Book Description
David Lindberg presents the first critical edition of the text of Roger Bacon's classic work Perspectiva, prepared from Latin manuscripts, accompanied by a facing-page English translation, critical notes, and a full study of the text.Also included is an analysis of Bacon's sources, influence, and role in the emergence of the discipline of perspectiva.About Roger Bacon:Roger Bacon (c.1220-c.1292) is one of the most renowned thinkers of the Middle Ages, a philosopher-scientist praised and mythologized for his attack on authority and his promotion of what he called experimental science.He was a leading figure in the intellectual life of the thirteenth century, a campaigner for educational reform, and a major disseminator of Greek and Arabic natural philosophy and mathematical science. About Perspectiva:The science that Roger Bacon most fully mastered was perspectiva, the study of light and vision (what would later become the science of optics).His great treatment of the subject, the Perspectiva, written in about 1260, was the first book by a European to display a full mastery of Greek and Arabic treatises on the subject, and through it Bacon was instrumental in defining this scientific discipline for the next 350 years. ... Read more

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A compulsively readable account of the most mysterious manuscript in the world, one that has stumped the world’s greatest scholars and codebreakers.

The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century.A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors, linguists, and historians alike have yet to solve the mysteries contained within.However, in The Friar and the Cipher, the acclaimed bibliophiles and historians Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone describe, in fascinating detail, the theory that Roger Bacon, the noted thirteenth-century, pre-Copernican astronomer, was its author and that the perplexing alphabet was written in his hand.Along the way, they explain the many proposed solutions that scholars have put forth and the myriad attempts at labeling the manuscript's content, from Latin or Greek shorthand to Arabic numerals to ancient Ukrainian to a recipe for the elixir of life to good old-fashioned gibberish.As we journey across centuries, languages, and countries, we meet a cast of impassioned characters and case-crackers, including, of course, Bacon, whose own personal scientific contributions, Voynich author or not, were literally and figuratively astronomical.

The Friar and the Cipher is a wonderfully entertaining and historically wide-ranging book that is one part The Code Book, one part Possession, and one part The Da Vinci Code and will appeal to bibliophiles and laypeople alike.

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This short but informative book describes and defines the fundamentales of Alchemy.Please note:This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher.ThiseBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable. ... Read more