Astronomical appropriation over the longue durée: Three centuries of Bonfils's Book of Six Wings

Written around 1340 in Hebrew at Tarascon on the Rhône, the Sepher Shesh Kenaphayim (Book of Six Wings) presents six tables for predicting eclipses, largely based on the parameters and methods of al-Battani. This work, composed by the Rabbi Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils, enjoyed considerable distribution and remains extant in 90 Hebrew manuscripts, 12 Greek manuscripts (translated in 1435), three Latin versions (translated in
1406 and 1437), and one lost Slavonic translation made in Kiev. In the 1630s, Gassendi and Peiresc had a Hebrew version that Solomon Azubi, a rabbi in Carpentras, translated into French. Very few sets of medieval astronomical tables diffused through this number of languages and astronomical communities over three centuries. In this paper I will examine the contexts for the Greek, Latin and French translations of Bonfils ' tables and will ask why these tables might have moved so easily given the existence, over these three centuries, of better known and more widely used competing astronomical tables. This paper will illustrate long-range mechanisms of knowledge communication in late medieval Europe.