The Library of Iberian Resources on Line Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages

[248] The passage of Greek science into Western Europe through medieval Spain has been one of the focal points of medieval intellectual history. Although the movement has been typically portrayed as a bipartite one, with translation from Greek into Arabic anteceding the flourescence of Arabic science in the ninth century, and a later phase of translation from Arabic into Latin (eleventh and twelfth centuries) and finally into Romance vernaculars (thirteenth century), recent research demonstrates the continuous nature of the phenomenon.(1) The studies of Millás Vallicrosa show not only the continuity in scientific tradition between eastern and western Islam but also highlight the virtual contemporaneity of the production of Andalusi science and its transmission to Christian Europe.(2) It is paradoxical that in both phases of transmission, the Islamic and the Iberian, the receiving societies have been characterized as the loci of cultural traditions inimical to the practice of science. The case is made for medieval Islam by G. E. von Grunebaum, who asserts that science and its technological applications had no root in the "fundamental needs and aspirations" of Islamic civilization. In the case of medieval Spain, Américo Castro was but one in a long series of participants in the "polemic of Spanish science" who have argued that science was a casualty of the wars against Islam, which had the effect of encouraging certain values and practices (honor, courage, religious fervor) and discouraging others (rationality, science, manual labor). A similar case has been made for the Christian West generally, as when Richard Lemay cites the inability of medieval Christianity, due to a pervasive obsession with the redemption myth, to come to grips with nature realistically.(3)