Byzantine Science

The study of the sciences in Byzantium is not a recent trend in Byzantine studies scholarship. At the beginning of the twentieth century, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and other sciences were defined as publication categories in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift bibliography. Despite this, critical editions were lacking until the 1980s and it is only since the 2010s that the existing research surpassed, in terms of both quantity and scope, a critical threshold that allowed it to form as an independent, sustainable, and growing field within Byzantine and Medieval Studies, as well as within the respective remits of history of science and history of knowledge. It is only in 2020 that the subfield received its first extensive and comprehensive synthetic overview, which employed a wide definition of Byzantine science, thus incorporating a paradigm larger than the commonly applied late antique framework of the four mathematical disciplines of the so-called quadrivium, or μαθηματικὴ τετρακτύς in Greek, that is, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (harmonics). In other words, Byzantine science as an independent subject of research has received recognition only recently and its scope includes non-mathematical disciplines as well, such as geography, zoology, botany and pharmacology, medicine, meteorology, and physics as well as the so-called occult sciences and the technology of warfare. Even so, the most persistent narrative regarding science (but also other cultural and intellectual products) of the Byzantine millennium is that of the absence of an “original contribution” and the important role Byzantium played, as a depository, preserving ancient and Hellenistic Greek heritage for it to be rediscovered by the Italian humanists and, more generally, by the West during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Instead, what should be taken into account in evaluating and understanding Byzantine science and intellectual culture more generally includes, first, the educational structures and underlying social, political (imperial and centralized), and institutional infrastructures, and, second, the characteristics of book production and circulation in Byzantium. Understanding the needs of the imperial and ecclesiastical administrations, the functioning of schools, and the structuring of curricula as evidenced in the extant manuscripts is thus essential for the study of the sciences in Byzantium on the terms of the historical actors involved in the creation of knowledge about the world and in its transfer.