The Republic of Translators: Latin, Greek, Arabic and a New Age of Science, Philosophy, and Theology in the Twelfth Century

Abstract

In the twelfth century, several dozen translators working around the Mediterranean translated over two hundred works of science, philosophy, and theology from Greek and Arabic into Latin. These translations would go on to revolutionize the medieval intellectual world, forming the foundation of the earliest European universities and shaping learned inquiry into the Renaissance and beyond. This dissertation offers the first extensive study that approaches this transformational phenomenon on a Mediterranean-wide scale. While the unprecedented quantity of these translations and their similarities in genre would give the impression of a coherent movement, there was no single institution or intellectual agenda that guided the translators’ activity. Hitherto, scholarship has concentrated on individual translators and their work. Approaching the more than thirty identifiable twelfth-century translators from a wide lens uncovers shared patterns in the translators’ movements, relationships, and intellectual concerns that bound them to the broader Latin scholarly world. A new model inspired by recent scholarship on the early modern Republic of Letters reveals that this phenomenon acquired its coherency not from any single region or institution, but the mosaic of institutions and scholarly projects of the broader Latin world.