A critical edition and study of any of the works of English scholars engaged in the early attempts to understand Aristotle is a most welcome addition to our knowledge of the activities at the early studium at Oxford. The latest contribution to the field is a critical edition (or better, three critical editions) by Julie Brumberg-Chaumont and Dominique Poirel of three versions of a commentary presented on one of the lesser known opuscula of Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence (De memoria et reminiscentia), published for The British Academy by Oxford University Press. As proper, the authors thank Silvia Donati for her permission to reproduce, without apparatus, the text of the versio vulgata of the Translatio vetus of the Aristotelian treatise, a text translated approximately a century earlier by James of Venice, and which exists currently only in an electronic version (xii).
At least one of the alleged commentators in this instance was Adam of Bockenfield (died between 1279 and 1292), his name a toponymic showing his birthplace as the Northumberland town by that name. We know that he studied at Oxford from a list (dated 1238) of those arrested in a riot at that university town, and it took an intervention by Robert Grosseteste, the powerful bishop of Lincoln, that Bockenfield be permitted to leave without being detained. By 1243 Adam bore the title “master,” continuing in the profession of the sacred scriptures as well as humane letters, and according to an Oxford colleague, Adam Marsh, was “worthy of commendation.” [1] In subsequent years, in fact, Bockenfield commented on all the treatises that constituted what scholars term the corpus vetustius of Aristotle, as well as three falsely ascribed works. One of the latter, the de plantis or vegetabilibus, has been recently edited and is now in print; in addition, a part of Adam’s commentary on Aristotle’sMetaphysics and an edition of his commentary on the De anima have seen the light of publication. Several of these writings have two or more recensions (as in the case under review here), so that twenty-two works in all have been issued under his name, either authentically or pseudonymously. In addition, the daunting number of manuscripts containing some or all of Adam’s commentaries--fifty-eight at latest count--testifies to the vogue these writings enjoyed, especially on the continent, where most of the copies today are found.
The fact that Bockenfield’s commentaries stopped being copied--virtually by the end of the thirteenth century--most probably indicates that the kind of glossing they represented, namely a literal exposition and analysis in the manner of Averroes’s middle commentaries, was by that time no longer fashionable. Famously, Albert the Great, who had the benefit of superior translations directly from the Greek, referred disparagingly to these earlier translators as “Latini.” In the middle decades of the century, however, and before the new translations of Aristotle began to make their appearance in the 1260s, Adam was by every measure the most influential among the English commentators on the Philosopher (so called, as if there were no other).
The introduction, co-written by the two editors, Drs. Brumberg-Chaumont and Poirel, presents three previously unpublished commentaries on Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia, the first in the Latin world, and tells the tale of a book that “in a subterranean way” became also a story of science and friendship, “inextricably intertwined” (ix). As the work progressed, “a secret goal” (ix) manifested itself, that is, to keep a kind of logbook of the edition to observe at first hand the way in which two people from diverse backgrounds collaborate: a philosopher novice in philology and a philologist novice in philosophy.
The authors then proceed to produce three separate texts or recensions, based on eleven different manuscripts in combinations of three for the first recension, five for the second, and three for the third. There is no attempt to prove that Adam might have been the author of all three versions, except for the fact that all of them are to be found in collections of other commentaries known to have been written by Adam. At any rate, the name of no other commentator is suggested.
Also unique in my experience is the inclusion of what scholars identify as a “critical introduction” to each of the three De memoria commentaries. In these dauntingly detailed studies, the editors undertake to account for the readings which are labeled “variant,” that is, the readings rejected by the editors as not authentic. At times, these explanations are not only specific, excluding only orthographic variants, but also quite lengthy, and they more than account for the editors’ claim that they have spent more than twenty years on the project. In other words, instead of the reader simply trusting the expertise of the editors to make the correct choice of readings, he or she is provided with a thorough justification for why the variants that were not chosen did not meet the bar of either correct grammar or reason or could be established as not being an authentic reflection of the author’s thought as manifest in the few editions that have already been published as critical editions.
It did occur to me, however, that this exhaustive exercise, bordering at times on the obsessive (a study of what remains a minor Aristotelian treatise, revisited as soon as superior translations from the original language were found, and running more than 400 pages), can in fact be most useful as a kind of textbook for a seminar in textual criticism. The beginning student of the discipline (as I envision it) would be treated to the art as well as the science of making the most reasonable (though of course never certain) of the textual choices that confront the scholar. As such, the teacher can view it as a pedagogical tool and in this context certainly of considerable value.
More time and attention in proof-reading the text, finally, might have led to the avoidance of a number of misspellings (e.g. O’Donnel for O’Donnell, pp. 42 & 397), inconsistent spellings (e.g. Silvia for Silva, p. 159, n. 428; not to mention the rather catholic spelling of Bockenfield, p. 2, n, 2; 33, n. 94; 43, n. 138, etc.) and omissions (e.g. for the name ‘Long’: omitted from pp. 39, n. 115; 42, n. 128; 61, n. 181; 62, n. 182; 193, n. 8--not n. 7; for the name ‘Judy’ no mention in the Index). I also would have expected a reference to the entry on Adam of Bockenfield in the DNB, who made his first appearance in that venerable reference work (The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, OUP, 2004), which is re-researched and re-published every century.
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Note:
1. Monumenta franciscana (Rolls series, 1858), 1:165.