Astronomy

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From Baghdad to Barcelona: The Anxiety of Influence in the Transmission of the Greek and Arabic Sciences

Drawing on Harold Bloom’s model of poetic influence and supersession in his famous book, “The Anxiety of Influence,” and considering several historical cases of cross-cultural reception of the...

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Astronomy in Medieval Jerusalem

There can be no comparison with the established sophisticated astronomical traditions in Mamlûk Cairo and Damascus and Aleppo, with substantial numbers of capable astronomers, but since the Jerusalem...

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Islamic Astronomy from “Star Wars” to Star Tables

The most obvious difference between modern and Islamic astronomy is that the latter is primarily mathematical and predictive, and the former has other observational goals, such as describing the...

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Star-finders Astrolabes

Oliver Hoare once said "The ability of Islamic civilization to perfect what it inherited, and to endow what it made with beauty, is nowhere better expressed than in the astrolabe". Over a...

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Islamic Astronomy

This article was originally published as: “Islamic Astronomy”, in Christopher Walker, ed., Astronomy before the Telescope, London: British Museum Press, 1996, pp. 143-174.

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Lund Astronomical Clock

The genesis of this article lies in a recent visit to the Romanesque cathedral of Lund. While in the cathedral, I walked over to the medieval astronomical clock to await the moving figures and music...

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