Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) as a Clockmaker

The paper analyses three preserved reports, depicting Gerbert of Aurillac (also known as: of Reims, of Ravenna, of Bobbio, and in 999–1003 as Pope Sylvester II) as a clockmaker. The Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury (died around 1143) writes about clocks Gerbert made in Reims in The History of the English Kings and describes them as arte mechanica compositum. The Benedictine Arnold Wion (died around 1610) mentions clocks from Ravenna, where Gerbert allegedly constructed a clepsydra, in The Tree of Life. In his Chronicle, Thietmar of Merseburg (died around 1018) describes a horologium with an observation tube (fistula) from Magdeburg. These three references are analysed from a historical standpoint and especially Williams’s and Thietmar’s short reports are interpreted as possible references to timekeeping devices – the astrolabe and the nocturlabe.

The Android of Albertus Magnus

In medieval and early modern writings, there is a cluster of stories concerning an artificial construct in the shape of a human body or a head that is animated for the purpose of divination, associated with such figures as Gerbert of Aurillac, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. Among them, the Albertus legends have been retold numerous times in interesting variations that provide insight into the changing attitudes towards intellectual magic. Given the fact that the wondrous object is described as being able to converse and even reason, its nature as a kind of medieval AI has made it an object of interest in recent books on AI, robotics, and posthumanity. In this article, the major appearances of Albertus’s speaking statue/head story will be examined in detail to show that the explanation for the wonder moved from astrology to demonic agency, as well as to pure mechanics.

Gerbert of Aurillac (938–1003)

Gerbert is chiefly remembered as an educational reformer. He established a syllabus for the university course in logic, the logica vetus, that remained in use until the mid-twelfth century. Most of his academic writings are instructional works on mathematics. In his single philosophical work, De rationali et ratione uti (On That Which is Rational and Using Reason), he uses Boethius’ logical commentaries to develop a distinctly Platonic solution to a problem he derives from Porphyry’s Isagōgē.

Transmission, Transplantation, and Diffusion in the Latin West

This chapter follows the growth and development of the intellectual culture in the West after a period of decline roughly concurrent to that of the decline of the Roman Empire. It explores the intellectual reawakening of the Western world following the efforts of the clergyman Gerbert of Aurillac, who transmitted classical and Islamic learning and strove—through his innovative use of the abacus, celestial spheres, and armillary spheres of his own fabrication—to raise the level of learning of the mathematical sciences in the Latin West. Among his students was a generation of Catholic scholars who went on themselves to establish or to teach at cathedral schools and to influence educational reforms in royal courts throughout western Europe.