Mobile Translators and Greek Knowledge, 1050–1350

How did ancient Greek knowledge reach medieval Western Europe and help shape modern science and learning? This project explores the people who made that transfer possible: medieval translators who moved between the Greek and Latin worlds between 1050 and 1350. During this period, hundreds of important works by Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, Galen, and others were translated into Latin. These translations played a key role in the rise of universities and in the development of philosophy, medicine, and theology. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the translators themselves: who they were, where they came from, how they travelled, and how they gained access to rare Greek books. The project focuses on the mobility of translators. It asks where they learned Greek, why they moved across the Mediterranean, which cities and courts they worked in, and how their journeys shaped what they translated. Instead of seeing translation as a purely scholarly activity, the project shows that it depended on real people, real routes, political contacts, diplomacy, trade, and access to libraries and manuscript collections. To answer these questions, the project will build a new open online database of about 30 major translators and more than 200 translated works. This digital resource will connect biographical data, locations, travel routes, patrons, and surviving manuscripts. Some translations survive in hundreds of handwritten copies spread across Europe; the project will study key manuscripts in major libraries to understand how these texts circulated. The project also examines the environments that made translation possible: multilingual regions such as southern Italy, Constantinople, and Sicily; diplomatic and trading networks that enabled travel; and the growing demand for scientific knowledge in medieval schools and courts. By combining historical research with digital tools, the project will offer a new picture of how knowledge moved across cultures in the Middle Ages. It shows how cooperation across languages and religions helped create the foundations of European intellectual life. The results will be shared through academic publications, public lectures, and a freely accessible online database for everyone interested in the history of knowledge.