One chapter of the book, for which I have a particular liking, bears the title “Humanists on Laxatives.” It tells the story of the reception of Arabic pharmacology in the Renaissance by focusing on a specific drug: the laxative senna. It leads the reader from the Arabic sources to the famous Renaissance botanists and from there to the eighteenth century. For some humanists, pharmacology was a textual science that needed to be purged of all Arabic accretions – which these authors achieved by way of deceptive textual manipulations. Other humanists were more empirical: they planted and tested senna themselves, comparing it with other laxatives. In the course of the sixteenth century, most pharmacologists realized that their Arabic predecessors in fact wrote very useful things.However, I know from personal experience that not everybody is as enthusiastic about the history of laxatives as I am. Other parts of the book may have more appeal to those readers. Those with a taste for exquisite polemics might like the chapter on how the humanist Juan Luis Vives demonstrated what he believed to be Averroes’s ignorance. Vives analyzes a passage from Averroes’s Aristotle commentaries, debunking the Arabic commentator in grand fashion. In spite of all the rhetoric, Vives was right on much of the philological detail: The quality of Averroes’ exposition indeed suffered severely from the accumulated errors of transmission and translation. But Averroes was able to balance some of these defects with his enormous knowledge of the Aristotelian corpus. This is the secret behind his continuing success as a commentator on Aristotle in the Renaissance.Some readers may feel deterred from reading a whole chapter about astrology, a discipline that most of us today, including myself, do not believe to be a serious science. But many Renaissance intellectuals did, and immersing oneself into the technical structure of famous astrological doctrines can be a real intellectual pleasure. For example, when important thinkers of the time, such as Girolamo Cardano and Johannes Schöner, compare competing Greek and Arabic astrological doctrines, with great acumen.Personally, my favorite protagonists are those Renaissance scholars who take impressive intellectual turns in the midst of the heated controversies about Arabic sciences — such as Jacob Mantino, whose elegant and precise Hebrew-Latin translations successfully adopt Arabic scientific traditions to the expectations of humanist readers; or Giovanni Manardo, a hard-nosed humanist physician, who does not find fault with commenting on Arabic pharmacological sources; or Agostino Nifo, the Averroist philosopher who suffers from the pressure of orthodoxy, but finds a way out by molding himself into a champion of Averroes’s interpretation, without adopting any contentious doctrine himself.The hostility of the humanist movement to Arabic sciences was far from monolithic. There are many examples of humanist scholars who contributed to the flourishing of Arabic sciences and philosophy in the Renaissance. Moreover, humanists did not explicitly oppose Arabic sciences because they were Oriental or because they originated from Islamic culture. Rather, they opposed them partly for scientific reasons, partly as a result of ideological beliefs in linguistic purism and in Greek superiority, and partly because Arabic authors were an obstacle—an obstacle to the humanists’ project of renewing Europe through Greece and Rome.The fact remains that Arabic traditions were attacked for being Arabic, that is, they were attacked on the basis of a cultural and linguistic labeling. Renaissance humanists are the inventors of cultural clichés that persist even today—that Arabic science amounts to plagiarism; that it is nothing more than Greek thought in Arabic garb; that Arabic scholars were mere transmitters of science from antiquity to medieval Europe; in other words, as Epicurus is said to have claimed, that “only the Greeks are able to philosophize.” This is the sad inheritance of the humanist polemics against Arabic science.It is one of the tasks of historical research to point out the historical falsity of clichés such as these, especially given that they survive even today. Many medieval and many Renaissance scholars knew better and were fully aware that Arabic scholars, too, are able to philosophize.