An Irish Astronomical Tract – Based In Part On A Medieval Latin Version of A Work By Messahalah.

Description

Maura Power (foilsithe den chéad uair / first published 1914)

xVIII + 176 pp. ISBN 1 870 16614 0

This volume, edited by Maura Power, is one of the very few texts of its kind that has been published in a critical edition. As Ms Power pointed out in her preface to the edition, ‘the translations of medieval Latin texts into Irish, probably for use as text-books in the schools of the 14th and 15th centuries, would supply material for special study’. This text was adapted into Irish from a Latin translation of an Arabic treatise by Messahalah, a Jewish astronomer who lived in Alexandria before 800 A.D.