Sefer ha-Kolel: A Thirteenth-Century Compendium of Astronomical and Astrological Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Sefer ha-Kolel ("The Comprehensive Book") is a forty-chapter compendium, composed by an anonymous scholar in the mid-thirteenth century. It is devoted exclusively to astronomical and astrological knowledge and appears to be the earliest Hebrew work to cover all the branches of medieval astrology in a single composition. Its surviving chapters (Chapters 32–40) are comprised of long quotations borrowed from astronomical and astrological literature already available to Hebrew readers in the mid-thirteenth century. The present study offers an in-depth examination of the last five chapters of the work, which have never before been the subject of academic scholarship. It addresses the contents of these chapters, traces all literary sources used by the author, and indicates the author's original remarks. It also reports on a number of intriguing phenomena, such as the author's adjustment of cross-references originally found in one of his sources so as to point at other sections of Sefer ha-Kolel. In addition, the article asks two fundamental questions: Why should historians and sociologists of science be interested in compilations of already available texts, and what may we learn from the appearance of Sefer ha-Kolel?