Michael Scot (1175 - ?1232) was a mediaeval mathematician and scholar.

Early life and education

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He was born in Scotland, and studied first at Durham School and then at Oxford and Paris, devoting himself to philosophy, mathematics, and astrology. It appears that he had also studied theology and become an ordained a priest, as Pope Honorius III wrote to Stephen Langton on 16 January 1223/4, urging him to confer an English benefice on Scot, and actually himself nominated him archbishop of Cashel in Ireland. This appointment Scot refused to take up, but he seems to have held benefices in Italy from time to time. From Paris, Scot went to Bologna, and thence, after a stay at Palermo, to Toledo. There he acquired a knowledge of Arabic. This opened up to him the Arabic versions of Aristotle and the multitudinous commentaries of the Arabs upon them, and also brought him into contact with the original works of Avicenna and Averroes.

Early career

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Scot began his scholarly career as a translator. Frederick II attracted him with many other savants to his brilliant court, and at the instigation of the emperor he superintended (along with Hermannus Alemannus) a fresh translation of Aristotle and the Arabian commentaries from Arabic into Latin. There exist translations by Scot himself of the Historia animalium, of De anima and of De coelo, along with the commentaries of Averroes upon them.

His books dealt with astrology, alchemy and the occult sciences generally and account for his popular reputation. These works include:

• Super auctorem spherae, printed at Bologna in 1495 and at Venice in 1631
• De sole et luna, printed at Strassburg (1622), in the Theatrum chimicum, and containing more alchemy than astronomy, the sun and moon appearing as the images of gold and silver
• De chiromantia, an opuscule often published in the 15th century
• De physiognomia et de hominis procreatione, which saw no fewer than eighteen editions between 1477 and 1660.

The Physiognomia (which also exists in an Italian translation) and the Super auctorem spherae expressly state that the author undertook the works at the request of the Emperor Frederick.

"Every astrologer is worthy of praise and honour," Scot wrote, "Since by such a doctrine as astrology he probably knows many secrets of God, and things which few know."

The legendary Michael Scot used to feast his friends with dishes brought by spirits from the royal kitchens of France and Spain and other lands.

But Michael Scot's reputation as a magician had already become fixed in the age immediately following his own. He appears in Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, canto xx. 115-117) among the magicians and soothsayers in the eighth circle of Hell. Boccaccio represents him in the same character, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola arraigns him severely in his work against astrology, while Gabriel Naud finds it necessary to defend his good name in his Apologie pour les grands personnages faussement accusés de magie.

Scot in modern fiction

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Scot is the title character in the historic fantasy novel The Lord of Middle Air by Michael Scott Rohan, who claims descent from the magician.

Jane Yolen's Tartan Magic series features Scot as a villain.

In the children's television fantasy Shoebox Zoo, Michael Scot has survived to the present day, where he acts as a Gandalf-like character, serving as the mysterious advisor to the main character. He is played by Peter Mullan.

Michael Scot is raised from the dead in "The Adept", by Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris. He is reincarnated in the sequel, "The Adept Book Two: The Lodge of the Lynx".

Michael Scott ^* was the teacher of the wizard Prospero in John Bellairs' novel The Face in the Frost.

Death

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The date of Scots death remains uncertain. The efforts of Sir Walter Scott and others to identify him with the Sir Michael Scot of Balwearie, sent in 1290 on a special embassy to Norway, have not convinced historians, though the two may have had family connections. ]

References

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Rev. J. Wood Brown, Life and Legend of Michael Scot (1897).

Original detail from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Astrologers | British astrologers | 1175 births | 1232 deaths