William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of Aristotle, Metaphysica, three leaves from a decorated manuscript on vellum [Italy, early fourteenth century]

3 leaves (a bifolium and a singleton), each 310mm. by 215mm., single column, 30 lines in black ink in a fine and professional university hand, capitals touched in red, paragraph marks alternately in red or blue, running titles in red “L[iber]” and “Phy[sica]” at head of each leaf, some early erasures and corrections, small flaws in vellum and occasional stains, else in fine condition

These leaves are from a notably large and fine copy of Aristotle, Metaphysica, in the Latin translation of William of Moerbeke (1215-68; Thorndike and Kibre, Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings, 1963, p.986), with text from the beginning of book V, the end of book VI, and book VII.

The translator was Flemish in origin (Moerbeke is a town near Geraardsbergen), and was a Dominican preacher who resided in the 1260s at the papal court of Viterbo. In 1277, he became the bishop of Corinth in Greece, a see established after the Fourth Crusade. He was a close associate of Thomas Aquinas while the latter was regent at the studium provinciale at the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome, and the present work is thought to have been written at Aquinas’ request. Aristotle was virtually unknown in the West at the turn of the thirteenth century, and what little was available in Latin had passed from Ancient Greek into Arabic, and then to Latin often via Moorish intermediaries in Spain, and there was anxiety that these multiple stages of translation had created a ‘Chinese whispers’ effect within the text. Moerbeke swept these aside, and primarily worked directly from the Greek, producing the standard translation of Aristotle known to the entire Middle Ages, on which scholastic theology and much of our modern ideas of science and logic were founded.