Gerard of Cremona (1114–87)

Gerard of Cremona was the most important translator of philosophical works from Arabic to Latin in the twelfth century. During a career of about forty years, he translated at least seventy books. The most famous translations are those of works of Aristotle, including Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption and Meteorology 1–3. Gerard also translated a number of works as part of the Aristotelian corpus that were not at all Aristotelian; the most important of these is the so-called Liber de causis (Book of Causes). However, the Aristotelian translations were only a small part of his labour. He translated many more works that were medical, astronomical or mathematical, bringing into Latin several small libraries of fundamental natural science.