The Celestial Orb

Demonstrates that the millennium from the fall of the Roman Empire to the flowering of the Renaissance was a period of great intellectual and practical achievement and innovation. This reference work will be useful to scholars, students, and general readers researching topics in many fields of study, including medieval studies and world history.

Edward Grant describes the extraordinary range of themes, ideas, and arguments that constituted scholastic cosmology for approximately five hundred years, from around 1200 to 1700. Primary emphasis is placed on the world as a whole, what might lie beyond it, and the celestial region, which extended from the Moon to the outermost convex surface of the cosmos.

Biography of the medieval Mediterranean's most cross-culturally significant sculptural monument, the tallest in the pre-modern world.

This study analyzes key concepts in al-F?r?b?’s cosmology and provides a new interpretation of his philosophical development through an analysis of the Greco-Arabic sources and a contextualization of his life and thought in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time.