At the end of the last century Paul Tannery published an article on geometry in eleventh-century Europe, which he began with the following statement:“This is not a chapter in the history of science; it is a study of ignorance, in a period immediately before the introduction into the West of Arab mathematics.”.

The reception of Euclid's Optica in the West has received scant attention, in contrast with the interest evoked by the Latin tradition of the Elements. A study of the extremely complex manuscript tradition of the Optica reveals that the translations of this work too were soon in the hands of many teachers, eager to learn what the great Geometer taught concerning vison and visual perspective. Three translations—two from the Arabic and one from the Greek —were available to scholars before the (...) close of the twelfth century. Furthermore, the Greco-Latin Liber de visu, by far the most widely known and carefully studied of the translations, appeared in at least three different versions before 1200. One of these versions is of particular interest as providing evidence of the diffusion of texts among the scholarly community in the latter part of the twelfth century. The version in question has survived in two manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi College 283, folios 163r–165v, and Seville, Bibl. Columbina 7.6.2, folios 43v–54r. Although the various translations and many other versions of Liber de visu are anonymous, the authors of this text are explicitly given in the colophon, which reads: Nota quod sexaginta et tria toreumata continentur in is to libra. Aimare, gralias age quia hoc opus sic glosulasti sub magistro Johanne de Beaumont. Explicit feliciter liber de visu. Whether Aimar was merely the scribe or perhaps the student of John of Beaumont, it is undoubtedly the latter that is to be primarily credited with the contents of the treatise. Unfortunately, neither The complete peerage nor the Dictionary of national biography list a John of Beaumont from the twelfth century, although the Beaumont family, with some reputation for learning, was prominent at that time in Normandy and England, particularly in the regions near Oxford. Whether John was a member of that illustrious line remains merely a matter for speculation. In any case, the treatise remains of interest to Euclidian scholars and historians of optics as a good witness to the twelfth century concern, not only with Euclid's visual theory, but particularly with his attempts to employ geometry in solving the problems of visual perspective. (shrink)

In 1953 Marshall Clagett presented a preliminary scheme of the medieval Latin versions of Euclid'sElements. Since then a considerable body of these texts has become available in critical editions, thanks to Clagett's labours on the Archimedean tradition and H. L. L. Busard's work on the Euclidean versions. Further, Busard, M. Folkerts, R. Lorch and C. Burnett have scrutinized the pivotal ‘second’ version of Adelard of Bath, and have thereby exposed a diversity of text forms that spells real complications for the (...) effort to establish its provenance and use. In his recent overview of the medieval Euclidean tradition, Folkerts displays not only how these studies have filled out and expanded upon Clagett's initial framework, but also how they have compelled rethinking of some basic issues, such as on the source relations and authorship of the various versions. (shrink)