Union Académique Internationale

Project nº41, adopted in 1985

The history of the Corpus of Byzantine Astronomers goes back to 1981, the year the project was launched at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Vienna. It was quite well received by the commissioner Robert Browning and accepted by the UAI in 1985. The project’s roots reach back to a much older tradition, particularly to the teaching of Canon Adolphe Rome (1889-1971) at the Catholic University of Leuven / Université Catholique de Louvain. Canon Rome greatly encouraged research into the History of the Sciences of Antiquity. Highly gifted in science and math, his superiors sent him to the Catholic University of Leuven to study classical philology, but his taste for the sciences brought him to look into numerous ancient scientific texts. He was one of the great rediscoverers of Ptolemy’s astronomy through his editions covering subjects from the Commentaries of Pappus and Theon to Ptolemy’s Almagest, published in the Vatican library’s series Studi e Testi (54, 72 et 106). He was also the author of several articles on Greek science. Many students gathered around him who dedicated their theses or doctoral dissertations to Greek scientific texts. Among them was his successor, the abbot Joseph Mogenet. Tasked by Canon Rome to edit commentaries from Theon of Alexandria to Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, J. Mogenet was called to the Vatican as scientific collaborator. While in Rome he collected a great quantity of unpublished scientific texts from the Byzantine era, particularly those of an astronomical nature. These discoveries resulted in over forty student theses. Among them was a provisory edition with translation and commentary, attempting to prepare unpublished texts from Ancient Greek sources as well as texts of Arabic, Jewish, or Latin inspiration. J. Mogenet wished to publish these texts in the form of Anecdota, which would have been the crowning achievement of his vast research. It is in this view that, preparing for Joseph Mogenet’s emeritus post, Anne Tihon had the idea of a veritable Corpus of Byzantine astronomers. Unfortunately, the untimely passing of her mentor in February of 1980 prevented him from seeing the Corpus launched. Cfr. A. Tihon, Un projet de Corpus des Astronomes Byzantins /A Project for a Corpus of Byzantine Astronomer, XVI Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress, Akten I, Beiheft, Jahrbuch der Oesterreichischen Byzantinistik 31 (1981) (2. 1) The project benefitted from the support of distinguished scholars of Byzantine studies such as I. Ševčenko (†), and Gilbert Dagron, and codicologists such as Jean Irigoin (†), Mgr Paul Canart (†), as well as from leading historians of astronomy like Otto Neugebauer (†) and Paul Kunitzsch. Furthermore, David Pingree (†) and Alexander Jones immediately joined in to collaborate with the series. One major problem was to find an editor that would publish and finance this corpus. Few were interested in Byzantine astronomy and the great publishing houses did not accept the project. We had to resort to a more artisanal system, and have the texts "camera ready" for reproduction. The first volumes were published by J. C. Gieben (Amsterdam). As one might imagine, however, Byzantine astronomical tests do not enjoy a wide readership, nor was the venture obviously commercially viable. When the editor halted publication, the following tomes were published by A. Hakkert, then by Academia in Louvain-la-Neuve. Currently, their publication has been entrusted to Peeters Publishers as part of the Publications de l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain. From early on, byzantine astronomy has been marginal discipline. It has since gained its rightful place in scholarship for historians of Arabic astronomy, who immediately saw the benefits that could be drawn from Byzantine sources for Arabic and Persian astronomy. For historians of Western medieval science, and even for scholars of Byzantine studies, however, the subject long went disregarded. This is no longer the case today. The rapid progress of Greek paleography, and particularly the identification of copyists from the Paleologue era (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the availability reproduced manuscripts on the internet and then the many general articles that Anne Tihon has published on the subject have inspired young researchers to join the adventure. The critical edition of a scientific text, particularly an astronomical one, is a long, difficult, and thankless task. The work is multidisciplinary and requires profound competency in paleography, codicology, classical as well as Byzantine Greek, Eastern languages, a thorough knowledge of the cultural and historical context, without forgetting the necessary astronomical knowledge. It also requires the creation of computer programs able to analyze and compare astronomical tables. This means the collaboration of a diverse group of specialists, in Eastern languages, computers, and the cooperation of different research projects and meetings.