More than the Sex of Angels
Alain Touwaide examines a 11th-century codex at the library of St John's monastery on the island of Patmos in Greece.
Alain Touwaide is a Historian of Sciences in the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He specializes in the history of botany, particularly medicinal plants, in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean world from Antiquity to the dawn of modern science. The current President of the Washington Academy of Sciences, he has extensively traveled in search of manuscripts. In this essay he discusses researching the history of Byzantine science(s).
Byzantium. The very word generally evokes sophistic, if not abstruse lucubrations by Byzantine monks on such questions as the sex of angels, rather than any scientific topic. Despite this all too diffused stereotype, the field of the history of Byzantine science(s) might be among the most promising. It is true that currently available literature is not inviting. George Sarton in his monumental Introduction to the History of Science (1927-1948) devotes some three pages to the 6th century (1: 443-445) and returns to Byzantium again in the late 14th century (e.g. 3.1: 753-755; 3.2: 1438-1441). In the late 1970s, the distinguished Byzantinist from the renowned school of Vienna, Herbert Hunger, was more destructive in his treatment of Byzantine medicine when he stated in his reference work on Byzantine profane literature that “nobody will want to spend months of work in reading poorly written manuscripts in order to recover one more prescription from the jungle of iatrosophia [that is, Byzantine therapeutic manuals]” (2.304; translation is mine). Finally and to quote just a few examples, the recent encyclopedia Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine (2005) does not devote any specific entry to Byzantium and does not include Byzantine scientists. The word “Byzantium” does not even appear in the index! Be it because of such widely diffused opinions or not, the history of Byzantine science(s) is almost a terra incognita, rather than a desert with nothing to offer. The promises are commensurate with the novelty of the explorations.
An exception
In this sort of unknown continent, there is, however, a small area that is beginning to be better known: astronomy. The case is revealing: the recent Corpus des astronomes byzantins, which counts now some 10 volumes, is the product of a long tradition at the University of Louvain—now in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). The story started in the 1930s with Adolphe Rome, who edited the commentaries of Theon and Pappus of Alexandria on the Almagest—a project courageously continued after World War II by Joseph Mogenet, editor of Autolycus of Pitane, and lately pursued by Anne Tihon. Little was available when Rome and Mogenet first started their inquiries. The many manuscripts containing the texts they were interested in had to be traced worldwide, carefully scrutinized, and submitted to a severe critical examination. All this was done with a remarkable patience and tenacity, particularly in an age where microfilm, telecommunications, and text processing did not even exist, not to speak of the computer and digital imaging. A knowledge base was gradually accumulated, a tradition was built, and students wrote B.A. and Ph.D. theses on some fragments of text, on a specific manuscript and, sometimes also, on an astronomer who emerged from the darkness of history.
The story is interesting, not so much for its long-term investment, but rather for its method. Louvain production in the field of history of astronomy was manuscript-oriented and manuscript-based, and based on the accumulation of data so as to reach a critical mass that would be statistically representative of the discipline under consideration. This is what the history of Byzantine science is about: manuscripts, manuscripts, and manuscripts. Of course, in astronomy it is indispensable to be able to look at the stars on a nice clear night in whatever season, to juggle with the Byzantine sexagesimal system of astronomical measurement and computation, or to speculate on the supposed movements of planets and stars to compensate for the shortcomings of observation and the theoretical models built on such a basis. But this is far from the crux of the research: most important is the scrutiny of, and dialogue with, manuscripts and, even before that, the hunt for such ancient books.
Searching for texts on pieces of paper recycled
in bindings.
The smell of the past
Searching for manuscripts is not antiquarianism – although it might have something of that, as we shall see below – but bringing to light books and texts that document the ancient practice of science and that, very often, have been overlooked even when not unknown. Contrary to an opinion diffused even among historians and philologists, ancient scientific texts were not repeatedly impoverished every single time they were reproduced by hand, although it might have happened in some cases. Instead, they were revised, updated and improved by including the results of the practice of science of their writers and owners. Trying to find all copies of a text is thus a fundamental operation as it provides the material for a reconstruction of the dynamics that texts underwent. Sometimes, however, the search for manuscripts can take a completely different direction, becoming transformed in an antiquarian enquiry that Hercule Poirot would have liked. Codices in private collections – and they are not as rare as the opinio communis would assume – might be sold, repeatedly, on the antiquarian market. Following the sometimes tortuous itinerary of a single manuscript might become a fascinating search in which the protection of the privacy of owners might be a component. The recent history of the Archimedes palimpsest is just one among the many cases of this kind of investigation; maybe a spectacular one, but certainly not the only one and surely not even the one which most transformed the field its text is about.
Bringing new manuscripts to light – be they in public libraries or in private collections – is always an inexpressible pleasure: turning the pages of a book that might not have been opened for centuries is like entering the cabinet of an ancient scientist and looking over his shoulder while he is writing down the data collected during the day, be it in his astronomical observatory, in the hospital where he was treating patients, or in the class where he was trying to inculcate mathematical principles in young students. The person is there, imperceptible, but still living through the lines and the data collected, a subtle and immaterial presence, impossible to reduce to an objective fact, but undeniably permeating the air emanated from the volume just opened. Provided, of course, that the reader allows all of his senses to be impregnated by the signs left in the book by its owner.
From the field to the lab
Just like botanists who go to the field to collect plants and then return to their lab to analyze, describe and classify them, the historian of Byzantine science(s) travels across the world to see and analyze as many manuscripts as his (or her) funding allows and then returns to his office to interpret and work on the data he collected. In best cases, he also brings in his luggage a transcription of the text of the manuscripts he has found, paged, and analyzed – and this is why he never checks his luggage but keeps in his case this precious document! All the facts and impressions collected during the personal inspection of the manuscripts – including the memory of the dust on the fingers, if any – need now to be brought back to the surface of memory and to the desk of the investigator. The nature of the medium – parchment or paper – and its quality; watermark(s) in the case of paper; color of the ink; strength of the hand in writing with the possible hesitations and return backwards to correct itself, and any other sign imperceptible to the eye of the neophyte; words deleted in the text and replaced with others; annotations, drawings and all possible additions in the margins; the binding, possibly with notes of owners and coats of arms of rich collectors and, also, in a time when books were not so abundant as today and often served as daily notebooks (particularly in the case of volumes of home medicine), the report of such family events as a birth of a child or the death of a relative; the daily accounting of expenses; the list of books received on loan or lent and, to mention just some, an eclipse, a heavy rain or drought, or, also, an irrepressible invective against a colleague accused of arrogance! All these and other facts, from the most visible to the smallest contribute to the reconstruction of the history of the book and, behind it, the construction of the knowledge that the book encapsulated.
Archeological work on books goes along with the reading of the text, deconstructed in the same way. Technical terms in a phrase might be anachronic or come from a language different from that of the main text; expressions can be of a linguistic level different from that of the main text and reveal the assimilation of oral commentaries; interruptions in the presentation may evidence the loss of one or more pages; and, to mention just these phenomena, bulky works might have been divided into smaller and more manageable units, each being sometimes provided with a single title and giving the impression that the author of the whole work was responsible for a series of short treatises.
Often such history resulting from archeology of the book and textual analysis is far from being flat, but is instead tri-dimensional and multi-layered, with several levels of data added one after the other in a never-interrupted succession that transforms books and texts in the hands of the historian in a sort of archeological field, with strata accumulated generation after generation.
Container for medicines from a Roman shipwreck of the 1st century B.C./A.D. Analysis of such containers can confirm textual information as they reveal the plants actually used in ancient times.
Toward a high-tech job
All this might seem to be old-fashioned, tedious and time-consuming, requiring hour- and day-long silent observation of old and dusty books and texts, like cadavers on the autopsy table of an indiscrete anatomist in search of the fugitive signs of a defunct life. Nothing would be more false. I will not speak here about the excitement that each book represents: opening it is like starting a new adventure, leaving for new discoveries of an unknown nature, with all the senses in maximal state of alert so as to be able to perceive any unexpected sign and to allow it to carve a trace in one’s memory. This is subjective and might be neither transmissible nor repeatable. From a much more practical viewpoint, manuscript analysis is becoming – or about to become – an extraordinarily multifaceted field of a high-tech nature. In the case of parchment, for example, the medium of books can be submitted to DNA analysis to identify the nature of the animal whose skin was used to produce parchment, possibly also to locate the geographical origin of the animal, and maybe even to determine the period in which its skin was transformed into parchment. The pages of the texts themselves can be digitized, and the resulting pictures can be mounted on a Web site on the Internet, making it possible to recreate in only one computer a unique and virtual library that contains all the books of a text in the world. No need any more of painstaking, time consuming and expensive travels across the world to see all such manuscripts one by one; they are all at the fingertips of the scholar, and can be systematically compared with each other, something that cannot be done in any library. Furthermore, unsigned, anonymous manuscripts can be compared to signed manuscripts by superposing the pictures of each, thus allowing exact correspondence and no longer requiring the eye of the expert who could recognize a hand at the first glance. Last but not least, optical character recognition makes it possible to transform hand-written texts into machine-readable documents. In other words: texts heretofore decipherable only by trained experts will be reformatted so as to be readable by any scholar trained in Greek. Texts still hidden in old tomes will become accessible and readable, word indices listing all occurrences of all their terms will be produced, and comparisons between texts treated in that way will be possible, allowing for the study of the possible continuity, transformation or any other phenomenon of the vocabulary and, behind it, of the contents, concepts, notions and architecture of knowledge.
The life of ancient science
Again, such micro-analyses will seem of a very limited nature, the result of Carthusian work that reminds us of the ancient exegetes of the Bible, an anachronistic practice of an archaic slowness in a time of Google Books. Again, nothing would be more inexact, because, from the accumulation of micro-phenomena gained on the basis of such analyses, the historian of Byzantine science(s) reconstructs the big picture, assembling tessel by tessel an image that emerges as a large, colorful and also contrasting mosaic. Among the many examples of life-like pictures resulting from such tesselation, one might use the case of Arabic medicine in Byzantium. Some articles in previous literature mention Byzantine texts apparently based on Arabic sources (Kouzis 1939). A systematic survey of Greek manuscripts containing medical texts brought to light more than 120 codices with over 70 texts presenting signs of Arabic or Persian origin. Texts were carefully and painstakingly transcribed on computer from microfilms, and the manuscripts containing these texts were analyzed in situ all across the world. As for the interpretation of this phenomenon, it needs to be framed in the movement of translation in the Eastern Mediterranean, marked among others by the assimilation of Greek science in the Arabic world from the 9th century onward. One interpretation might be that when the Byzantine empire declined not only politically and economically, but also culturally and scientifically, it found itself dominated by Arabic science, which, in the meantime, had surpassed it. Such a possible interpretation based on the idea – or an a priori – of the decline (or absence) of Byzantine science and maybe also on the paradigm of clash of culture, should not necessarily be accepted without reservations. A close scrutiny of texts and their framing in their historical context suggest indeed quite a different reconstruction. From a macroscopic viewpoint, Arabic science seems to have been massively present in Byzantium after the end of the disastrous Latin empire in 1261. Yet in 1258 Baghdad was conquered by the Mongols. The quasi simultaneity of the reconquest of Constantinople and of the fall of Baghdad, and the subsequent presence of Arabic science in Byzantium suggests that, after 1258 and even more after 1261, Arabic scientists left Baghdad and went to Byzantium not only in search of a job, but also because society – particularly health services, whatever their nature – needed to be reconstructed. A microscopic analysis of manuscripts indicates that, in some cases at least, Arabic-speaking physicians worked closely with their Greek-speaking colleagues. Moreover, they sometimes wrote bi-lingual lexica of plant names together, each writing the names in his own language, but both doing it in the Greek alphabet. What better indicator of a close collaboration between different groups than the evidence provided by these medical texts.
In sum, the history of Byzantine science(s), although challenging, is certainly not the vain, or absurd, discussions on the sex of angels that Byzantines are supposed to have held. The reward is commensurate with the challenge, however, and makes it worthwhile to devote a career to such a field where so many discoveries are still to be made that will transform the way an entire period has to be approached. At the same time, the promises of such scholarship make me regret that Byzantine science is so largely under-represented in the history of science, and still seems a highly specialized job for a handful of scholars threatened with extinction.