Letters and Scientific Writings

The correspondence and mathematical-astronomical works of the "scientist pope"

Tradition: Latin Carolingian-Ottonian scholarship

The abacus, the astrolabe, and Arabic numerals — the first mediaeval scholar-pope transmits Islamic science to Latin Christendom

Gerbert of Aurillac's surviving works consist principally of his extensive correspondence (over 220 letters) and a cluster of scientific and mathematical writings. The letters, addressed to emperors, bishops, monks, and fellow scholars, are the best window into the intellectual, political, and ecclesiastical life of tenth-century Latin Europe; they reveal a mind equally at home with Boethian logic, Aristotelian categories, astronomical instrument construction, and papal politics. The mathematical writings include a treatise on the abacus using Hindu-Arabic numerals (written on marked counters called apices), geometrical works, and descriptions of astronomical instruments — a celestial globe and an observation tube. The logical work "On the Rational and the Use of Reason" (De Rationali et Ratione Uti) engages the Boethian-Aristotelian question of the relationship between rational natures and the act of reasoning. Taken together, these writings document the earliest significant transmission of Arabic mathematical and astronomical knowledge into the Latin West and the proto-scholastic method that would blossom in the twelfth-century schools.