This research provides an appreciation of Arab authors' intellectual impact in Western Europe in the 13th century. To this end, we have studied the quotations of Arabic sources in several 13th-century Latin encyclopaedias, with a focus on the "Liber de natura rerum" of Thomas of Cantimpré, the "De proprietatibus rerum" of Bartholomew the Englishman and the "Speculum naturale" of Vincent of Beauvais. This examination leads us to draw a typology of what can be considered as an Arabic source according to various criteria and degrees of proximity with Arabic culture. Then we propose a quantitative evaluation of Arab authors' impact, based on the number of quotations in the Latin compilations. Then, we turn to qualitative aspects and examine Arab authors' influence on lexical issues, on the organization and on the selection of contents made by the Latin compiler. Within this scope, we propose an immersion in four domains of natural sciences : astrology, medicine, botany and zoology.
Clesse, G. (2016). Sources arabes en toutes lettres : étude des citations d’auteurs arabes dans les encyclopédies latines du XIIIe siècle. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/183240