A total of eighty-nine manuscripts were added this week. As expected, the bulk are Pal.lat and Reg.lat, with Ross and Vat.lat the next two most popular fonds. There were two outlier fonds this week, three manuscripts, including a fragmentary Book of Hours and a catalogue of the Reg.lat library from Ott.lat and one manuscript from Chigiani, a stunning early 16th Spanish Breviary made for king Ferdinand. This week we have a special guest post on a manuscript perhaps less visually stunning than Chig.C.VII.205, but important to the transmission and translation history of Aristotle. The author is Pieter Beullens, who studies the history of the translation of philosophical and scientific works. It is followed by the bottom border image from Reg.lat.1882, f.11v, a copy of St. Augustine's City of God originally comissioned for the papal bursar.

William of Moerbeke(† 1286) worked as a translator during the second half of the 13th century. As his Latin versions of Aristotle were successful textbooks at the medieval universities, they were often assembled according to their topics. Pal. lat. 1033, an Italian manuscript from the 14th century, contains various works of natural philosophy.

William was later criticized by the humanists for following the Greek models too closely in Latin. But even they recognized the value of his work for the correction of the transmitted Greek text, since he often had access to precious old manuscripts that were afterwards lost.

In Pal. lat. 1033, the Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti († 1459) copied large sections of the Greek original next to the corresponding translations, see the right and bottom margins of f.1r, to the right. On ff.111r-112r, we find the Latin version of a short treatise on the annual flooding of the Nile. William’s Greek model is lost, and no other copy is known. Unfortunately, as Manetti was also unable to fill the margins with the Greek text, William’s Latin is our only access to this charming work from Antiquity.

Incidentally, that is equally the case for a few works on mathematics that William translated in 1269-1270. The autograph of those versions is also in the Vatican Library, hidden behind an incunable. Ott.lat.1850