I - The introduction of scientific texts into Britain, c. 1100–1250

Summary

The Norman conquest of England occurred within the same generation as the reconquests of Muslim-held territory: namely those of Sicily (1060s), Toledo (1085), and parts of the Middle East (1098). One result of the English Norman Conquest was the refurbishment of the libraries of English monasteries, and it is not surprising that included among the new books imported and copied should be those containing texts made available by Christendom’s expansion at the expense of Islam. The earliest of such books, however, probably arrived not as a result of conquest. These were the corpus of Arabic medical texts that Constantine the African is said to have brought from Qayrawan (in present-day Tunisia) to Salerno and translated with colleagues in the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino in the last years of the eleventh century. Already in the early twelfth century copies of these medical texts had been brought to, or made in, English monasteries, among them Cambridge, Trinity College, ms. R. 14. 34, and London, Wellcome Historical Library, ms. 801A (both from Bury St Edmunds Abbey) and BL, Add. ms. 22719, which belonged to St Nicholas in Exeter (a dependency of Battle Abbey). A translation of Arabic astronomical tables from Spain was copied together with notes in Arabic and original texts by Walcher, abbot of Great Malvern (d. 1135), in the scriptorium of Worcester Cathedral Priory between c.1120 and 1140 (now Bodleian, Auct. ms. F. 1. 9). A medical text translated in Antioch in 1127 was already being copied in the scriptorium of Worcester Cathedral by the mid-twelfth century (Worcester, Cathedral Library, ms. f. 40).