The Transmission of Arabic Science in the Middle Ages: Translation, Expansion, and Legacy

The Arabs have written one of the most golden pages of the history of science, for being the transmitters and preservers of the thought and knowledge of Antiquity, especially of the Greeks, to the Europe of the Renaissance across three phases. This article approaches these stages and provides an overview of the key authors in each of them. It argues that the standard tripartite periodization—translation, expansion, transmission—while heuristically useful, obscures the extent to which original contributions and translation activities were intertwined from the outset, and underestimates the distinctive role of Andalusian scholars in shaping the pharmacological tradition that reached Christian Europe.