The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones.

  • John Henry Bridges
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life & work of Roger Bacon : an introduction to the Opus majus / by H. Gordon Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    21/180 (page 19)
    lecturer was Grosseteste ; but we may well believe it. It may be supposed that the influence of Adelard of Bath,^ the first translator of Euclid, had left its traces. Twenty years before the close of the twelfth century we hear of two English- men, Alexander Neckham and Alfred of Sershall, lecturing in Paris on the Physics of Aristotle, then recently introduced from the school of translators from Arabic directed by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo. But the University of Paris, placed nearer the centre of the spiritual forces that swayed mediaeval society, had grown up under the dialectical in- fluences of theological controversy ; and when Bacon went there, perhaps about 1240, he found what is called, vaguely and inaccurately enough, the scholastic philosophy in the fullness of its growth, with the enlarged scope given to it by the recent permission to study the Physics^ Meta- * [‘ The writer referred to is Adelard of Bath, who lived in the early part of the twelfth century. He fills an important place in the history of mediaeval science. He was the first translator of Euclid into Latin ; not, however, from Greek but from Arabic. A more complete translation was made in the following century by Campanus. (See Weissenborn, Abhandlungen zur Ge- schichte der Mathematik, Drittes Heft, Leipsic, 1880, pp. 141- i66.) Adelard studied in the schools of Tours and Laon ; and subsequently travelled in Greece and Asia Minor. In Bacon’s mathematical treatise, as yet unpublished, he is frequently men- tioned, always under the name Alardus. (See Sloane MSS. 2156, ff. 74-97.)’—Op. Maj.y vol. i, p. 6 «.]