Biography

Luca Farina received a joint PhD from the Universities of Padua, Venice, Verona, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) in 2022 with a dissertation titled “Arabic Astrology and Astronomy in Palaiologan Constantinople.” He later served as a research fellow at the University of Tübingen (2022–2023) and as a scientific member of the École française de Rome (2023–2026). Trained as Graeco-Arabist and Byzantinist, he specializes in Byzantine and Middle Eastern intellectual history. By focusing on the circulation of manuscripts and drawing on history, philology, and codicology, he studies the translation of scientific texts from Arabic into Greek and Latin from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance across the Mediterranean.

Project Summary

The project explores the Italian and French reception of the “Book of Astrological Secrets” by Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (d. 886), known in Latin as “Excerpta de secretis Albumasar,” from its emergence in the mid-13^th century to its flourishing in the 15^th and late-16^th century. It examines the diffusion and impact of Arabic-origin astrological lore in the European Renaissance, revealing deep intellectual interconnections across the Mediterranean. It focuses on the Latin text and its role in (anti-)astrological debates, tracing how it was read in the late medieval Latin West and the shifts in Western scholarly approaches to it during the Renaissance. It challenges two dominant historiographical assumptions: that Arabic science reached the West primarily through direct translations in medieval Spain, and that Byzantine contributions became significant only after the fall of Constantinople. It argues that Arabic-Greek-Latin exchanges began much earlier and shaped medieval intellectual life in key centers such as Padua and Paris. The project combines manuscript analysis, linguistic comparison, and the study of scholarly reception in order to retrace networks of readers engaged with astrology of Islamicate origin. By reassessing the circulation and impact of this hitherto neglected work, it offers a new perspective on the interconnected intellectual history of the medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean.