The history of the science of the stars (astronomy and astrology) in fourteenth-century Byzantium is significantly intertwined with the implications of theological and philosophical controversies. A less-explored astronomical text authored by the fourteenth-century Byzantine scholar Theorodos Meliteniotes (ca. 1320–1393 CE) provides new historical factors toward a historiography of the differences between scientific and theological discourses, their development in the transition to early modern times, and the different historical developments of science in the worlds of the Eastern and Western Churches.

This paper is a preliminary study focused on the astronomical manuscript Marcianus latinus VIII.31 (2614) and its socio-historical context of use and production, the Venetian colony of Crete in the 15th century. It is a relevant source for the study of scientific interactions in colonial, multilinguistic, and interreligious contexts in the Eastern Mediterranean for at least two reasons: (a) it contains an unpublished translation into Latin of a popular Byzantine handbook on how to use a set of astronomical tables stemming (...) from Islamic sources, namely the so-called Paradosis of the Persian Tables, a work extensively copied and annotated by very significant Byzantine and Jewish scholars active in Constantinople; and (b) it provides evidence of a Byzantine product being the object of exchange in the interactions between Christians and Jews in the Cretan territory under Venetian rule. (shrink)