From sight to light : the passage from ancient to modern optics / A. Mark Smith.

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2015.

xi, 457 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The emergence of optics as a science : the Greek and early Greco-Roman background -- Ptolemy and the flowering of Greek optics -- Greco-Roman and early Arabic developments -- Alhacen and the grand synthesis -- Developments in the medieval Latin West -- The assimilation of perspectivist optics during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance -- The Keplerian turn and its technical background -- The seventeenth-century response.