Posted here is a working transcription from two manuscripts of the version of Michael Scot’s translation of Averroes’ long commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics that we call the “Versio circulans.” We call it the “Versio circulans” because it was available to Richard Rufus of Cornwall in Paris in the 1230’s and is found in many of the surviving manuscripts. This version differs both from Michael Scot’s original translation and from the Renaissance printed editions. For us it was important to get reasonably close to the translation Rufus was reading when he wrote his own commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. We provide it here mainly because it will allow scholars to check the footnotes of our edition of Rufus’ Scriptum in Metaphysicam Aristotelis. But we also think that this transcription of the eleven books linked below may serve as a more general resource for other scholars. We hope that some of them will perhaps be interested in going beyond the two manuscripts on which this transcription is based, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Arsenal 702 and Paris, BNF Lat. 6300, and researching further this “Versio circulans,” as reflected in manuscripts we have not collated or examined.

However, it is important to note that this transcription is not an edition and certainly not a critical edition of Michael Scot’s translation. That will be provided by Dag Nikolaus Hasse and Stefan Georges at the University of Würzburg.¹ Rather, our aim is simply to draw attention to some of the ways in which the text Rufus and some of his contemporaries had may have differed both from Michael Scot’s original and from the Venetian editions often consulted today.

Introduction
Book 1 (alpha elatton)
Book 2 (alpha meizon)
Book 3 (beta)
Book 4 (gamma)
Book 5 (delta)
Book 6 (epsilon)
Book 7 (zeta)
Book 8 (eta)
Book 9 (theta)
Book 10 (iota)
Book 11 (lambda)

As is well known, Averroes’ long commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, written in Arabic most likely in the 1190’s and translated into Latin by Michael Scot in the 1210’s or 1220’s, was fundamental to the Latin scholastic understanding of Aristotle. In the course of editing Rufus’ Scriptum, however, we became aware that his text of Averroes differed in some ways both from Michael Scot’s presumed original translation and from the 1562 Iuntina edition typically used by scholars today. What is more, it appears that Rufus’ version of the text was not that of a single idiosyncratic manuscript but rather part of a major branch of the Latin manuscript tradition of Averroes’ commentary.

Our attention was first drawn to the distinctive aspects of this manuscript tradition when we encountered this passage from the beginning of Rufus’ commentary on Alpha meizon, book 2 in the Arabic-Latin tradition:

Et dicit Commentator quod illud capitulum, quod quidem durat usque ad finem istius libri, non est de principali intentione. Et istud capitulum secundum Commentatorem non continuatur cum eo quod praecessit nec cum eo quod subsequitur. In illo tamen continentur expositiones quaedam primi tractatus.

Averroes in the 1562 Iuntina edition does not say anything that corresponds to this reference, but some manuscripts do have the following sentence at the end of Averroes’ commentary on Alpha elatton (book 1 in the Arabic-Latin tradition):

Quod huic sequitur usque inferius post septimum folium, post scilicet “Necesse est nobis” etc. [3.1.995a24], non est continuum cum eo quod praecedit vel quod sequitur, sed quod sequitur interrumpitur hic de expositionibus primi tractatus.

This sentence is distinctive of the “Versio circulans,” and its reference to the “seventh folio” appears unchanged regardless of the actual number of folios occupied by Alpha meizon in the given manuscript. That seems to indicate that it is a reader’s note mistakenly incorporated into the main text, not part of Averroes’ authentic commentary. Yet our review of twenty-one Latin manuscripts of Averroes’ commentary found it present in twelve of them. We chose manuscripts for ease of access, mostly online, not in an attempt at systematic evaluation. However, these twenty-one manuscripts represent over a third of the surviving manuscripts listed in Aristoteles Latinus: Codices and its supplements,² giving the results some claim to representativeness.³

In what follows, we compare the presence or absence of the “seventh folio” sentence and the accurate or garbled reproduction of the Latin name of Alpha meizon, “A maius,” with which the presumably authentic text of Averroes’ commentary on Alpha elatton ends: “et Aristoteles perscrutatus est de hoc in hoc libro et in alio libro qui dicitur A maius.” That remark immediately precedes the “seventh folio” sentence when the latter appears.

Four manuscripts identified as forming a distinct family in Gion Darms’ edition of Alpha elatton⁴ - Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 3467 (English, thirteenth to fourteenth century); Paris, BNF Lat. 6300 (possibly English or Italian, second half of the thirteenth century); Paris, BNF Lat. 14385 (probably Italian, second quarter of the thirteenth century); and Paris, BNF Lat. 16109 (thirteenth century) - have the “seventh folio” sentence (in BNF 16109 with the marginal comment “Ista littera non invenitur in aliis libris”) and report “A maius” more or less correctly. To this group we can add Paris, BNF Arsenal 702 (French, late thirteenth century), which garbles the book name but has the “seventh folio” sentence. Darms did not identify it as part of this group for book 1 (Alpha elatton), but Ruggero Ponzalli found it to be closely related to BNF Lat. 6300 and more loosely related to BNF Lat. 14385 for book 5 (Delta)⁵, and Bernhard Bürke found a similar close relationship to BNF Lat. 6300 and a looser one to BNF Lat. 16109 for book 9 (Theta)⁶.

Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 3467⁷

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arsenal 702⁸

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 6300⁹

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 14385¹⁰

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 16109¹¹

Another branch of the “Versio circulans” tradition appears to be represented by Avranches, Bibliothèque Municipale 220, not explicitly dated but thought to be one of the oldest surviving Latin manuscripts of Averroes’ commentary, possibly the oldest, from the early thirteenth century, and perhaps the work of an English scribe. Not closely related to the preceding group, according to Darms, it has the “seventh folio” sentence in the text but marked for deletion by vacat and garbles “A maius.”

Avranches, Bibliothèque Municipale 220¹²

Oxford, Balliol College 112¹³

Oxford, Balliol College 113¹⁴

Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Borgh. 306¹⁵

Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob. lat. 2215¹⁶

Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2081¹⁷

Finally, in Paris, BNF Lat. 16159 (possibly French or English, early fourteenth century), “A maius” is correct and the “seventh folio” sentence appears, but the “seventh folio” has become the “second folio” (secundum folium).

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 16159¹⁸

The “seventh folio” sentence is absent in what Darms, Bürke, and Ponzalli have identified as a distinct Northern Italian tradition¹⁹ that includes the oldest known dated Latin manuscript of Averroes’ commentary, Paris, BNF Lat. 15453, copied in 1243 in Milan, and extends through the editio princeps, printed in Padua in 1473,²⁰ as well as Paris, BNF Lat. 6504 (second half of the thirteenth century, possibly Bologna). The Venetian editions of 1552,²¹ 1560,²² and 1562,²³ not collated by Darms, Bürke, and Ponzalli, can also probably be added to this group, as their text in this passage is identical to that of the Paduan editio princeps except for a misguided attempt to correct Padua’s book name “Annalis” to the superficially more plausible “Analytica” or (as a marginal alternative reading) “Auditus naturalis.” Notably, this tradition has already in 1243 garbled the book name “A maius,” suggesting that its archetype cannot be automatically assumed to be closer to Michael Scot’s original than the archetype of the “seventh folio” tradition.

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 6504²⁴

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 15453²⁵ 

Possibly connected to this group are at least some members of another set of manuscripts that share the characteristics of a garbled book name and the absence of the “seventh folio” sentence.

Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 220 (Italian, fourteenth century)²⁶

Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2080 (French, thirteenth to fourteenth century)²⁷

Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. VI, 45 (mid-thirteenth century)²⁸

Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. Z. 248 (English, second half of the thirteenth century)²⁹

Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento di S. Francesco, Fondo antico della Biblioteca Communale 286 (Italian, thirteenth century)³⁰

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 16084 (possibly English, thirteenth century)³¹

Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 185 (English, second quarter of the thirteenth century)³²

What can we learn from all this? The limited information about the place of origin of many manuscripts and the uneven distribution of the sample make it impossible to draw definitive conclusions, but it is tempting to wonder whether the cluster of English manuscripts containing the “seventh folio” sentence might be traced back to a manuscript that Rufus brought with him from Paris to Oxford. Less speculatively, the “seventh folio” sentence seems to have been quite common, though certainly not universal, in French manuscripts and not unknown in Italian ones. And clearly, more than a few of Rufus’ contemporaries read Averroes in manuscripts that contained this sentence and would probably have seen nothing odd in his assertion about the Commentator’s views. Perhaps when the eagerly awaited critical edition of Michael Scot’s original translation by Dag Nikolaus Hasse and Stefan George is published, we will be in a better position to decide whether there is any significant difference in how Western scholastics understood Averroes depending on their manuscript resources.