
John Mulhall
In the twelfth century, more than thirty translators working around the Mediterranean translated over two hundred works of science, philosophy, and theology from Greek and Arabic into Latin. These translations would go on to revolutionize the medieval intellectual world and shape learned inquiry into the Renaissance and beyond. My current book offers the first monographic history of this transformational moment in world intellectual history by situating this translation activity within the history of Mediterranean knowledge exchange. By reconstructing the networks of translators, it becomes possible to trace the flow of knowledge around the twelfth century Mediterranean, across linguistic and political boundaries. I propose that, although often operating on the frontiers of the Latin world or beyond, these translators actively integrated themselves into the wider Latin scholarly world by using their Greek and Arabic skills to fulfill requests from scholars, to join intellectual debates, and to contribute to scholarly conversations that were taking place around the Mediterranean. In so doing, the translators became more than scholars rendering texts from one language into another: they became agents linking the scholarly communities of the Mediterranean with those of northern Europe.