Lot 3

Aristotle, Physica, in Latin, single leaf from a decorated manuscript on vellum

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

single leaf, 85mm. by 211mm., written space 120mm. by 219mm., 30 lines in brown ink in two sizes of a single early Gothic bookhand, three tables within the text and two substantial marginal comments, one large 2-line simple initial in red (opening book 7 of the work), recovered from a binding and hence a little defective with some staining to verso, a small hole (with loss of only 3 letters on verso and none on recto), and slight trimming to inner vertical edge of leaf removing the last letters of each line of the commentary, else in good condition

Catalogue Note

text

This is one of the key texts in the philosophy of Aristotle. It acts as a preliminary to the long series of Aristotle's physical, cosmological and biological works, and contains a series of lessons dealing with theoretical, methodological and philosophical concerns, and setting the bases for the scientist to study the world subject to change. The present text is the earliest known medieval translation of the work from Greek into Latin, by the early twelfth-century scholar Jacobus de Venetia, who also translated Aristotle's De anima, Metaphysica and parts of the Parva naturalia. All these texts were translated anew, some six centuries after Boethius' work, for a Western European milieu with a blossoming interest in science and philosophy.

The present leaf contains book 6, chap. 10 to book 7, chap. 1 (edited by F. Bossier and J. Brams, Aristoteles Latinus VII, 1-2 (1990), pp. 255-60), and is from the same manuscript as that in Quaritch Catalogue 1147 (1991), item 100, also recovered from a book-binding, and subsequently Schøyen MS.652. They are extremely early witnesses to the text, produced only decades after Jacobus completed his work (c. 1128). G. Lacombe, Aristoteles Latinus (1939 & 1959), records approximately 130 extant manuscripts of this translation of the text, but of these only one twelfth-century complete manuscript survives, Avranches, Bib. mun. ms. 221, from Mont-Saint-Michel. The Avranches manuscript is the only other witness to include line-drawings and the text above them, and the present manuscript may be a direct descendant of the Avranches copy, or both may share a common ancestor (perhaps the translator's autograph).

The present leaf contains part of a twelfth-century commentary in the lower margins of the verso; no other commentaries to the Physica exist before the mid-thirteenth century.