Re: Introductorium in astronomiam Albumasaris

2
Excellent link, Sasha!

This must be the Hermann translation I think as the John of Seville one was never properly printed until the late Richard Lemay's exhaustive critical edition appeared in 1995.

A year ago it was still possible to purchase all nine volumes (in inexpensive softcover bindings) of the Lemay edition of this great opus from an academic bookstore in Italy called Herder (easy enough to find on the Internet). I personally decided to buy only volumes one to six, with one to three being the Arabic original and notes, and four to six the John of Seville translation. This was because the Hermann translation is reputed to have been less accurate than that of John of Seville, and since my interest was studying an accurate Latin representation of the source text with the late Professor Lemay's notes, not comparing translations of lesser and greater accuracy, I felt that the John of Seville translation would be adequate!

By the way, I was in contact briefly with Professor Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute in London just under a couple of years ago, and he confirmed that he was working on the first complete English translation from Lemay's Arabic edition of the whole work, but expected it not to come to print for about four more years. So just possibly, all going well for Professor Burnett, it might be available in English in 2008 or 2009! Something to look forward to there.

One of the most interesting features of Abu Ma'Sar's work is its lengthy treatise on the Arabic Parts, which of course predates that of Bonatti.

Professor Burnett previously translated, with some colleagues, the shorter 'Lesser Introduction' by Abu Ma'Sar, and this has been readily available in a simplified ARHAT edition without the original source text for several years. But the full-length 'Greater Introduction' whose first printed translation into Latin you have linked to here is of course a much more thorough representation of Abu Ma'Sar's astrology!

From what I understood at least, the 'Lesser Introduction' was reduced from the original by Abu Ma'Sar himself for a different market from his full-length version, and is not a modern abridgement.

Philip

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Hello Philip Graves,

Thanks for the information about Abu Mashar's texts.

I think that regarding arabic texts we need translations direct from arabic. The texts in latin translation are easyer for us but I think we loose the original meaning of arabic terminology.
The key is to find the terminology used by arabic astrologers and also a complete text without interpolations.