Alfonsine Astronomy

From the late thirteenth century, when Alfonsine astronomy began to take shape under Alfonso X's patronage in Castille, to the first decades of the sixteenth century, when Alfonsine astronomy had become a common computational tool throughout Europe, astronomers compiled works on tables, instruments, procedures, and theory-now preserved in more than 900 manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These sources reveal that Alfonsine astronomers focused on elaborating procedures rather than theoretical speculations or celestial observations. Their procedures-expressed through texts, tables, diagrams, and instruments-were designed to compute astronomical positions.This volume explores computational practices across four sections: (1) procedural texts related to table sets and instruments; (2) tables and table sets, their geometrical and theoretical grounding, purposes, and numerical derivation; (3) questions of numbers, accuracy, rounding, and interpolation; and (4) ephemerides and horoscopes as

boundary genres between mathematical astronomy and wider audiences. [Publisher's text]

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