Book review: Arianna Borrelli. Aspects of the Astrolabe: “Architectonica Ratio” in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Europe. Stuttgart 2008.

Note: The primary transmission of mathematics and astronomy from the Islamic world to medieval Europe took place in the form of Latin translations from Arabic made in the twelfth century a.d. The book under review concerns the history of the astrolabe in Christian Europe before the twelfth century. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the astrolabe was well known in the Islamic part of the Iberian Peninsula, and two splendid examples from the 1020s survive today. Knowledge about the astrolabe had trickled down to Christian Europe, and the instrument is described in a corpus of brief and disorganized, mostly eleventh‐century Latin texts, which ultimately go back to Arabic sources. Some of the texts contain very interesting diagrams. One may wonder to what extent the astrolabe was understood by the authors of these texts and why Latin scholars were interested in this instrument at all. Aspects of the Astrolabe is devoted to these questions.