The study of light is in the details

Smith honored with Guggenheim Fellowship

History Professor A. Mark Smith is the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. "Grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are generally recognized as the most prestigious in the humanities," says department Chair Jonathan Sperber. "Only about six percent of applicants receive funding; the fact that Smith received a grant is evidence of the high esteem in which his scholarship is held, not just by experts in his field, but among all humanistic scholars." Of 2,800 applicants this year, 189 received funding.

Smith is editing critically and translating a work on visual perception and the physics of vision originally written in Arabic by Alhacen, an 11th-century scholar, whose work on mathematical subjects, including optics, has earned him a place in the top tier of contributors to the history of science. Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) – the Arabic version of the work Smith is editing – was translated into Latin under the title De aspectibus (On Visual Appearances) around 1200. At least two different translators were involved in producing the original source manuscript upon which all subsequent copies were based.

To edit, Smith works with seven different copies of the source manuscript. Because the copies were written in different time periods and geographic areas, they present unusual challenges. While working with occasional linguistic anomalies and checking for omissions or errors, Smith had to decipher various abbreviations or shorthand forms for terms or concepts used by the different scribes.

All seven manuscript copies were written in Latin and in medieval script akin to that used in the Gutenberg Bible (Gothic textura; example) – not Roman letters as we use today. Smith uses one of the seven as a control copy and then compares the six others to it, seeking places where they diverge from the control. Smith transcribed that control copy into Roman characters for ease of reading, and he makes comparisons, line by line, with each of the six other copies. By collating the resulting transcriptions, he produces a critical Latin text that reflects as closely as possible the source translation, which has not survived. That critical text serves as the basis for his subsequent English translation and commentary.

Alhacen's work is important because it was the authoritative source on optics until about 1600 A.D. when Johannes Kepler's work reshaped the field of optics. Alhacen's original work comprised seven books or parts, ranging in topic from ocular anatomy and physiology through reflection and image formation in mirrors of various shapes to refraction. During the course of 20 years, Smith has published editions and translations of the first five books of the De aspectibus, and his edition of the sixth is in press. The Guggenheim Fellowship allows Smith to take a research leave next year to continue work on the seventh and final book. While on leave, Smith will travel to Europe for about a month to visit several manuscript collections from northern Italy through northern France to Edinburgh.

Links:

A. Mark Smith
Department of History

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation