Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan.

• Author: Bos, Gerrit

Until recently, the study of popular culture and science in medieval Islamic countries was virtually impossible because of the inaccessibility of source material. But now this situation has dramatically changed thanks to the renewed interest of the scholarly world in these fields. For the field of popular medicine in medieval Islam, we now have a fundamental catalogue of the Genizah medical material in the Cambridge University Library prepared by the late Haskell Isaacs (see his Medical and Paramedical Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, [Cambridge, 1994]). The magical material from the same source is being published by a team of scholars in a corpus of magical texts dating from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (see Peter Schafer and Shaul Shaked, Magische Texte aus der Kairoer Genizah, vol. 1 [Tubingen, 1994]). Another genre shedding light on late medieval popular culture and science is that of the so-called "catch-all-recipe books" or "do-it-yourself formularies" which until recently were known only from western Europe. For an example from sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Syria-Palestine covering a wide variety of subjects from chemistry and technology to medicine and agriculture, see my "Hayyim Vital's 'Practical Kabbalah and Alchemy'," The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4:55-112.

Another important source of information about popular culture and science in medieval Islam is the medieval Arab almanac. This virtually forgotten genre seems to be especially promising because of the wealth of material extant in hundreds of manuscripts. Varisco's monograph is the first edition of such an almanac from the Arabian peninsula, more precisely from thirteenth-century Yemen. Moreover, Varisco is the first to recognize its importance as a primary source of our knowledge of popular science and culture. The almanac he has published is part of an astronomical treatise entitled K. al-tabsira fi ilm al-nujum (Instruction in the science of astronomy and astrology), composed by the Yemeni sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Umar ibn Yusuf, the third of the Rasulid dynasty, in A.D. 1271. Although it is mainly agricultural, it covers other subjects as well, such as astronomy, astrology, time-keeping, meteorology, flora and fauna, medicine, and navigation. Varisco's edition comprises an introduction, the Arabic text and English translation of the almanac, extensive commentary, bibliography and indices.

In the introduction, Varisco deals...