Transmission into use :
The evidence of marginalia
in the medieval Euclides latinus
John E. Murdoch (*)
When Euclid's Elements was transmitted to the Latin West via Islam, it was not simply passed on, but the character of the work had been changed from that we find in the Greek (1). The thesis of
(*) John E. Murdoch, Harvard University, Department of the history of science, Science Center 371, One Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. (1)1 have briefly sketched the fundamentals of this case of « transmission with transformation » (as well as the rather different case of Aristotle) in a paper delivered in Moscow in 1971 at the Xlllth International Congress of the History of Science entitled « Transmission and Figuration : An Aspect of the Islamic Contribution to Mathematics, Science, and Natural Philosophy in the Latin West ». This paper has now been published in an uncorrected form in The Commemoration Volume of Biruni International Congress in Rev. Hist. Set, 2003, 56/2, 369-382
