Medicine in the Arab World
Medicine in the classical Islamic world was basically shaped by three different traditions, sometimes interacting with each other: pre-Islamic Bedouin folklore; the so-called Prophetic medicine, the diagnosis and therapy of which was informed by the alleg
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Mair, John ▶ John Mair
Manuel Chrysoloras GEORGE ARABATZIS Research Centre on Greek Philosophy Academy of Athens Athens Greece
Abstract Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350–1415) was a Byzantine writer and scholar better known as professor of Greek language in Florence after 1397, the first one to hold public teaching office of Greek in Italy. His audience included famous Italian humanists like Guarino da Verona (his most loyal pupil), Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto Rossi, Niccolo` Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Uberto Decembrio, Poggio Bracciolini, and others. After 1400, Chrysoloras left his teaching position and carried out mainly diplomatic missions in the service of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. He converted to Catholicism and died in 1415 in Constance, Switzerland, while attending the Synod in an effort to convince the Westerners to save Byzantium from the Ottoman threat. He used a personal method of teaching that consisted in part in the discussion between the students of the translation of Greek works. He translated Plato’s Republic with the help of his student Uberto Decembrio and his son Pier
Candido and he authored a Greek Grammar that had a wide circulation as textbook. His teaching influenced the art criticism of Renaissance by relating art works to literary works and by insisting on the importance of the artist as the efficient cause of Art and the public as the intelligent agent. As to his ideology, this scholar who is said that his teaching had a strong political motive, in his work on the Comparison of the Old and the New Rome, he insisted on Constantinople’s lineage to Ancient Rome. His posthumous fame was somehow limited because the Italian humanists’ scholarly activity to which he had greatly contributed had grown strong autonomously.
Biography The Byzantine author, professor, and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was born in Constantinople around 1350 in a noble family. Very little is known about the first half of his life until he came to Venice in 1390–1391 with a diplomatic mission. Later he was invited to teach Greek in Florence where he started professing in 1397 with a contract of 5 years. But he was not to spend all this time in Florence because in 1400 he left his position probably in order to join the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos who came to the West seeking help to save the Byzantine Empire from the Ottoman threat. For the rest of his life, Chrysoloras will carry out mainly diplomatic missions, traveling in the service of his country, and only secondarily will assume scholarly and teaching work. In late 1405 or in 1406 he will ask the papal permission to be converted to the Latin dogma and perform the Latin rite; the permission was granted but Chrysoloras never undertook any priestly duties. He died in 1415 while attending the Council of Constance in Switzerland in a last effort to convince the Westerners to help Byzantium. His fame rests principally on his teaching activity in Florence as the first Greek to hold public teachi
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