The Greek and Arabic Reception of Ptolemy's Almagest between the 7th and 9th Centuries | Maria Mavroudi

The period between the seventh and the ninth centuries has frequently been portrayed in scholarship as “dark”, especially because its intellectual production appears low. Overall, it is deemed as an empty interval between the end of the intellectual efflorescence of antiquity and the presumed renaissance of philosophy and the sciences in the Arab world enabled by the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad. This talk will re-examine these scholarly assessments by using the reception of Ptolemy’s Almagest as an example.

Maria Mavroudi was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and studied Philology at the University of her native city before earning a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work begun by focusing on a tenth-century Byzantine book on dream interpretation that had been widely received in Latin and the European vernaculars and counted as the Christian dreambook of the Middle Ages. While generally viewed as a Byzantine invention partly based on the second-century manual of Artemidorus, she showed that it was a Christian adaptation of Arabic Islamic material and one among a larger group of texts originally written in Arabic or Persian and received into Greek between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. During the next two decades, she worked on identifying the place of these translations within Byzantine literary culture and its reception in “East” and “West’ during the medieval and early modern period. This begs reconsidering the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions, as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship in 2002. Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of California, Berkeley, with additional appointments at the departments of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.