Talk:Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 07:45, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Roger Bacon on Pierre de Maricourt
Regarding Roger Bacons attitude to Pierre de Maricourt, Edward Grant quotes him in his Source Book of Medieval Science (1974 ed.) as calling Pierre "a master of experiment", and someone who "knows by experiment natural history and physic and alchemy", among other things. All the references I have seen to Bacon commenting on Maricourt has been similar ones, not exclusively "master mathemathician". I will let the section stand until profer reference can be provided to a widespread misuse of the latter term, or delete it as irrellevant.

Roger Bacon on Pierre de Maricourt
Grant's much longer discussion of Pierre in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (vol. 10 [1974], pp. 532-540) notes that the Bacon references are doubtful. The oldest manuscripts have the reference to Petrus only in the margins, that is, it is a later addition and not by Bacon. This then gets incorporated into the text of later copies, masking the fact that the attribution is not by Bacon but by someone else.

This is also noted in my article, "Peter Peregrinus" in Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Thomas Glick et al. (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 388-389.

This tends to be the latest opinion among scholars. Ron B. Thomson (talk) 21:30, 25 August 2011 (UTC)