Prof. Dr. Charles Burnett
Internationales Kolleg für Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung "Schicksal, Freiheit und Prognose. Bewältigungsstrategien in Ostasien und Europa"
- E-Mail: charles.burnett@sas.ac.uk
Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe
Home Institution: The Warburg Institute, London (United Kingdom)
IKGF Visiting Fellow June - July 2011
IKGF Visiting Fellow July - August 2017
(Last change of profile by end of stay)
IKGF Research Project:
Curriculum Vitae
Charles Burnett has been Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, University of London, since 1999. He received his MA and PhD from Cambridge University, and has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Medieval Studies in the University of California at Berkeley and Visiting Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Munich.
His work has centred on the transmission of Arabic science and philosophy to Western Europe, which he has documented by editing and translating several texts that were translated from Arabic into Latin, and by describing the historical and cultural context of the translations. A major project on which he has been engaged for several years with Keiji Yamamoto of Kyoto is the edition of the major Arabic texts on astrology in the Middle Ages, accompanied by English translations and editions of the medieval Latin translations. His interest in Japan has led him investigate the impact of Jesuit education in Japan in the late sixteenth century, and the use of Japanese themes in Latin drama in Europe in the seventeenth century.
Publications
A full list of his publications in Medieval Studies can be found on the website of the Warburg Institute. They are divided into Arabic-Latin translators, natural science and philosophy, astronomy and astrology, medicine and psychology, magic and divination, arithmetic and geometry, Anglo-Norman science and learning in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard and the French schools, music, and contacts between the West and the Far East.
Three collections of his articles have been published:
- Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages (1996)
- Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context (2009) and
- Numerals and Arithmetic in the Middle Ages (2010).