Cosmography in 16th-Century Greek and Slavic Communities

The Synopsis of Natural Questions (Conspectus rerum naturalium) written by the physician and scholar Symeon Seth is a work of natural philosophy that, among other matters, addresses questions of astronomy, geography, and meteorology. Important sections of this text circulated in Slavonic translations in the late 15th and 16th centuries and were fused with other anonymous cosmographical passages, as was the case in some post-Byzantine manuscripts. By analyzing a few specific manuscripts, and beyond the question of textual sources, this presentation considers the nature of such elementary cosmographical collections as textbooks and the role they may have played in 16th-century Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox communities, as well as patterns of transmission and adaptation between cultural areas particularly in their inclusion of diagrams and maps.