The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England

Download or read book The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England written by G. A. Russell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1994 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England" deals with the remarkably widespread interest in Arabic in seventeenth-century England among Biblical scholars and theologians, natural philosophers and Fellows of the Royal Society, and others. It led to the institutionalisation of Arabic studies at Oxford and Cambridge Universities where Arabic chairs were set up, and immense manuscript collections were established and utilised. Fourteen historians examine the extent and sources of this Arabic interest in areas ranging from religion, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, philology, and alchemy to botany. Arabic is shown to have been a significant component of the rise of Protestant intellectual tradition and the evolution of secular scholarship at universities.