ROGER OF HEREFORD

(fl. England, second half of the twelfth century)

astrononmy, astrology.

Very little is known with certainty about Roger of Hereford’s career. There has
been considerable speculation seeking to identify him with several other
contemporaneous Englishmen named Roger. At the beginning of his Compotus, which is
dated 9 September 1176, Roger refers to himself as “young” but adds that he has
devoted many years to learning. The period of his activity probably lies in the
decade from 1170 to 1180.

Roger of Hereford wrote several astronomical works. The Compotus, which consists of
five books of twenty-six chapters, is critical of other Latin computists. The work
is dedicated to Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford until 1163, and then bishop of
London. Roger also composed a set of astronomical tables for the latitude of
Hereford, dated 1178, based on the Toledan and Marseilles tables. His other
astronomical treatises include De ortu et occasione signorum and Theorica
planetarum. Taking into consideration the period during which the latter work was
probably written and the dates of the availability of Ptolemy’s Almagest in the
Latin West (1160, 1175), Roger’s Theorica is likely one of the earliest works in
that genre in the post-Latin Ptolemy period. The Digby manuscript of the Theorica
(Digby MS 168, fols. 69 f.) is entitled “Incipit theorica Rogeri Herefordensis”; a
later hand has added “floruit a.d. 1170 sub Henrico 20.” In the Theorica, Roger
describes the “Hindu” procedure for the determination of’planetary latitudes, a
technique that entered the West in the Toledan Tables as well as from other Arabic
Sources. He also provides the Ptolemaic method for latitudes, which he calls “more
likely.”

In addition to these astronomical contributions, Roger of Hereford wrote several

works on astrology. One of these, Liber de divisione astronomiae, in the
Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript, begins, “In the name of God the pious and
merciful…,” which has a decided Arabic flavor and would indicate that the work
might be a translation. Other astrological treatises by Roger include De quatuor
partibus iudicorum astronomie, De iudiciis astronomie, Iudicia Herefordensis, and
De tribus generalibus iudiciis astronomie. Several of these treatises apparently
are extracts from the four-part work on astrology. Roger also wrote De re
metallicis.

Roger of Hereford can be placed in that group of twelfth-century Englishmen who

were instrumental in bringing Arabic scientific materials to the Latin West, either
through direct translation or in the form of adaptations of Arabic sources. The
group includes Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley, Alfred of Sarashel (Alfred
Anglicus), and Adelard of Bath. Whether Roger knew Arabic or traveled to Spain is
unknown. Alfred of Sarashel, who translated the Arabic version of the De
vegetabilis or De plantis, a work attributed to Aristotle but written by Nicholas
of Damascus, dedicated his translation to Roger.

Whether Roger’s activity continued into the 1180’s is unknown. He may have been the
Roger, clerk of Hereford, who served as itinerant justice with Walter Map in 1185.
It has also been suggested that he died as a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
See Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde, III (Paris, 1958), 222–223, 520–523; C. W.
Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 87,
123–128; Josiah C. Russell, “Hereford and Arabic Science in England,” in Isis, 18
(1932), 14–25; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, II
(New York, 1923), 181–187, 260.
Claudia Kren