Hermann of Carinthia

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Hermann of Carinthia — also called Hermannus Dalmata, Hermann the Dalmatian, and in his own colophons Hermannus Secundus — was a Latin scholar and translator active in the second quarter of the twelfth century, one of the figures who moved Arabic learning into the European schools. Where he was born is uncertain beyond the region his names point to, the Istrian and Carinthian borderland of the eastern Adriatic; he is documented not by a biography but by the books he made and the dates he attached to them. A handful of dedications, a scatter of colophons giving a place and a year, and the texts themselves are nearly the whole of the record. The man stays behind the work. No charter names him, no chronicle records his birth or death; the dates that anchor him — around 1140 for the Albumasar, 1143 for the Planisphere and De essentiis — are dates of books, not of a life. Modern reckonings place his birth around 1105 to 1110 and his death after 1154, both inferred from the works and from the silence that follows them. He is, in the strictest sense, an author known only by what he wrote.

What the work shows is a particular kind of intelligence: a translator who was also a cosmologist, who did not render the Arabic sciences as inert cargo but absorbed them into an argument about the order of the world. He had studied in France, under Thierry of Chartres, the master whom he later called the soul of Plato returned once more to mortals — a debt that runs through everything he wrote. From Chartres he carried the conviction that the cosmos was a legible order, a structure of number and proportion descending from a first cause, and that the labor of the scholar was to read it. Then he turned to the work that defines him: translation from Arabic, carried out in the borderlands of Christian Spain and the lands just north of the Pyrenees, where Arabic manuscripts could be had and read, and where a generation of Latin scholars had begun to converge on the libraries that the reconquest of cities like Toledo had thrown open.

The transmitter

The texts he chose were chiefly astronomical and astrological — the technical apparatus of the heavens, the part of the Arabic inheritance the Latin West most conspicuously lacked. Around 1140 he rendered the great introduction to astrology of Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi — Albumasar to the Latins — the Kitab al-mudkhal al-kabir, the most influential single Arabic astrological text the Middle Ages would receive. John of Seville had already translated it once, in 1133; Hermann translated it again, and it was his version, not the earlier one, that the printers of the fifteenth century chose for the first printed edition. In 1143, at Toulouse, he turned to a different register and translated the Planisphere ascribed to Ptolemy, working not from a bare Greek-derived text but from the recension of the Andalusi astronomer Maslama of Madrid, who had furnished it with explanatory chapters and notes. He dedicated that translation to Thierry of Chartres, sending the geometry of the heavens back to the master who had taught him to look for it.

He rendered other things besides: tables and instruments of the practical astronomy then entering Latin, work touching on Euclid and on the astronomical canons of al-Khwarizmi, and a body of judicial and predictive astrology — the branch of divination that read events and answered questions from the heavens — in which the names of the ninth-century masters — among them Sahl ibn Bishr, the Zahel of the Latin tradition — circulated. From this material, and from the Arabic he had made his own, he produced original works of the same kind: the Liber imbrium, a treatise on predicting rain from the configurations of the sky; the De indagatione cordis, on the interrogation of the heavens; the Fatidica. In these the line between translator and author thins almost to nothing, which is precisely the condition of the twelfth-century transmission — the men who carried the texts also rewrote, abridged, recombined, and extended them, so that a Latin rendering is often a new composition built on Arabic foundations. The astrology that came across in this way was a transmitted textual tradition — a body of inherited doctrine about the meanings of configurations, copied and re-Latinized from master to master — rather than a freshly invented art, and Hermann’s place in it is that of a careful carrier who happened also to think.

Some of this material traveled under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, the antediluvian sage to whom the Arabic world, like the Greek before it, attributed a literature of the stars and their governance. The Islamicate Hermes was not a faded echo of the Greek divine scribe but a figure reconstituted on his own terms — a prophet of the technical sciences, identified with the Qur’anic Idris and the biblical Enoch, credited with founding astrology, alchemy, and the art of talismans before the Flood. It was this Hermes, the Hermes of the Arabic Hermetica, whose corpus the twelfth-century translators carried into Latin a full three centuries before Marsilio Ficino recovered the Greek dialogues. In Hermann’s De essentiis the Istimatis, one of the pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetic books of astral causation, is cited by name — a direct trace of that channel running through his own cosmology. In transmitting such matter Hermann stands inside the long medieval afterlife of the Hermetic name, and at the head of the Latin Platonism into which the astral sciences were folded.

He worked in a crowded field and is best placed among his peers. The same decades saw Adelard of Bath bring across al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Hugo of Santalla render the Hermetic and Apollonian texts of the Ebro valley, John of Seville pour out the astrology of the Toledan stream, Plato of Tivoli turn the Hebrew of Abraham bar Hiyya and the Arabic of the Tetrabiblos into Latin, and, a little later, Gerard of Cremona produce in Toledo the largest single body of translations any one scholar made in the Middle Ages — among them the medicine and philosophy of Avicenna, the figure who would dominate the Latin reception of Arabic learning. Hermann belongs to this company not as its most prolific member but as its most philosophical — the translator who turned the inherited apparatus into a system. The wave was not coordinated, but it was cumulative: within two generations the Latin schools went from near-total ignorance of Greek and Arabic mathematical science to possession of its central texts, and Hermann’s colophons mark some of the earliest dated points on that curve.

The Cluniac Qur’an

He is remembered as well for a labor outside the stars. In the early 1140s Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, traveling through Christian Spain, assembled a team to render into Latin the foundational texts of Islam — the first such effort the Latin West had mounted. Hermann was one of the scholars he recruited, together with his friend and fellow translator Robert of Ketton, the Mozarab Peter of Toledo, and a Muslim known to the project simply as Mohammed. The collection they produced is the Collectio Toletana, the Toledan corpus: at its center the first Latin translation of the Qur’an, the Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, which Robert of Ketton made and which would remain the standard Latin Qur’an for some four centuries. Around it the team set a dossier of supporting texts. Hermann’s own contributions were two: the Liber de generatione Mahumet et nutritura eius, drawn from an Arabic account of the prophetic light passing down the ancestral line, and the Doctrina Mahumet, a Latin version of a popular catechetical dialogue on the questions a learned Jew is made to put to Muhammad.

The frame of the undertaking was polemical. Peter the Venerable meant the corpus to arm Christendom for argument against a religion he intended to refute, and the title given to the Qur’an itself — naming Muhammad a false prophet — declares as much. The translations bear the marks of that intent in their glosses and their framing. What the project also shows, and what later readers have found more durable than its polemic, is something the polemic did not anticipate: a circle of scholars who could read the language and the sources of a faith their patron meant to oppose, and who, in order to oppose it, first had to understand it. For Hermann the commission was a detour from the astronomy that drew him — Peter the Venerable records that he found his translators already at work on the sciences and had to turn them, for a season, to the texts of religion. The two enterprises ran on the same skill: the Arabic that opened Albumasar to the Latin West was the Arabic that opened the Qur’an, and the same borderland that supplied the astronomical manuscripts supplied the religious ones. The transmitter of the stars and the transmitter of the Lex Mahumet are one scholar, working both sides of the same linguistic frontier. The corpus sat largely unprinted until 1543, when the Zurich orientalist Theodore Bibliander issued it from Basel, with a preface by Martin Luther’s circle — and so Hermann’s twelfth-century labor reached print in the middle of the Reformation, in a controversy he could not have foreseen.

De essentiis

Hermann was not only a conduit. In the same year, 1143, he completed De essentiis — begun at Toulouse, finished at Béziers — an original work of natural philosophy cast as a dialogue between himself and Robert of Ketton. In it he set out a cosmology drawn from Plato’s Timaeus, from Aristotle, and from the Arabic astronomers he had been translating, organizing the whole around five essences — cause, movement, place, time, and habitudo, the disposition or condition of things — through which the structure of the world could be expounded. The book is built on the double premise of his school: that the cosmos descends in ordered ranks from a first cause, and that the heavens act on the world below through real, traceable influence, so that the study of the stars is not idle but a study of secondary causation within God’s design.

Here the two halves of his career meet. The Platonism of Chartres supplies the architecture — the legible, proportioned cosmos, the soul of the world, the descent from unity that the school inherited from late-antique Neoplatonism — while the Arabic sciences supply the working detail of how the heavens move and what they do. The result is one of the earliest Latin works in which the new astronomy is not merely translated but thought with, made to carry a philosophy. It is a small book and it had a small circulation, surviving in only a handful of manuscripts; its importance is out of proportion to its diffusion, because it stands at the precise moment when the Latin West, newly supplied with the apparatus of the heavens, began to use it.

The textual record

What can be said of Hermann with confidence is bounded by these works and their colophons; the man behind them stays largely out of view. The reconstruction of his career is therefore almost entirely the work of editors. The standard study and edition is Charles Burnett’s Hermann of Carinthia, De essentiis: A Critical Edition with Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1982), which fixed the text, established the chronology of the translations, and traced the Arabic and Platonic strata of the cosmology; Burnett’s earlier articles on the Spanish translators, and his later edition of the Latin pseudo-Hermetic Astrologica et Divinatoria (Brepols, 2001), set Hermann within the wider transmission. Lynn Thorndike had already placed him among the twelfth-century translators in his History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Macmillan, 1923), vol. 2, scanned in full and long out of copyright. A useful modern biographical synthesis is Stipe Kutleša’s “Croatian Philosophers I: Hermann of Dalmatia (1110–1154)”, in Prolegomena (2004), which gathers the scattered evidence for his life and works.

For the texts themselves, the principal public witness to Hermann’s Albumasar is the editio princeps, the Introductorium in astronomiam Albumasaris Abalachi printed by Erhard Ratdolt at Augsburg on 7 February 1489, which preserves Hermann’s version rather than John of Seville’s; the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds a digitized copy. Robert of Ketton’s Qur’an and the rest of the Toledan corpus survive in their twelfth-century form in the manuscript at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris and reached print in Bibliander’s 1543 Basel edition. The modern critical work on the Arabic Hermetica that Hermann’s generation carried west — the editions and studies of David Pingree, Charles Burnett, and Kevin van Bladel — remains in copyright, and represents the living edge of a field whose foundational texts are now, by date, open.

The transmission Hermann took part in did not stay behind the colophons. The astrological and cosmological texts he and his contemporaries Latinized reshaped how the medieval West read the sky, and reshaped how the medieval West read the sky.

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Middle Ages · Neoplatonism · Divination · Latin Platonism · Arabic Hermetica · Astrology · Gerard Of Cremona · Ptolemy · Plato · Aristotle · Islam · Qur An · Avicenna · Hugo Of Santalla