With apologies for cross-posting (from HOPOS-L)

-----Original Message-----

Marshall Clagett, 89, Scholar on Science in Ancient Times, Is Dead

By WOLFGANG SAXON | 26 October 2005 | The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/nyregion/26CLAGETT.html

October 26, 2005

Marshall Clagett, 89, Scholar on Science in Ancient Times, Is Dead

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Marshall Clagett, a scholar of science in ancient Egypt and Greece and
the
way it was received in medieval Europe, died on Oct. 21 at a hospital in
Princeton, N.J. He was 89 and lived in Princeton.

His death was announced by the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton,
where he was a professor emeritus in the Department of Historical
Studies.
He arrived to teach in 1964 and took emeritus status in 1986, but
continued
to publish, and at his death was working on the fourth and final volume
of
his "Ancient Egyptian Science," the institute reported.

Dr. Clagett's major work was his five-volume "Archimedes in the Middle
Ages," published over 20 years starting in 1964. It covered the range of
work and the influence of Greece's most famous mathematician and
inventor,
about whom little is known.

Archimedes worked mostly in his native Syracuse, the principal
city-state in
Sicily, but is believed to have spent time in Egypt early in his career
and
later corresponded with Alexandrian scholars. Dr. Clagett's achievement
was
to trace and document the continuity of science from antiquity, through
Byzantium and Islam to the Europe of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance.

His volumes analyzed, interpreted and, at times, retranslated
Archimedes's
surviving treatises and examined them in a new context under subtitles
like
"Fate of the Medieval Archimedes, 1300-1565." The final volumes on the
subject were published by the American Philosophical Society in 1984.

In the same fashion, "Ancient Egyptian Science: A Source Book" stretched
over several volumes - the first of which appeared in 1989 - surveying
the
entire scope of the ancients' knowledge and mechanics. Volume 2 (1999),
for
instance, lists "Calendars, Clocks, and Astronomy" in its title.

Dr. Clagett was the author of "Greek Science in Antiquity," first
printed in
1955 and reissued by Dover Press in 2000. It provided an inventory of
Greek
medicine, biology, mathematics, physics and astronomy, along with Roman
and
Latin science in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Marshall Clagett was born in Washington and began his studies at the
California Institute of Technology. Transferring to George Washington
University, he graduated in 1937 and received a doctorate in history
from
Columbia in 1941. His thesis was on the history of science.

He saw combat in the Pacific during World War II, returning as a Navy
lieutenant commander, and started his academic career at Columbia in
1946 as
an instructor in history and the history of science. Moving to the
University of Wisconsin a year later, he became a full professor of the
history of science in 1954, and directed the university's Institute for
Research in the Humanities from 1959 to 1964.

He is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Susan Riley; a
daughter,
Kathleen Williams of Towson, Md.; two sons, Dennis, of Nyon,
Switzerland,
and Michael, of Yardley, Pa.; a half-brother, Brice, of Washington; and
five
grandchildren.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company