With this third instalment of the series, Pamela Robinson completes the project to catalogue the medieval manuscripts containing Latin Aristotelian commentaries preserved in Britain. While the first two volumes were published by Rodney Thomson in 2011 (Oxford) and 2013 (Cambridge), Robinson’s task was to describe 203 manuscripts and fragments preserved in the libraries outside the two main university centres. [1] About a third of them come from the British Library; no less than 36 other academic, ecclesiastical, or local libraries are also documented to have medieval Aristotelian writings in their holdings--a few among them preserve no more than one or two leaves of otherwise lost manuscripts. No attempt was made to survey the collections of private owners. [2]

In combination with the manuscripts from the libraries in Oxford and Cambridge that were presented in the previous volumes, the descriptions in this catalogue provide a broad overview of academic and intellectual life during the later Middle Ages, both at the universities and in monastic circles. Yet, the information is not strictly limited to the medieval period and to the British Isles: students liked to take their textbooks home from universities on the continent, which accounts for the presence of four fifteenth-century manuscripts from Leuven in the Aberdeen University Library, and of other codices that arrived from Paris or Cologne in various British collections. On the other hand, many manuscripts have no direct historical links with Britain, but they arrived there in the last two centuries after their acquisition by collectors or institutions. Three manuscripts in this catalogue even have a historical criminal record: Guglielmo Libro, a famous nineteenth-century book thief, is responsible for fleeing with them to Britain and selling them there.

The manuscripts’ descriptions are wonderfully detailed. The catalogue provides collations (which implies that each manuscript was examined on site, either by Robinson or by various scholars whose contributions are acknowledged in the preface), measurements, the opening words of the second folio (useful to potentially trace the manuscript’s history in older library inventories), information about provenance and former owners, and bibliography. The full content of each volume is listed, although incipits and explicits are only given for texts with an Aristotelian connection. Authors of the commentaries are identified where possible and keyed to Lohr’s inventory. [3] Indices of Aristotelian texts, of commentaries, and of commentary incipits, combined with a general index of names, make the wealth of information more user-friendly.

Cataloguing manuscripts is painstaking and meticulous work, especially if the aim is to provide detailed and comprehensive information for each item. Obviously, I did not have the intention to check every entry on the correctness of its codicological details. My personal research interest, however, made me compare the bibliographic sections of Robinson’s catalogue with the three volumes of Aristoteles Latinus Codices, [4] and Lohr’s “Aristotelica Britannica.” [5] From this admittedly random and very limited assessment I have had to conclude that Robinson is not consistent in referring to these two essential inventories. I was not able to discover the rationale why they are cited for some manuscripts and omitted for others. In a few cases where they are given, the page numbers are plainly incorrect. Obviously, this is not a fundamental flaw and it does not take away any value of the important work done by Robinson. Yet it might make cross-referencing with other catalogues somewhat more complicated.

Thomson’s and Robinson’s combined efforts have produced a splendid overview of Aristotelian scholarship with a British connection as it was preserved in medieval manuscripts. Obviously, the nature of printed catalogues is that they are static and therefore convenient to be cited in other publications. On the downside, it is impossible to introduce corrections or additions, which Rodney Thomson was able to supply as Addenda et corrigenda for his two prior volumes in this third and last part of the series (285-295). Yet, in the year since the publication of Robinson’s catalogue, more fragments have been inventoried and their details published. A quick search through the recently launched “Lost Manuscripts” database, which aims to build a unified catalogue of manuscript fragments in the British Isles, has yielded ten more medieval fragments of commentaries, five of them coming from libraries that Robinson does not mention as holding Aristotelian material. [6] In an ideal world, a series of printed catalogues like these deserves a second life in some digital form, freely accessible and easily searchable, with updates at regular intervals. Since that scenario is not likely to be realized in the short run, we have to be very grateful for the hard work that went into these attractively produced books.

--------

Notes

1. Appendix I (297-301) additionally contains 21 Latin Aristotle manuscripts without a commentary or notes, and Appendix II (302) lists four more that formerly were in British libraries.

2. In accordance with that decision, the Phillipps manuscripts are absent from Appendix II.

3. C.H. Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, 1: Medieval Authors, 2 vols. Firenze: SISMEL – Galluzzo, 2010-2013.

4. George Lacombe, Aleksander Birkenmajer, Marthe Dulong, Ezio Franceschini, Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus: codices. Vol. 1. Roma: Libreria dello Stato, 1939. Vol. 2. Cantabrigiae: Typis Academiae, 1955. Supplementa Altera. Bruges-Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961 (freely available at hiw.kuleuven.be/dwmc/al/DALE). Although Robinson refers to entries from the ‘Supplementa Altera’, that volume is missing from her bibliography.

5. Charles H. Lohr, “Aristotelica Britannica,” Theologie und Philosophie 53 (1978), 79-101.

6. “Lost Manuscripts,” www.lostmss.org.uk (Accessed 27 August 2021).