Previously Unpublished Works of Roger Bacon, Fascicle 11: Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics and On Plants

as a text-book in twelfth-century universities—the Infortiatum A specific section of the Digest, part of the monumental collection of Roman law commissioned by Emperor Justinian I. begins in the middle of a book of the Digest original: "Digestum", and the Three Parts original: "Tres Partes," a division of the legal Digest used in medieval universities. in the middle of a paragraph, yet each is a separate text-book, the subject of a distinct course of lectures.

It is difficult to assign a date to this version, which is a true word-for-word original: "verbum in verbo" translation (almost the only one known), and so is not from the hand of Boethius An influential 6th-century philosopher whose translations of Aristotle's logic served as the foundation for medieval scholarship., to whom it was probably assigned on the strength of the Greek words and phrases, interspersed as was his custom in his translations of Aristotle. These fragments of Greek are printed here as they appear in the normal text of Aristotle; in our manuscript they are so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable, as the facsimile on p. 330 will show. This distortion presupposes a succession of copyings by writers unacquainted with Greek—experiment would suggest five or six—the original form of the letters suggesting an eleventh or twelfth century Greek original. The fact that the late edited manuscript B at Brussels has a distorted Greek word in the text, not found in the two earliest manuscripts, points to the conclusion that the source from which B was composed in the thirteenth century was similar to but not identical with the text here printed. In most manuscripts of the Old Metaphysics original: "Metaphysica Vetus" the Greek quotations are represented by the letters G G. or omitted altogether.

The paucity of early manuscripts may be connected with the repeated condemnations of Aristotle and his Commentators in the early years of the thirteenth century, and the remarkable differences between our manuscripts and all other known copies of the Old Metaphysics may perhaps be attributed to the decree of Gregory IX in 1231, permitting its use after it had been duly corrected in accordance with the faith. These differences occur mainly in the first and second books and are not due to comparison with the Arabic-Latin version; they may be due to another Greek-Latin version which has recently been identified and named the Middle Metaphysics original: "Metaphysica Media". We have no manuscript of this edited form of the Old Metaphysics earlier than the end of the thirteenth century, but after that they are relatively common. A study of some of them has been made by Professor Pelster (Commemorative Publication original: "Festgabe"...