Pedro Gallego

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the conquistador, see Pedro Gallego de Andrade.
Page from a copy of Pedro Gallego's Summa de astronomia. The drawing depicts the relative positions of the planets on 1 May 1273.[1]

Pedro González Pérez (c. 1197 – 19 November 1267), known as Pedro Gallego (

bishop of Cartagena from the diocese's restoration in 1248 until his death, and played a prominent role in organizing the church in the region of Murcia after 1243. He also compiled, abridged and adapted previous translations from Arabic into Latin, producing books on zoology, astronomy and economics
.

Life

Pedro was born about 1197 in Galicia, whence his nickname Gallego. According to the 18th-century historian Pablo Manuel Ortega, his birthplace was Santa Marta de Ortigueira and his father was Gonzalo Pérez Gallego.[2] He was probably of noble birth, and may have been educated at the Franciscan convent of Val de Dios [es] (Vallis Dei) near Santiago de Compostela, where he may have learned Arabic.[1][3] He entered the Franciscan order before the Spanish peninsula was divided into separate provinces. According to Juan Gil de Zamora, he joined the convent of La Bastida in Toledo under the superior Alfonso Martínez shortly after its founding in 1219.[2][3] He succeeded Alfonso as superior and in 1236 became the first minister provincial of Castile after a chapter-general held at Soria in 1233 divided Spain into three provinces.[2][3] This brought him into contact with King Ferdinand III.[2]

In the 1240s, Pedro served as confessor to the future

Tarragona through the bull Novella plantatio Carthaginensis, making Cartagena subject directly to the Holy See.[2][3] The old see of Cartagena that had disappeared after the 10th century had been a metropolitanate itself.[3]

Up to this point, Pedro's career must be reconstructed from the chronicles of the contemporary Gil de Zamora and the much less reliable Manuel Ortega, but after his appointment as bishop his career can be traced in numerous documents, such as royal privileges and papal bulls.[4] In the 1250s, he frequently served on commissions for the organization of conquered territory. On 23 December 1252, he was authorized to select candidates for the new bishopric being set up in conquered territory. He also obtained buildings for the church in Murcia and property in Seville from the king. He took an interest in the Christian communities of North Africa.[2] His knowledge of Arabic, certainly acquired before he became bishop, was probably key to his successes on the frontier.[3] He collaborated with the Dominicans in setting up a language school, the Studium arabicum et latinum, in Murcia.[3][5]

In 1265, on account of the

cathedral of Murcia in 1291.[4]

Works

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 6818) reads: "[Here] begins the epitome compiled by brother Peter, bishop of Cartagena, on the domestic science."[6]

Three works by Pedro Gallego are known. None were known before 1924,[2] when Auguste Pelzer [de] published editions of two from manuscripts he found in Rome and Paris.[6] In 1943, Gaudenzio Melani discovered two chapters of a third work in the municipal library of Sarnano. Since then José Martínez Gázquez has discovered the rest of this work in a Spanish manuscript, now Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 8918.[4] All three works have been edited and published by Martínez Gázquez.[7]

Although often labelled translations,[8] Pedro's works are now seen as compilations and adaptations of existing translations.[1] Pedro affirms in a prologue that he could read Arabic, but the incipits of his works describe him variously not as translating but as reading, compiling, selecting, abridging, shortening, subtracting, adding, copying, transferring and transforming. Nonetheless, some of his citations may be to Arabic originals and some of his words even true translations from the Arabic. His works are not wholly unoriginal. Hugo Marquant compares him to a modern translator creating a new translation of an already translated work and constantly looking back at his predecessor's work.[4]

  • Liber de animalibus is a partial adaptation of
    al-Fārābī (Abonacer).[4]
  • De regitiva domus (or De scientia domestica)[4] is a work on household management.[9] It is also most likely adaptation of an existing Latin work, possibly a translation of Aristotle's Economics from the Greek, but more probably a translation of Galen's Yconomica from Arabic or a translation of an epitome by Averroes on the same.[4][9] Pelzer thought it had peculiarities that indicated translation from an Arabic original.[4] It is preserved in two manuscripts (one in Paris, one in Rome).[4] Certain similarities between this work and Alfonso X's Siete Partidas led the Franciscan scholar Atanasio López Fernández [es] to conclude that Pedro was one of Alfonso's collaborators in this work.[4][11] Juan Torres Fontes detected in De regitiva domus original ideas probably not found in his sources.[4]
  • Summa de astronomia (or Summa astronomica) is described in one incipit as "composed by friar Pedro Gallego ... all taken from
    Levi ben Gerson. For this reason, he relies more on Martianus and Macrobius, whose universe is larger, than on al-Farghānī and the Arabic tradition derived from Ptolemy.[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c José Martínez Gázquez and Rubén Florio (eds.), Antología del latín cristiano y medieval: introducción y textos (Universidad Nacional del Sur, 2006), pp. 215–217.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j José García Oro, "Pedro González Pérez", Diccionario Biográfico electrónico (Real Academia de la Historia, 2018), retrieved 9 October 2020.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Williell R. Thomson, Friars in the Cathedral: The First Franciscan Bishops, 1226–1261 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), pp. 35–40.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Hugo Marquant, "Pedro Gallego OFM (†1267) y la ciencia: ¿Escritor, compilador, traductor? Una reflexión traductológica", in Antonio Bueno García (ed.), La Labor de traducción de los franciscanos (Editorial Cisneros, 2013), pp. 127–144.
  5. ^ a b Julio Samsó, On Both Sides of the Strait of Gibraltar: Studies in the History of Medieval Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib (Brill, 2020), pp. 545–553.
  6. ^ a b Auguste Pelzer, "Un traducteur inconnu: Pierre Gallego, franciscain et premier évêque de Carthagène (1250–1267)", in Adrien Pattin and Émile Van de Vyver (eds.), Études d'histoire littéraire sur la scolastique médiévale (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1964), pp. 188–240. Originally printed as a monography in Miscellanea Francesco Eherle, Vol. 1 (Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1924).
  7. ^ José Martínez Gázquez (ed.), Petri Galleci Opera Omnia quae exstant (Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2000).
  8. ^ H. Salvador Martínez (trans. Odile Cisneros), Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography (Brill, 2010), p. 557, calls him a translator, as does Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 524.
  9. ^ a b c Bernard G. Dod, "Aristoteles Latinus", in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 43–79, at 60–61.
  10. ^ José Martínez Gázquez, "Studium Arabicum et Hebraicum en Murcia", in Giuseppe Buffon and Sara Muzzi (eds.), Francesco d'Assisi e al-Malik al-Kamil: L'icona del dialogo tra storia e attualità (Milan: Fondazione Terra Santa, 2020), pp. 13–22, at 14–16.
  11. ^ Atanasio López, "Fray Pedro Gallego, primer obispo de Cartagena (1250–1267)", Archivo Ibero-Americano 24 (1925), pp. 65–91.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pedro_Gallego&oldid=1175341569"