ʿĪsā Ibn ʿalī's Book on the Useful Properties of Animal Parts: Edition, Translation and Study of a Fluid Tradition

ISBN-13: 9783110549867 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 627 str.

Lucia Raggetti

Opis

The `Science of properties' represents a large and fascinating part of Arabic technical literature. The book of 'Isa ibn 'Ali (9th cent.) `On the useful properties of animal parts' was the first of such compositions in Arabic. His author was a Syriac physician, disciple of Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who worked at the Abbasid court during the floruit of the translation movement. For the composition of his book, as a multilingual scholar, he collected many different antique and late antique sources. The structure of the text itself-a collection of recipes that favoured a fluid transmission-becomes here the key to a new formal analysis that oriented the editorial solutions as well. The `Book on the useful properties of animal parts' is a new tile that the Arabic tradition offers to the larger mosaic representing the transfer of technical knowledge in pre-modern times. This text is an important passage in that process of acquisition and original elaboration of knowledge that characterized the early Abbasid period.

O autorze

Lucia Raggetti, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.