90 Shank
sisted on letting nature do the teaching. But he too depended heavily on
the textual tradition and advanced it.^33 The transformations in knowledge
that he envisioned required many new books. Their proliferation helps to
explain the enthusiasm for classifi cations of learning, an odd activity best
understood as an attempt to cope with the fl ood of new materials and of
specialized schools “of grammar, of arts, of divinity, of civil or canon law,
of medicine, and more.”^34
Reports of ancient books in Spain led scholars like Gerard of Cremona
to Toledo, where he learned Arabic and translated dozens of works into
Latin. His translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest—the work that drew him
to Spain—would do for astronomy what Adelard’s Euclid had done for
geometry a few decades earlier. Two- thirds of the newly translated trea-
tises belonged to the nonmusical mathematical sciences.^35 The remainder
included generous portions of Aristotelian works in logic and especially
natural philosophy. By the early thirteenth century, almost all of the Ar-
istotelian corpus was available in Latin. With this new material so heavily
focused on the natural world, it is scarcely surprising that scientia increas-
ingly developed naturalistic connotations as well.
New knowledge was bursting the seams of the traditional categories
used to circumscribe it. In the later twelfth century, ars (“art”) took on
the additional meaning of “method” (that is, a system of rules) while
disciplina could both refer to “theory” (doctrina speculativa) and serve as
synonym for ars and scientia.^36 Whereas physica continued to designate
the study of nature generally (from natural philosophy to medicine), the
expression scientia naturalis and its cognates (scientia naturae, scientia de
natura) surfaced with increasing frequency in the later twelfth century
(Daniel Morley) and especially after the thirteenth (Robert Kilwardby,
Pietro d’Abano, and others). Kilwardby defi ned naturalis scientia as the
branch of theoretical knowledge pertaining to “knowledge of mobile /
changeable body in respect of its mobility / changeability” (that is, the
change or motion, not the body, is the focus).^37
The translation of al- Fa ̄ra ̄bı ̄’s De scientiis had prepared this transition
by dividing “natural science” (scientia naturalis) into eight parts, each
identical to the title of an Aristotelian natural philosophical book: Phys-
ics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On Animals,
On the Soul, On Plants and On Minerals.^38 This list would soon swell the
“arts” curriculum at Paris in the mid- thirteenth century, and many other
universities besides.
The association of the trivium with the “verbal sciences” (scientiae ser-
mocinales) and of the quadrivium with the “real sciences” (scientiae reales,
that is, devoted to things, res), mediated the transition from the language