The Moral Vision
Gerard of Cremona
~ 95 ~
GERARD OF CREMONA
Gerard, who was born in Cremona, Lombardy, in
1114, was a mediaeval scholar who translated the
works of many major Greek and Arabic writers into
Latin, there being a great body of scientific and
philosophical literature in these languages which
were well worth making available to all the known
world at that time. In this sense, he performed the
same service for his countrymen that Hunain Ibn
Ishaaq had done for eastern Arabia. He went
specially to Toledo, in Spain, to learn Arabic so that
he could read the
Almagest
by Ptolemy, the Greek
astronomer, geographer and mathematician who
lived in the second century A.D. The
Almagest
was a
vast computation of the astronomical knowledge of
the ancients, and was accepted as authoritative up
to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As such,
this was one of Gerard’s most significant
translations. He was assisted in his task by
two
other scholars, one Christian and one Jewish. With
this, and other such books, the gates of Greek and
Arabic sciences were opened for the first time to the
west. In the field of medicine, he translated books
by Buqrat and Galen, almost all of the books by
