The goal of this project is to complete a critical edition, with English translation and scholarly annotation, of the first three books of the medieval Latin version of Alhacen's `Treatise on Optics.` Composed in Arabic in the early eleventh century, this treatise was rendered into Latin some two centuries later, under the title `De aspectibus.` In that form it quickly became a canonical source for optical thought in the Latin West, inspiring a series of important derivative works and serving as the primary teaching text for optics until the early seventeenth century. Both directly and indirectly, this work played a critical role in the formation of medieval and Renaissance ideas about light, color and visual representation. The critical edition will make this theoretically-oriented portion of Alhacen's work accessible in definitive form not only to specialists in the history of science but also to those with more general interests in medieval and Renaissance intellectual and cultural history.
