In Aragon-Catalonia, for example, Pere III “The Ceremonious” (r. 1335–1387), seeming consciously to model his court on the glorious thirteenth-century Castilian court of Alfonso X (1221–1284),⁷ commissioned scientific works and astronomical tables as well as scientific and philosophical translations. Pere’s son, Joan I “The Hunter” (r. 1387–1396), followed in his father’s footsteps while also favoring astrology and other divinatory arts in his court.⁸ Under his patronage and even under that of his somewhat less enthusiastic brother Martí (r. 1396–1410), mathematics, medicine, astrology, and astronomy flourished in Perpignan as well as in Barcelona, the commercial center of Aragon. Royal patronage by the fourteenth-century kings of Aragon led in turn to the employment of Jewish translators, instrument makers, physicians, cartographers, astrologers, and scientific craftsmen, laying the foundations for the important role Jews and conversos would play in Iberian science of that and following centuries.⁹

      If the role of the court was conspicuous in the production of Jewish science in late medieval and early modern Iberia, the role of the city was no less so. Scientific writings in this period emerged nearly exclusively from urban centers that had attained a certain level of economic and commercial importance. In the sixteenth century, for example, most scientific texts were produced in Seville, the main port and commercial gateway for ships traveling to and from the New World. Madrid, the second most vibrant center of scientific publications at the end of the century, achieved this status precisely because Felipe II (1527–1598) made it his new capital. The urban nature of early modern Iberian science is expressed also in the social position of its practitioners, who (apart from some nobility and members of the clergy) came primarily from the urban literate strata of artisans, merchants, craftsmen, and scribes. Significantly, the overwhelming majority of scientific writings, whether or not in the field of medicine, were the work of physicians.¹⁰

      Each of these factors helps explain the striking presence of Jews in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century science. The last factor is especially noteworthy, for the Jews were an almost completely urban group; indeed, Jews made up a disproportionate fraction of literate urban society. Moreover, from the early fourteenth century through the fifteenth, Jews were especially well represented in the medical profession. A third of the doctors appearing in the archives of Barcelona were Jews, though the Jewish population in that city made up no more than 5 percent of the total. The proportions were similar in the city of Valencia. In Huesca, a far smaller town where Jews comprised 10–15 percent of the population, more than half the doctors were Jews; in the years 1310 and 1311, they all were. The fifteenth century was no different.¹¹

      Patterns of scientific activity are shaped by a wide array of considerations, including the nature of scientific patronage, how society is structured, what communication networks are used to spread scientific knowledge, which institutions of learning are available, and the prevailing religious culture and its attitude to scientific investigation. Using Duran as an illustrative example, I will consider how the social milieu and intellectual and religious culture of the late medieval Iberian Jewish elite conditioned their scientific endeavors, and how, in particular, Duran’s scientific practice may have been shaped by and have itself shaped his Jewish identity.

      First, a caveat: medieval science is not modern science. Not even in theory does it rest on the examination of a problem, the formulation of a falsifiable hypothesis, or the conceiving and carrying out of an accurate and isolated experiment that will either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. The word “scientist” itself is an artifact of the nineteenth century. Two modern terms often favored by historians of medieval science, are “philosopher-scientist” and “natural philosopher” (as in one who examines the natural world using the tools of philosophy).

      Both of these terms suggest a particular approach to the study of the natural world that may misrepresent some of the motivations of Jewish astronomers, astrologers, physicians, and even mathematicians.

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