Arabica Veritas. Europeans' Search for "Truth" in Arabic Scientific and Philosophical Literature of the Middle Ages.
Prof. Charles
Burnett (Warburg Institute, University of London) delivers a lecture on the
medieval Latin reception of Arabic philosophical texts. Arabic scientific
and philosophical sources were highly revered and sought after in the Middle
Ages, translated by specialists, and disseminated among the literary and
religious elite, for whom mastery of the latest state-of-the-art Arabic
material was crucial. Getting at the “Arabic truth” was a passion for
Latinate scholars, even as cultural and political figures preached the language
of crusades, demonising the alien religion. Prof. Burnett, an authority
in the field, tells this rich and surprising history in a lecture commemorating
his honorary doctorate at the University of Gothenburg.