Juan Vernet Ginés, disciple and successor at the University of Barcelona to the Arabist and pioneering historian of science, José Millás Vallicrosa, has long distinguished himself by his editing and monographic articles in the same fields. His latest is not in the well-trampled Legacy-of-Islam genre (see W. Montgomery Watts, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe [1978] and bibliography), nor yet is it a cultural history of Spanish Islam (see Anwar Chejne, Muslim Spain [1974] and bibliography). Despite having recently compiled the first survey of Arabic literature in Spanish, Vernet is not really interested here in the title’s “Culture,” reserving only the last seventy pages for poetry, prose, and art. He offers instead “an inventory” (p. 7) of the contributions, especially in science, by Arabic-speaking Spaniards both to Europe and to Islamic North Africa and the Near East, particularly from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, with a deliberate abundance of bibliographic notes.
Introductory chapters on the contribution from the ancient world, and on the techniques of transmission into Islam and later into Europe, set the stage. Each chronological chapter then plods from one subtitled science to the next. This geographical and topical focus, and the special intent, allow the author to display his unrivaled erudition at a pace relatively leisured for so compendious a short book, and to refrain from interpretative or contextual labors. The emphasis is bookish (on content and transmission) and dense (the technicalities can make bleak reading). The best coverage goes to mathematics and astronomy, the most disappointing to aspects of technology. Alchemy-chemistry, astrology, botany, geology, medicine, physics, and zoology receive their allotted segments, with some attention also to philosophy and the occult. Vernet’s bibliographical scan is impressive (to 1974, with a few additional notes to 1977); he draws upon the range of international scholarship, and is generous in citing from both sources and colleagues.
Vernet’s works are unfortunately not available in English to historians or students, except for twenty entries in the current Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Despite its brevity and survey nature, Cultura merits translation. More handbook than history, it abounds in dates, details, source citations, and bibliography. It will be valuable either as introduction to the whole field or as handy reference work. It also illustrates Cerulli’s paradox, quoted by Vernet: Spain, foremost in opposing Islam on the battlefield, was also foremost in absorbing and transmitting to Christendom its learning and creative arts.
