ASTRONOMY IN ISLAM Islamic Astronomy and Geography. David A. King (Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS1009; AshgatePublishing, Franham, Surrey, 2012). Pp. xlii + 376. £90. ISBN 978-1-4094-4201-1.The papers reprinted in this welcome addition to the series of three previous collections of David King's papers further witness to the breadth and depth of his researches on medieval Islamic astronomy, as well as the extent to which that discipline was responsive to the concerns of Islamic religion and culture.King has divided the papers into five groups, the first of which (General) begins with a 1996 overview of problems and achievements in Islamic astronomy. The two following papers deal with Islamic astronomical instruments (2004) and illustrations in astronomical manuscripts (1995). In the former, inscriptions to context, King related a number of cases in which physical features (such as inscription) and (sometimes) separate treatises have given us information about the purpose of these instruments and the context in which they were produced. One such instrument is an astrolabe the design of whose rete and stars displayed thereon are identical with that of the sole surviving Byzantine astrolabe. It predates all known early Islamic astrolabes; the inscriptions tell us that the instrument was reworked (and slightly muddled) by an Ottoman craftsman almost a thousand years after it was made. In the past decades instruments and illustrations in scientific works have received careful scholarly attention and King has been a leading contributor to the study of both.The second section, Regional studies, treats astronomy in Fatimid and Mamluk Egypt, as well as astronomy in the medieval Maghrib. The treatment of astronomy in the medieval Maghrib has received much attention in past decades, as King points out, thanks to the efforts of the Barcelona school under the leadership of Julio Samso. However King has to be considered the principal authority on mathematics in Fatimid and Mamluk Egypt, and his paper, Aspects of Fatimid astronomy: From hard-core mathematical astronomy to architectural orientations in Cairo, connects, as do so many of his works, the exact sciences in Islam with the wider context of Islamic culture. In this case King shows how the effects of the work of the great Cairene astronomer, Ibn Yunus (d. 1009), and his successors were felt for centuries in such seemingly unlikely matters as the orientation of ventilators in Cairo.Much of King's work has been devoted to the study of astronomical tables, and the third section of this book, Mathematical astrology, contains one paper, tracing the Arabic tradition of two tables by the second-century Antiochian astronomer Vettius Valens. These tables ostensibly predicted a person's length of life based on the longitude of the ecliptic rising at the moment of birth, subject to the bound determined by half the maximum length of daylight at the place of birth. Although such use of exact science may seem nonsensical to a scientific 'modem' it seems appropriate to modify a remark that King makes in a later paper (VIII, p. …