‘The Service of Astronomy’: European star-gazing and its implications in the Middle Ages

Abstract What follows is an exploration of medieval European astronomy focussing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a period of significant change in terms of technologies and learning largely via the inheritance from Greek and Islamicate astronomical thought through translation into Latin. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253) is used as a particular focal point for discussion, setting his treatise on astronomy On the Sphere in the context of his writing on related topics and those of his contemporaries. Why contemporaries should claim astronomy as the highest of the liberal arts is understood and appreciated through the use of case study and more general reflection - and so too the limits of the discipline.