Between the eighth and the tenth centuries, the Jews of southern Italy, at that time under the political and cultural influence of Byzantium, experienced a time of cultural renaissance, best represented by the composition in Hebrew-a language that the diaspora had neglected as a tool of scientific transmission in favour of local vernaculars, especially Arabic-of work on various disciplines, from historiography through mathematics to astrology and astronomy. In an attempt to reconcile the tenets of Ptolemy with the cosmological traditions preserved in the Bible and especially in the rabbinical writings (particularly the Talmud), Shabbatai Donnolo, a tenth century polymath from Apulia, the 'heel' of Italy's boot, examined and interpreted the Baraita of Samuel, an anonymous text produced probably in Palestine in the eighth century and mainly elaborating on Ptolemaic astrological teaching, and Sefer Yetzirah, another anonymous work dating to between the third and sixth centuries whose cosmology, however, did not abide by any known tradition, especially the writing of Ptolemy. The result of Donnolo's analysis is the 'deconstruction' of the two texts, especially Sefer Yetzirah, and the definition of a new, plausibly coherent, view of the universe and the cosmos dominated by a hierarchies of entities and celestial creatures.
...MoreBook Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum; Charles Burnett (2015) From Māshāʾallāh to Kepler: Theory and Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Astrology.
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