Abstract Summary
Alfonsine astronomy flourished in Latin Europe from the second half of the 13th to the middle of the 16th century. It is arguably among the first European scientific achievements and shaped a scene for well-known actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There has been, however, little detailed analysis of its comprehensive development. ALFA (2017-2022) is a European Research Council-funded research project addressing this lacuna by studying Alfonsine tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way, drawing on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. For example, rather than focussing simply on individual texts, we are studying manuscript codices as physical objects and computation with such objects as performance. The roles of different instruments and visual representations in relation to manuscripts in various astronomical practices is also addressed. The goal of this symposium is to present to a wider audience some of the first results of the project.
