| This volume presents a translation of Practica geometriae, a twelfth century Latin treatise attributed by Abb Roger Baron, its twentieth century editor, to Hugh of St. Victor. The translation is based on Baron's critical edition and is intended to provide accessible source reading in medieval Latin mathematics, education, and scholastic thought. A brief introduction considers the mathemat ical content, quality, and place of Practica geometriae in the history of mathematics without addressing textual problems. |
| The translation attempts to put the author's often labored, repetitive, and occasionally obscure medieval Latin into idiomatic English. It follows Baron's arrangement of the text into Prologue, Praenotanda, and three Chapters with his subdivisions of them into fifty-seven sections, identified, for example, as (#40). The author did not command a large technical Latin vocabulary; he knows but a few Greek terms from Euclid and Ptolemy. Indeed, he admits belatedly, in (#55), to using terms loosely. He uses the Arabic "alidada" once and replaces it with the medieval Latin "mediclinium." His circumlocutions have been translated by current (and classical) English technical terms, for example, "duo trianguli habentes eandem proportionem" is rendered "two similar triangles." The Roman numerals of the manuscripts have been replaced by Arabic ones in the translation. |
| The medieval manuscripts Baron used have illustrations of varying quality, and some none at all. The figures in Baron's text, themselves reproduced from an earlier edition of Curtze, have been redrawn, and others added, to interpret the translation. Figures modified, or added, are marked with an asterisk, e.g., Figure 19*. Illustrations from later sources have been supplied to suggest the persistence of the methods taught in Practica geometriae. To avoid distractions, numbered footnotes have not been used, but references for statements made in the introduction can be found, according to page number, in the notes. |
|
![Robert Hugh Benson [Benson - Robert Hugh Benson Collection [11 Books]](/uploads/posts/book/139831/thumbs/robert-hugh-benson-benson-robert-hugh-benson.jpg)
