Dr Federica Gigante discovers medieval astrolabe linking Islamic and Jewish science

Dr Federica Gigante’s discovery of a medieval astrolabe held in a museum in Verona, Italy, has attracted considerable international attention, with articles in TheTimes, The Guardian, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, El Pais, Le Monde, and The New York Times, among others. 

Dr Gigante, research associate at the Faculty of History, has recently published an article in Nuncius which shows how the eleventh-century astronomical instrument contains engravings in Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Western numerals, testifying to its exceptional status as an object which is at once ‘Islamic, Jewish, and European’.

F. Gigante, ‘A Medieval Islamic Astrolabe with Hebrew Inscriptions in Verona: The Seventeenth-Century Collection of Ludovico Moscardo’, Nuncius (2024). DOI : 10.1163/18253911-bja10095

More on Federica’s research here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/verona-astrolabe