In March I am talking on the Byzantine polymath Nikephoros Gregoras and his efforts to establish his scientific authority. In “Empiricism, Prediction, and Instruments: The Creation of Expertise in 14th-Century Constantinople” I will examine the ways that Gregoras tried to distinguish his own expertise by grounding it in precise, empirical predictions and his command of technical knowledge.
This talk forms part of my larger project on Byzantine scientific knowledge. This larger project began from Gregoras’s text “On the Construction and Origin of the Astrolabe” (“Περὶ κατασκευαζῆς καὶ γενἐσεως ἀστρολάβου”).
