GERARDO da CREMONA. — Medieval translator, b. at Cremona in 1114, d. in 1187. He translated scientific and philosophical works from Arabic into Latin
and was one of the earliest and most effective agents in the progressive contact of the Latin Middle Ages with Arab, Jewish, and Greek culture. Having completed his initial studies in his homeland, he went to Toledo at a very young age and carried out his activity there, first as a disciple, then as a collaborator, and finally as the principal representative of the celebrated school of translators promoted by Archbishop Raimondo.
Among the more than seventy philosophical, scientific, and mathematical works translated by G., those of capital importance for the development of medieval philosophy are Aristotle’s Physica, the De coelo et mundo, the first three books of the Meteore (the fourth had already been translated from the Greek by Enrico Aristippo, d. 1162), the De gener. et corr., the Anal. post. with the commentary of Themistius, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de causis (an Arabic compilation derived from Proclò’s Elementatio theologica). Constitutive elements of medieval science itself are his translations of Avicenna’s medical Canon, Euclid’s Elements, and Ptolemy’s Almagest (already translated from the Greek in Sicily around 1160, whereas G.’s version was completed in 1175). He also translated writings by Alessandro d’Afrodisia, Archimede, Ippocrate, Galeno, al-Kindi, al-Fārābī, Isaac Israeli, etc.