Bøger af J. Wood Brown

Michael Scot was a legendary scholar of the Middle Ages. He was born in 1175 in the border regions of Scotland and northern England. He was an advisor court astrologer to Emperor Frederick II. Scot studied in Oxford and Paris. He was a theologian and appears to have been ordained by Pope Honorius III. He knew many languages and translated important texts from Greek and Arabic, including Aristotle. It was a contemporary of Fibonacci and it is possible he influenced the presentation of his famous Fibonnaci sequence. Noted during for his scholarship in his lifetime, Scot quickly became a legend in the years following his death c. 1232. He gained posthumous fame variously viewed as an alchemist, occultist, sorcerer, and warlock. He is the only Scot to appear in Dante's Divine Comedy. Originally published in 1897, Brown's work remains an important full-length enquiry into Scot's life and legend.

This work is the result of exhaustive research into the life of Michael Scot, the Scottish translator and astrologer. At the court of Emperor Frederick II, Scot worked with other scholars on the translation of Aristotle's works and Averroes' commentaries. He penned many original works dealing with astrology, the occult sciences and alchemy, and through these works became known as a wizard. He was the subject of popular legends wherein he possessed a demon horse and a demon ship.