Books by Alexandre Roberts
University of California Press, Jun 2020
What happened to ancient Greek thought after Antiquity? What impact did Abrahamic religions have ... more What happened to ancient Greek thought after Antiquity? What impact did Abrahamic religions have on medieval Byzantine and Islamic scholars who adapted and reinvigorated this ancient philosophical heritage? Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch tackles these questions by examining the work of the eleventh-century Christian theologian Abdallah ibn al-Fadl, who undertook an ambitious program of translating Greek texts, ancient and contemporary, into Arabic. Poised between the Byzantine Empire that controlled his home city of Antioch and the Arabic-speaking cultural universe of Syria-Palestine, Egypt, Aleppo, and Iraq, Ibn al-Fadl engaged intensely with both Greek and Arabic philosophy, science, and literary culture. Challenging the common narrative that treats Christian and Muslim scholars in almost total isolation from each other in the Middle Ages, Alexandre M. Roberts reveals a shared culture of robust intellectual curiosity in the service of tradition that has had a lasting role in Eurasian intellectual history.
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Papers by Alexandre Roberts
Journal of the History of Ideas 84.4, 2023
The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic... more The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic as a historical category. The present article shifts away from asking what pre-modern alchemy “really” was, to asking how medieval scholars writing in Greek and Arabic thought about the practice of treating and combining naturally occurring substances to produce apparently quite different substances, and how they interpreted, valorized, or critiqued this practice and its results — in other words, what they thought about chemistry.
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Dumbarton Oaks Papers 76, 2022
In 1029, the resident synod of Constantinople, led by Patriarch Alexios the Stoudite, condem... more In 1029, the resident synod of Constantinople, led by Patriarch Alexios the Stoudite, condemned the Jacobite patriarch John VIII bar ʿAbdun as a heretic. This event has been woven into modern narratives of Byzantine persecution and intolerance against the Syrian Miaphysite Christians in the recently conquered eastern territories of the Byzantine Empire, especially the city of Melitene. Building on a recent reevaluation of that prevailing interpretation, the present article reads our key narrative sources for the trial of John bar ʿAbdun as reflecting and constituting competing arguments not only about the Jacobite patriarch’s innocence or guilt, but also, more subtly, about the very terms in which these questions should be framed. It argues that the ethnic and religious categories mentioned in the narratives did not correspond to fixed social groups but rather needed to be mobilized and activated, and that this is an important part of what certain historical actors described by the narratives — and the narratives themselves — were seeking to do. More broadly, the unexpected convergences among the narratives, and unexpected strategies within individual narratives, demonstrate that we must rethink how we narrate the history of medieval ecclesiastical disputes, ethnic and religious communities, and Christian attitudes towards orthodoxy and empire.
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Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies 1, 2022
This article examines the names of authors appearing in the front matter of our single most impor... more This article examines the names of authors appearing in the front matter of our single most important witness to the Greek Alchemical Corpus, Marcianus graecus 299 (ca. tenth century). The names appear in the table of contents and in a list of authors, both original to the manuscript. The aim is to understand how these authorial attributions would have resonated with readers. What was the portrait of the textual tradition of the Sacred Art that the authorial collectivity implied? The answer, in short: philosophical, imperial, and linked not only with Egypt but also with Persia and the Levant.
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Isis 113.3, 2022
This essay analyzes the known evidence for Byzantine engagement with what are conventionally term... more This essay analyzes the known evidence for Byzantine engagement with what are conventionally termed “alchemical” texts, theories, and practices of the Islamic world. Much of the evidence is difficult to date. Nevertheless, the aggregated direct, indirect, and circumstantial evidence suggests at least some engagement by Greek-speaking scholars throughout the Middle Ages. This engagement took various forms, from the use of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish terminology to the adaptation of whole Arabic treatises in Greek. Sometimes the Byzantine texts emphasize their Islamicate sources, and sometimes they do not mention these sources at all. The resulting picture is still fragmentary, but it indicates that medieval Greek-speaking scholars were active in the circulation of chemical knowledge and techniques in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Byzantium, therefore, should no longer be left out of research into long-term patterns in the history of science.
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Diagram as Paradigm, 2022
Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an examp... more Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus's Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important, if not the most important component of his commentary. They allowed Chioniades to (1) shape how readers would experience and study John of Damascus’s philosophical exposition and (2) update the Damascene’s introductory discussions on astronomy and astrology with Arabic terminology and his own interests in medical astrology. By paying attention to such diagrams, historians have much to learn about the intellectual projects of scholars like Chioniades. Conversely, Chioniades' own testimony about his diagrams can help us better understand how medieval scholars thought about, and thought with, the diagrams they have left behind.
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Byzantinische Zeitschrift 115.1, 2022
The famous middle Byzantine alchemical manuscript Marcianus graecus 299 contains annotations from... more The famous middle Byzantine alchemical manuscript Marcianus graecus 299 contains annotations from the late Byzantine period, most prominently in its opening quire. This article examines a text on the very first page of the manuscript, a text written in a late Byzantine Greek script, but in a language other than Greek. A number of words in this undeciphered text can be correlated with Arabic technical vocabulary that would also have been used in other Islamicate languages such as Persian and Ottoman Turkish. Certain features such as accentuation on the final syllables of words make Turkish or Persian the most likely candidates.
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Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 83 (2020; published May 2021), 2021
This article examines the dedicatory epigram of the earliest and most important witness to the Gr... more This article examines the dedicatory epigram of the earliest and most important witness to the Greek alchemical corpus, the tenth-century manuscript donated by Cardinal Bessarion to the Republic of Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana MS gr. 299, as a window onto the cultural coordinates of the manuscript’s middle Byzantine readers. Scrutiny of the epigram’s meter, language, literary conventions, and the handwriting of the scribe who copied it into the manuscript point to a tenth-century date not only for the manuscript but also for the epigram itself and make it possible to situate the epigram, and with it the alchemical manuscript that contains it, within the mainstream of middle Byzantine elite culture.
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Journal of Near Eastern Studies 80.1, 2021
A study of Malik b. Dinar's comparison of himself to a runaway slave.
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Philological Encounters 5.3, 2020
This article examines an Arabic mathematical manuscript at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Ma... more This article examines an Arabic mathematical manuscript at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (or. 45), focusing on a previously unpublished set of texts: the treatise on the mathematical method known as Double False Position, as supplemented by Jābir ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābī (tenth century?), and the commentaries by Aḥmad ibn al-Sarī (d. 548/1153–4) and Saʿd al-Dīn Asʿad ibn Saʿīd al-Hamadhānī (12th/13th century?), the latter previously unnoticed. The article sketches the contents of the manuscript, then offers an editio princeps, translation, and analysis of the treatise. It then considers how the Swiss historian of mathematics Heinrich Suter (1848–1922) read Jābir’s treatise (as contained in a different manuscript) before concluding with my own proposal for how to go about reading this mathematical text: as a witness of multiple stages of a complex textual tradition of teaching, extending, and rethinking mathematics—that is, we should read it philologically.
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Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73, 2019
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Patristic Literature in Arabic Translation, edited by B. Roggema, and A. Treiger, 2020
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Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2017
Thābit b. Qurra (d. 288/901), a Sabian of Ḥarrān, and his descendants remained in their ancestral... more Thābit b. Qurra (d. 288/901), a Sabian of Ḥarrān, and his descendants remained in their ancestral religion for six generations. Why did they persist despite pressure to convert? This article argues that religious self-identification as a Sabian could be a distinct advantage in Baghdad’s elite circles. It focuses on Thābit’s great-grandson Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābī (d. 384/994) and his poetry as collected by al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038). Two members of the family who did convert are also considered by way of contrast.
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Le vie del sapere, ed. C. Noce, M. Pampaloni, C. Tavolieri, 2013
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Bulletin d'études orientales 60, 2011
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Book Reviews by Alexandre Roberts
The Byzantine Review, 2024
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Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017
Review of Andrea De Giorgi, *Ancient Antioch from the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest* (Camb... more Review of Andrea De Giorgi, *Ancient Antioch from the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest* (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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Marginalia, Apr 2014
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Books by Alexandre Roberts
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