Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts
Ars Astronomica is an academic project dedicated to producing the first English translations of rare historical Hebrew and Latin astronomy and cosmology texts. The project utilizes an AI-assisted pipeline to ensure modern readability while maintaining strict fidelity to the original manuscripts.
Why it matters
This initiative makes previously inaccessible scientific history available to a broader audience, bridging the gap between ancient scholarship and modern language.
A scholarly imprint producing first English translations of historical Hebrew and Latin works in astronomy, cosmology, and natural philosophy.
These texts span centuries, and most have never appeared in English. One – Gersonides’ 136-chapter mathematical astronomy – was never printed and survives only in manuscript. They cite and answer one another, addressing the same cosmological questions, yet until now no one could read them side by side in a single language.
Translations are produced with an automated, AI-assisted pipeline that runs each text through a multi-stage workflow before final collation. For technical details, see the translator’s translation-pipeline repo.
These translations are prepublication texts – nearly publication-ready, pending the diagrams and illustrations still in progress.
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