Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
In Greek mythology, Alcyone and Ceyx were a wife and husband who incurred the wrath of the god Zeus for their romantic hubris.
In Greek mythology, multiple characters were known as Cycnus or Cygnus. The literal meaning of the name is "swan", and accordingly most of them ended up being transformed into swans.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his magnum opus. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar in a mythico-historical framework comprising over 250 myths, 15 books, and 11,995 lines.
Arthur Golding was an English translator of more than 30 works from Latin into English. While primarily remembered today for his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses because of its influence on William Shakespeare's works, in his own time he was most famous for his translation of Caesar's Commentaries, and his translations of the sermons of John Calvin were important in spreading the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation.
The Emerald Tablet, also known as the Smaragdine Tablet or the Tabula Smaragdina, is a compact and cryptic Hermetic text. It was highly regarded by Islamic and European alchemists as the foundation of their art. Though attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, the text of the Emerald Tablet first appears in a number of early medieval Arabic sources, the oldest of which dates to the late eighth or early ninth century. It was translated into Latin several times in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Numerous interpretations and commentaries followed.
In Greek mythology, the Hyades are a sisterhood of nymphs that bring rain.
The Secretum Secretorum or Secreta Secretorum, also known as the Sirr al-Asrar, is a treatise which purports to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great on an encyclopedic range of topics, including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, magic, and medicine. The earliest extant editions claim to be based on a 9th-century Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the lost Greek original. It is a pseudo-Aristotelian work. Modern scholarship finds it likely to have been written in the 10th century in Arabic. Translated into Latin in the mid-12th century, it was influential among European intellectuals during the High Middle Ages.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
In Greco-Roman mythology, the Propoetides are the daughters of Propoetus from the city of Amathus on the island of Cyprus.
Hylonome was a female centaur in Greek mythology.
De tribus puellis or The Three Girls is an anonymous medieval Latin poem, a narrative elegiac comedy written probably in France during the twelfth or early thirteenth century. The metre and theme (love) are modelled so thoroughly on Ovid that it is ascribed to him in the two fifteenth-century manuscripts in which it is preserved.
The following is a timeline of probability and statistics.
Angelo Decembrio was a Milanese humanist who began his career in Ferrara, where he arrived in 1430. The son of Uberto Decembrio, who was the first Renaissance translator of Plato's Republic, and outshone among his contemporaries by his brother Pier Candido, Angelo is known especially for the seven books of literary dialogues of De politiæ litterariæ, which provide a vivid record— though synthesized in retrospect— of literary life at the court of Leonello d'Este of Ferrara, Taking as its main concern the question of how to achieve and maintain the literary polish characteristic of the civilized man in a courtly environment, Decembrio's unique dialogues elaborating aspects of this central idea take as personae his patron Leonello d'Este, who serves as the questioner, with the great teacher Guarino of Verona, Leonello's former tutor; the architect, theorist and humanist Leon Battista Alberti; the poet Tito Vespasiano Strozzi. They debate the comparative value of ancient and modern poetry, discuss the quality of works of art, examine the Egyptian obelisk that still stands in Vatican City in the Piazza S. Pietro; and describe the ideal renaissance library and how it should be organized.
Angelo Sabino or in Latin Angelus Sabinus was an Italian Renaissance humanist, poet laureate, classical philologist, Ovidian impersonator, and putative rogue.
Pegasides were nymphs of Greek mythology connected with wells and springs, specifically those that the mythical horse Pegasus created by striking the ground with his hooves.
The Mirror of Alchimy is a short alchemical manual, known in Latin as Speculum Alchemiae. Translated in 1597, it was only the second alchemical text printed in the English language. Long ascribed to Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the work is more likely the product of an anonymous author who wrote between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.
Pamphilus de amore is a 780-line, 12th-century Latin comedic play, probably composed in France, but possibly Spain. It was "one of the most influential and important of the many pseudo-Ovidian productions concerning the 'arts of Love'" in medieval Europe, and "the most famous and influential of the medieval elegiac comedies, especially in Spain". The protagonists are Pamphilus and Galatea, with Pamphilus seeking to woo her through a procuress.
Bartholomew of Messina was a Sicilian scholar who worked as a translator of Greek into Latin at the court of King Manfred of Sicily.
