1107–1137: Adelard of Bath's Questiones naturales Promote "the Studies of the Arabs"

Abstract

When Adelard of Bath wrote the Questiones naturales in the first decades of the twelfth century and referred to the "studies of the Arabs," Latin-Christian Europe was just beginning to engage with the so-called Arabic sciences. Adelard merely refers to the "knowledge of the Arabs" and to "Arab teachers," without naming specific works or individual scholars. The article investigates whether Adelard's claim to have made use of the "studies of the Arabs" is an argumentative device, or rather evidence for the actual reception of texts that had originally been written in Arabic.