Introduction

Abstract

This book is premised upon two observations: that in general commentaries qua commentaries have long been a relatively neglected type of writing; and that commentaries that deal in particular with scientific matters have tended to seem especially uninteresting to many modern scholars. The editors and authors of this volume are animated instead by the conviction that this neglect and lack of interest constitute a serious deficiency in the study of scientific sources, one that represents an important loss both for the study of commentaries qua commentaries and for the history of science. Commentaries as Tools to Interpret the Base Text or as Writings Standing on Their OwnTraditionally, commentaries in all fields have tended to be studied above all for the sake of the light they could be thought capable of casting on the meaning of the base texts they commented on. This practice amounted to tacitly (and sometimes involved explicitly) denying the significance of the contribution to knowledge that commentaries themselves might be able to make, and attributing such a contribution exclusively to the base text: if the commentary helped us to understand the base text better, then it was worth studying, but only to the extent that it performed this function well; if it did not help us to understand the base text better, it could be safely ignored. Accordingly, commentaries were most often edited primarily for the use of scholars interested in the base texts, but only rarely were they translated or commented upon themselves so that they could thereby be made more widely available as documents worthy of attention in their own right.These assertions hold true in general, and they hold true in particular for mathematical sources. The Sanskrit treatise Āryabhat ˙īya, which Āryabhat ˙a is considered to have completed in 499, is a case in point. The oldest commentary on this treatise, composed in the seventh century by Bhāskara I, has been used exclusively in order to interpret the base text, but until recently it was never studied in its own right, qua commentary. The first critical edition of the commentary was not published until 1976 (Shukla 1976), in contrast with Bhāskara I's non-commentarial writings, which began to be published thirty years earlier, in 1946earlier, in (Keller 2006. It was only in 2006 that part of Bhāskara I's commentary was translated for the first time into any European language at all (Keller 2006). Likewise, one could argue that the strong interest in the ancient commentaries on Aristotle's writings, which is manifested in the massive editorial work on them that was carried out at the end of the nineteenth 1 See the book series published by De Gruyter: Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina,