Etablissement Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès
École doctorale ALLPHA – Arts, Lettres, Langues, Philosophie, Communication Modalités de candidature
Spécialité Etudes Hispaniques et Hispano-américaines
Equipe Ca.Li.P.Sa – Cartographies des Lieux de Pouvoir et de Savoir
Unité de recherche CEIIBA-Centre d’études Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines
Encadrement de la thèse Amaia ARIZALETA 
Financement
du 01-10-2027 au 30-08-2030Origine des fonds:MSCA COFUND BEST
Employeur:Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès
MSCA COFUND BEST
The doctoral project is funded under the BEST doctoral programme (Between Earth and Sky in Toulouse), successful in the European HORIZON-MSCA-COFUND-2025 call (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions), co-funded by the European Commission and led by the Université de Toulouse. Funding is secured: the subject, submitted as part of the programme’s call for expressions of interest, will be open to international application from 14 September 2026 under MSCA recruitment rules (open, transparent and merit-based recruitment), for first enrolment in 2027–2028 and a thesis start date of 1 September 2027. The doctoral contract runs from 1 September 2027 to 31 August 2030; the employer is a partner institution of the project. The programme fully covers salary, research environment and international mobility; it also covers consultation missions to archives, conference attendance and training. Research stays at UCLouvain are capped at twelve months. International co-supervision with UCLouvain operates within the contractual framework provided by the programme.
Début de la thèse le 1er octobre 2027
Date limite de candidature (à 23h59) 23 novembre 2026
Profil et compétences recherchées
The project is addressed to a candidate with a strong command of at least one medieval Ibero-Romance language and reading competence in Occitan, or the ability to acquire it rapidly, and sound Latin. Any knowledge of ancient and medieval astronomy, of the history of science and of the basics of Arabic would be considered an asset. Familiarity with the methods of textual criticism and with digital humanities is welcome but not required: the thesis includes specialised training (Latin palaeography, history of ancient astronomy, digital corpus tools) designed to complete the profile as needed. The working languages of supervision are French, Spanish and English, and the dissertation may be written in any of the three. No level of French is required on entry; reading competence in scholarly French is useful and can be developed during the doctorate through the training offered by the Université de Toulouse. The doctorate includes two six-month stays, or a single one-year stay, at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), fully funded by the programme.
Application link : https://edd-projets.utoulouse.fr/
Niveau d’anglais requis: Intermédiaire supérieur: Vous pouvez utiliser la langue de manière efficace et vous exprimer précisément.
Résumé du projet de thèse
The astrological turn of the long twelfth century: the Latin translations of astronomical and astrological treatises, among them Ptolemy translated by Gerard of Cremona and the Great Introduction to Astrology of Abu Ma’shar (Albumasar), met with a success whose scale is still not fully measured. Astronomy henceforth stood as a mathematical science, and astrology as the application of that science to the study of terrestrial phenomena. This entailed a profound change in the regime of knowledge, one that transformed the relation between human beings and the reality surrounding them: natural phenomena were no longer explained solely by divine intervention or by moral causes, but were read within a system, a natural order governed by the movements of the heavenly bodies. From the twelfth century onwards this interest in science in general, and in astrology in particular, irrigated the textual traditions of the Christian West, sometimes obliquely, as shown by the appearance of cosmological and planetary diagrams in the margins of manuscripts whose content bears no direct relation to the discipline (Coulson / Roy 2000).
Spain was the principal theatre of this translation movement: the city of Toledo was the main centre of a major cultural translatio (Burnett 1994), a milieu whose intellectual networks and writing practices have been studied by the thesis director (Arizaleta 2010, 2014a, 2024, 2027 in press). It was therefore natural that the Iberian literatures, in Latin and in the vernacular, should be the first traditions to reflect the irradiation of astrological culture, in the scientific domain as well as in narrative literature (Burnett 2006). Far from remaining the preserve of specialists, astrology, magic and cosmology exercised a deep and lasting impact on society as a whole, as their presence in narrative texts addressed to broad audiences attests. The project studies the repercussions of this astrological turn in the earliest Castilian and Occitan literatures: the moment when the science of the heavens, freshly arrived in Europe, was received, transformed and set into narrative by vernacular writing. BEST places at the forefront new ways of producing, analysing and translating scientific knowledge; this is precisely what early Castilian and Occitan vernacular writing does, at its own historical scale, when it receives the knowledge of the sky.
Thématiques Domaine
The project is part of Pillar 2 of the BEST programme, “Grasping global changes and their impact on societies”, and it responds directly to the very name of the programme, Between Earth and Sky. Where the summary situates the project within the general history of the transmission of celestial knowledge, this rubric anchors it specifically in Toulouse. The city itself stands on the medieval routes of celestial knowledge: tradition places in Toulouse, in 1143, Hermann of Carinthia’s Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Planisphere, and the Toulouse Tables, adapted from the Toledan Tables to the meridian of the city, made Toulouse one of the places where the movements of the heavens were calculated, a role it holds again today as the European capital of aeronautics and space. Studying from Toulouse the first vernacular appropriation of the sky gives the BEST programme the historical depth of its own question. The doctoral candidate will moreover join the active pluridisciplinary environment of the research programme Le ciel vu de Toulouse (IRPALL, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès), which brings together medievalists, historians of science and of art, literary scholars and astrophysicists, in partnership with the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie (IRAP), the Bibliothèque de Toulouse, the Société d’astronomie populaire de Toulouse, the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France and the Rectorat de l’Académie de Toulouse, with further partnerships under discussion with the CNES, the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées and the Académie de l’Air et de l’Espace.
Medieval Romance literatures and civilisations, history of knowledge (Hispanic and Occitan studies, philology, history of astronomy and astrology).
Objectif et contexte
The principal aim is to study how astronomical and astrological science, newly arrived in Europe through Arabic learning, exerted a profound and lasting impact on the way people of the central Middle Ages questioned their place in the cosmos and their interaction with it. Three specific objectives follow from this. The first is to establish how, when and through which discursive traditions a scientific terminology of the heavens came into being in Castilian and Occitan; the principal deliverable will be a dated glossary of this earliest Romance terminology, organised by domain, with a chronological curve and a distribution by discursive tradition, published in open access. The second is to identify the Latin and Romance sources of the corpus, taking Arabic sources into account wherever possible, and to analyse their acclimatisation within the macrostructure of the works, which will make it possible to characterise the intellectual operation proper to the vernacularisation of knowledge. The third is to analyse the concepts that exceed the scientific frame and carry anthropological and social significance: astral destiny, cosmological wisdom, the government of the world. Each hypothetical filiation within the corpus will be either confirmed or set aside, the reduction in the number of open questions constituting in itself a verifiable indicator of progress.
The transmission of astronomical and astrological knowledge of Greek and Arabic origin took place in Spain through the twelfth-century Latin translations: some names, such as that of Gerard of Cremona, are known to us, others remain anonymous, but the city of Toledo was the principal centre of this major cultural translation (Burnett), whose intellectual networks and writing practices have been studied by the thesis director. It is therefore natural that Iberian literatures, in Latin as in the vernacular, should be the first traditions to reflect the spread of astrological culture, both in the scientific domain and in narrative literature. Yet research here shows an imbalance: studies are abundant on the scientific corpora of the age of Alfonso X and Ramon Llull, but the decades preceding the mid-thirteenth century, precisely when the first vernacular encounters with the new science occur, remain comparatively little mapped. The project responds to this documented gap. It draws on a mature international bibliography concerning the transmission of Arabic science to the Latin West (Burnett; de Callataÿ), medieval encyclopaedism (Paulmier-Foucart; de Callataÿ, Cavagna and Van den Abeele), the vernacularisation of the sciences (Goyens, De Leemans and Smets) and medieval translation in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as on the work of the two supervisors: on the Louvain side, the editing and study of the great vernacular translations of Latin learning and of Occitan cosmological literature; on the Toulouse side, the learned culture of early thirteenth-century Castile and the transpyrenean circulation of clerics and manuscripts. The thesis brings these strands together for the first time in a systematic way, applied to the earliest Castilian and Occitan corpus.
Méthode
The method combines philology, historical linguistics and the history of knowledge, and rests on a set of complementary operations, two of which form its probative core. The first is analysis by section: isolating within each work the passages of learning and comparing their linguistic profile with that of the surrounding narrative, in order to test the hypothesis that knowledge carries its own language with it even once the text has changed register. The second is the typology of additions and omissions with respect to the source: what is added in the vernacular passage (glosses, examples, updatings, markers of orality), what is removed (technical apparatus, authorities, divine causality), what is substituted; systematised work by work, this is the most direct way of characterising the intellectual operation proper to vernacularisation.
Around this core, complementary operations will refine the picture: a systematic survey of metalinguistic glossing formulas in both directions, from Latin into the vernacular and back; the morphological acclimatisation of borrowings, distinguishing passive borrowing from deliberate elaboration; the study of learned, semi-learned and popular doublets, which makes it possible to date the entry of terms and to separate what the language borrows from what it forges; the measurement of Latinising syntax through systematic collation of each vernacular passage with its Latin source; a survey of the epistemic vocabulary of knowledge and proof; the extraction of native classifications of knowledge, to be compared with contemporary Latin divisions such as Gundissalinus’s De divisione philosophiae; and a codicological enquiry into what travels alongside what within the same manuscripts. A methodological precaution is set out from the outset and budgeted into the timetable: the identification of the Latin sources is a precondition for the collation work, not one of its results, and the first year will be planned accordingly.
Résultats attendus
The thesis will first deliver a monograph: the first comprehensive study of the integration of astronomical and astrological knowledge into the earliest Castilian and Occitan literatures. It will then deliver a dated glossary of the terminology of the heavens attested in the corpus, with the dating of first occurrences and a distribution by discursive tradition; confined to the corpus under study, this glossary is a realistic goal within three years, and it is conceived as a lasting instrument, useful to third parties and published in open access. It will further establish a typology of the operations of vernacularisation (additions, omissions, substitutions with respect to the source), applied to the works whose Latin source is identified and edited, in keeping with the methodological precaution set out from the outset; where the source remains uncertain, the expected result is the clarification of the question of filiation itself: each hypothetical link will be either confirmed or set aside, the reduction in the number of open questions constituting a verifiable indicator of progress. The survey of the epistemic vocabulary will finally provide a first account of what counted as knowledge and as proof in the vernacular around 1230, a contribution to intellectual history that the precisely bounded corpus makes measurable. These results will give rise to articles in peer-reviewed journals and to presentations in the seminars of both universities and within the Le ciel vu de Toulouse programme; avenues that exceed the scope of the thesis (extending the glossary to other traditions, an iconographic study of cosmological diagrams) are explicitly conceived as an open programme, not as commitments of the doctorate.
Précision sur l’encadrement
The thesis is directed by Amaia Arizaleta, Professor of Medieval Hispanic Studies (CEIIBA, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès), in international co-supervision with Mattia Cavagna, Professor of Medieval French Language and Literature at UCLouvain (INCAL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). The doctoral candidate will be based at CEIIBA, in collaboration with the Occitan studies section of UT2J, and will take part in the pluridisciplinary programme Le ciel vu de Toulouse (IRPALL), directed by the thesis supervisor. Mobility to UCLouvain will take the form of two six-month stays, or a single one-year stay, that is twelve months in total, in keeping with the ceiling of one third of the thesis duration set by the European Commission; it will take place at the Centre d’études sur le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance (CEMR, INCAL), with a workstation, access to the history of science holdings, and participation in CIOL activities and in the history of science seminar led by G. de Callataÿ and J.-Ch. Ducène. Supervision will rest on regular video conferences, an annual joint meeting of both supervisors with the doctoral candidate, and a co-signed progress report presented to the individual monitoring committee. Training will combine the seminars of both centres, the offerings of the Toulouse Doctoral School, and specialised courses as needed (Latin palaeography, history of ancient astronomy, digital humanities).
Conditions scientifiques matérielles (conditions de sécurité spécifiques) et financières du projet de recherches
The project requires neither heavy equipment nor an experimental protocol: the material conditions are those of research in philology and the history of knowledge, and all of them are already in place. The doctoral candidate will have a workstation at CEIIBA (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès) and, during mobility stays, a place in the shared doctoral students’ office of the Centre d’études sur le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance (INCAL, UCLouvain), with access to the bibliographic holdings of both universities, including the history of science section of the Louvain library. The corpus consists of edited works and of manuscripts largely accessible in digital reproduction through the holding libraries (BnF, Biblioteca Nacional de España, chapter and municipal libraries); on-site verification will require occasional consultation missions, covered by the operating budget attached to the BEST doctoral contract, which will also fund mobility to UCLouvain, participation in conferences and specialised training (Latin palaeography, history of ancient astronomy, digital tools). The working tools required are standard office and digital-humanities software (corpus-building and querying tools, a database for the glossary), available through the digital services of both institutions. The project carries no specific safety requirements: it handles neither sensitive personal data nor hazardous materials; consultation of early holdings follows the conservation rules of the libraries concerned.
Objectifs de valorisation des travaux de recherche du doctorant : diffusion, publication et confidentialité, droit à la propriété intellectuelle,…
Dissemination will follow the open-science commitments of the BEST programme. Results will be disseminated through articles in peer-reviewed journals in the field (Hispanic and Occitan studies, history of knowledge), deposited in open access on HAL in accordance with the policy of the Université de Toulouse, and through papers given in the seminars of both partner universities and at international meetings of the discipline. The glossary of celestial terminology, the thesis’s principal deliverable, will be published in open access under a Creative Commons licence, so as to constitute a lasting instrument for the scholarly community. The thesis itself will be deposited and disseminated according to the rules in force (national deposit, online dissemination unless a temporary embargo is requested for publication). The Le ciel vu de Toulouse programme will further offer a framework for outreach to the general public, through the doctoral candidate’s participation in its lecture series and in its mediation activities with site partners (Bibliothèque de Toulouse, Société d’astronomie populaire, Rectorat). The project carries no confidentiality clause: it involves neither sensitive data nor protected know-how, and raises no question of patentability. Intellectual property in the work falls under copyright: the doctoral candidate is the author of the thesis and of the resulting publications, any co-signed publications with the supervisors following the rules of scholarly authorship, and reproductions of manuscripts will be subject to the conditions of the holding institutions.
Collaborations envisagées
Besides the co-supervision with UCLouvain, and the two international collaborations already detailed (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, for the iconographic study of the cosmological diagrams of the Ovidian tradition; Warburg Institute, London, through the shared network of the two supervisors around Charles Burnett), two further collaborations are envisaged. At the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, the Occitan studies section will support the Occitan strand of the corpus (linguistic and philological expertise, seminars). The pluridisciplinary programme Le ciel vu de Toulouse (IRPALL, UT2J), directed by the thesis supervisor, will offer the doctoral candidate a regular framework for interdisciplinary presentation and discussion, bringing together medievalists, historians of science and art, and astrophysicists, in partnership with the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie (IRAP), the Bibliothèque de Toulouse, the Société d’astronomie populaire de Toulouse, the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France and the Rectorat de l’Académie de Toulouse, as well as, subject to confirmation, CNES, the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées and the Académie de l’Air et de l’Espace; this network also opens possibilities for science outreach around the thesis results, and extends internationally through the thesis director’s ongoing collaboration with Eleonora Andreani (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin). Finally, the BOSMAH programme (Casa de Velázquez, EHEHI), directed by the thesis supervisor, will make available to the project its work on the manuscript holdings of Burgo de Osma and Santa María de Huerta, a possible field of enquiry for the codicological strand.
Ouverture Internationale
The project is international by design. It rests on a co-supervision between the Université de Toulouse and UCLouvain (Belgium), with two six-month stays, or a single one-year stay (twelve months at most, in keeping with the ceiling of one third of the thesis duration set by the European Commission), at the Centre d’études sur le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance (INCAL), including participation in CIOL activities and in the history of science seminar led by G. de Callataÿ and J.-Ch. Ducène. Its very object is transnational: the circulation of astronomical and astrological knowledge between Arabic, Latin and the Romance vernaculars, on either side of the Pyrenees, calls for a framework of analysis that exceeds any single national tradition. Beyond the Toulouse–Louvain axis, the project opens onto two further collaborations. The first, iconographic and digital, concerns the cosmological diagrams of the Ovidian tradition, with the research group at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela responsible for the Biblioteca Digital Ovidiana. The second draws on the shared network of the two supervisors at the Warburg Institute (London), around the work of Charles Burnett on the transmission of Arabic science to the Latin West, a natural venue for the doctoral candidate’s presentations and exchanges. The thesis may be written in French, Spanish or English depending on the profile of the candidate recruited through the international call, and its results will be presented at international meetings of the field (AIEO and AHLM/Semyr congresses, conferences in the history of science).
Références bibliographiques
Primary sources:
Abū Ma’šar, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, ed. Ch. Burnett, M. Yano, K. Yamamoto, Leiden, Brill, 1994. Auto de los Reyes Magos, in M. Á. Pérez Priego (ed.), Teatro medieval, Madrid, Cátedra, 2009. Libro de Alexandre, ed. J. Casas Rigall, Madrid, Real Academia Española, 2014. Semeiança del mundo, ed. W. E. Bull and H. F. Williams, Berkeley – Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1959. Peire de Corbiac, Lo Tezaur, ed. A. Jeanroy and G. Bertoni, “Le Thezaur de Peire de Corbian”, Annales du Midi, 23, 1911, p. 289-308 and 451-471. Lucidari, ed. A. Silvaggi, Lucidari. Edizione critica del volgarizzamento provenzale dell’Elucidarium di Onorio d’Autun (ms. Carpentras 157), doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Trento, 2010. Matfre Ermengaud, Le Breviari d’Amor, vol. II, ed. P. T. Ricketts, London, Westfield College – AIEO, 1989. Dominicus Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophiae / Über die Einteilung der Philosophie, ed. and trans. A. Fidora and D. Werner, Freiburg im Breisgau, Herder (Herders Bibliothek der Philosophie des Mittelalters, 11), 2007.
Secondary literature:
Arizaleta, A., La translation d’Alexandre. Recherches sur les structures et les significations du Libro de Alexandre, Paris, SEMH, 1999. Arizaleta, A., Les clercs au palais. Chancellerie et écriture du pouvoir royal (Castille, 1157-1230), Paris, e-Spania Books, 2010. Arizaleta, A., “El orden de Babel: la conciencia lingüística de la clerecía letrada castellana”, e-Spania, 13, 2012. Burnett, Ch., Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009. Burnett, Ch., “Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna”, Micrologus, 2, 1994, p. 101-126. Cavagna, M., “La cosmologie du Livre des propriétés des choses en occitan: une lecture de l’Elucidari et du Breviari d’Amor”, in L’aventure du sens. Mélanges François Zufferey, Strasbourg, ELiPhi, 2016, p. 33-65. Cavagna, M., “Traduire, écrire et imprimer la science”, in Bilan et perspectives des études sur les encyclopédies médiévales, Louvain-la-Neuve, PIEM, 2021, p. 287-328. De Callataÿ, G., Cavagna, M. and Van den Abeele, B. (eds.), Speculum arabicum. Intersecting Perspectives on Medieval Encyclopaedism, Louvain-la-Neuve, PIEM, 2021. De Callataÿ, G. and Van den Abeele, B. (eds.), Une lumière venue d’ailleurs: héritages et ouvertures dans les encyclopédies d’Orient et d’Occident au Moyen Âge, Turnhout, Brepols, 2008. Goyens, M., De Leemans, P. and Smets, A. (eds.), Science Translated. Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2008. Martínez Romero, T. and Recio, R. (eds.), Essays on Medieval Translation in the Iberian Peninsula, Castelló – Omaha, Universitat Jaume I, 2001. Paulmier-Foucart, M., Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand miroir du monde, Turnhout, Brepols, 2004. Saif, L., “Islamic Astrology”, in Astrology through History, Santa Barbara, ABC-Clio, 2018, p. 176-185. Zinelli, F., “Attrito, resistenza e fluidità nella ricodificazione linguistica dei testi romanzi”, in Innovazione linguistica e storia della tradizione, Milano, Mimesis, 2020, p. 67-105.
Source : Université de Toulouse
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