Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
53 folios on paper, untrimmed with deckle edges, two watermarks, ff. 1-34v, unidentified letters(?), ff. 35-53v, balance in a circle, similar to Piccard Online 116808, Brescia 1473; 116818 Seefeld Tiro 1467; modern foliation in pencil top outer corner recto, (collation i12 ii10 iii12 iv10 v10 [-10, presumably cancelled blank]), no signatures, vertical catchwords quires 1-2, decorated horizontal catchword quire 4, frame ruled in lead, all full across, (justification 160-158 x 103-100 mm.), copied by at least two scribes in cursive gothic scripts with the second scribe beginning f. 32 (and perhaps a third scribe beginning on f. 47, in a much quicker, less controlled script) in two columns of 38-47 lines, spaces left blank for two- to three-line initials, red used for rubric, paraphs, and highlighting on f. 1 only, eight-line blank on f. 1, with simple initial added later, in very good condition, light damp stains and a few spots on the first leaves. EARLY BINDING, possibly CONTEMPORARY, of limp vellum, reusing a large leaf from a handsome twelfth-century Italian liturgical manuscript (a Missal?), traces of a paper label on spine. Dimensions 223 x 154-148 mm.
This large volume written in cursive on paper and housed in an early limp vellum combines two unedited and unpublished works on medieval philosophy. The first by Radulphus Brito, “the last of the great arts masters,” includes most of his important statements on universals. Extant in only twelve other manuscripts, this text is rare on the market (no texts by him are recorded for sale by the Schoenberg Database) and still lacks a complete modern critical edition. The second is an unidentified commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, here intriguingly attributed to the Franciscan writer, Franciscus de Mayronis, but unidentified among his known works.
1. Written in Italy in 1446, and completed on April 20; the scribe copied the date at the end of the second text on f. 52v, date “1466 ad 20 Ap.” Evidence of the script localizes this to Italy; watermark evidence is not conclusive but suggests an origin in Northern Italy. The scribe wrote the final explicit of the text in code, copying each word back to front.
2. Used (and owned) by Franciscans early in its history, and perhaps copied by a Franciscan student for his own use; fifteenth-century ownership note, two lines, added to the front cover (in reverse orientation, so it is now upside down): “Iste liber est[?]ad usum[?] fratris sanctis de <?>tertio minoris ordinis studium[?] esse ....” (A quick drawing of a face has been added below this inscription).
On the back cover there are six lines of text copied in an Italian hand, contemporary or slightly later, that appear to be the beginning of a letter. It is certainly also Franciscan; note the mention of the Dalmatian Province: “Ave Maria. Bernardini religioso fratri officio[?] <…> in conventu madoni[?] <…> honorande patri fratri Francisco palla<?>atii A<…>sis ordinis minoris in convent a<r?>lii provincie dalmatie guardia<?> di <…> fratri cordialissimo.”
3. Front cover, early modern inscription(?), “No 7. Questiones Britonis (?), Sec. XV”; f. 1, “7.”
4. Modern owners’ and dealers’ notes, f. 53v in pencil “GOV3/18DP; May EXP”; inside front cover, price in ink; fragment of a paper label with traces of letters in ink preserved on spine.
5. Private collection.
ff. 1-31v, Incipiunt questiones britonis dicte et acte super porphyrium, incipit, “Sicut dicit philosophus sexto metaphisice tres sunt partes principales scientie … quod accidens actitudinaliter semper est in subiecto actualiter autem non semper in est subiecto et ideo habet diffiniri per subiectum unum,” Expliciunt quaestiones britonis dicte et acte super porphirium;
Radulphus Brito, Questiones super Porphyrium; printed, Questiones subtilissime Magistri Rodulphi Britonis super arte verteri, ed. Franciscus de Maerata, Venice, Rubeus (Giovanni Rosso), 1499 (ISTC ir00240000). There is no modern critical edition of the complete text; the prooemium is edited in Ebbesen and Pinborg, 1981-1982, pp. 293-313; questiones 5-8 are edited in Pinporg, 1980, pp. 60-122.
The text is known in only twelve manuscripts besides this one; see Ebbesen and Pinborg, 1981-1982, pp. 274-277 and Pinborg, 1980, pp. 56-58. This text, and indeed, manuscripts of any of Brito’s works are extraordinarily rare on the market. There are only fourteen records in the Schoenberg Database for this author, all recording copies in institutional collections, and no sales records.
Radulphus Brito or Raoul le Breton (c. 1270-1320) was an important and influential teacher and writer at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century; important studies of his life include Courtenay, 2005 and Deuffic, 2002. Born around 1270 at Ploudiry in Bretagne, he was master of arts in Paris from c.1290; he obtained his doctorate in theology c.1312-1315. One modern writer has called him “the last of the great arts masters” (Ebbesen, 1999), and his most important contributions stem from his teaching in that faculty, including commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle, Priscian, Boethius, and, as we see in this manuscript, Porphyry. He is grouped with the medieval teachers who later became known as the modistae or modists (from their ideas of modes of signifying or modi significandi), speculative grammarians who considered grammar a science in Aristotle’s sense, teaching that language mirrors metaphysical reality and that one can deduce grammatical principles common to all languages.
Very few of his works are edited. Mora-Márquez and Costa summarize his importance as a thinker as follows: “Brito’s philosophical work is largely unexplored, even though it is a crucial link between the philosophical discussions of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Among other things, he richly contributed to the development of medieval logic and philosophy of language. In fact, one can fairly consider his logic of intentions to be the pinnacle of the development of thirteenth-century Aristotelian logic” (Online Resources, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
ff. 32-52v, incipit, “Cum sit necessarium grisarori etc. Ge[nus] <utrum?> ultime in multis[?] ad extra de pluribus predicabile …. [f. 50v], Accidens[?] est quod adest et abest. Queritur primo utrum ista discripito sit bona et utrum quod non primo illa descriptio non est bona…, [f. 52v], … et per genus totum …, amen. [written with each word reversed] Arclup et ailitbus edlav tnus et sinoryam ed icsicnarf sirotcod iimixe ailasrevinu tnuicilpxe (that is, Pulcra et subtilia valde sunt et mayronis de francisci doctoris eximii universalia expliciunt; [written normally:], 1466 ad 20 Ap.; [f. 53rv, blank].
Commentary on Porphyry, Isagoge, attributed here to Franciscus de Mayronis in the final rubric, “Here ends the universals, beautiful and very precise, by the excellent doctor Francis of Meyronnes,” which was copied by the scribe with each word written in reverse (so to decode it, one reads the word from right to left beginning with the final letter). That is, “pulcra” is written, “Arclup”, “subtilia” is “ailitbus,” and so forth. There is nothing “secret” recorded in this explicit, and why the scribe chose to write it in this curious fashion is a mystery. There is an earlier tradition of scribes recording their colophons, or parts of them, using a simple substitution code (see “Cracking a Medieval Code,” and “Anglo-Saxon Cryptography,” Online Resources), also for no apparent reason apart from the fact that they could.
Franciscus de Mayronis or Francis of Meyronnes (c.1285-c.1328), Franciscan philosopher and theologian, was a follower of Duns Scotus, known as the “doctor illuminatus.” He was the author of numerous works, both theological, including a commentary on the Sentences, Questiones quodlibeta, and sermons, and philosophical, including his Passus super Universalia et Predicamenta aristotelis et Perihermenias, a commentary on the Isagoge and the logical works of Aristotle (Franciscus Maioranis, Passus super universalia, praedicamenta, et perihermenias Aristotelis, ISTC No.im00088000, Bologna, Johannes Schriber, de Annunciata, 1 Apr. 1479). The relationship of the text in our manuscript, where short lemmata from the Isagoge head sections of the work, and the Passus super Universalia by Francis of Meyronnes, is not evident from an initial and very brief comparison of the texts, but further research is certainly called for. No independent commentary on the Isagoge by Francis, apart from the Passus is listed in Roth, 1936, pp. 65-68 and 173-179, in Roßmann, 1972, pp. 56-57, or in Lohr 1967, and this manuscript thus may contain a hitherto unknown and unstudied commentary on the Isagoge, perhaps by Franciscus de Mayronis or another author following in his footsteps.
The texts included in this manuscript would have been studied by students in the first stage of their university education, the faculty of arts. During the Middle Ages, far more people matriculated in this faculty, than did people who went on to study theology, law, or medicine (rather like today, in fact). The arts curriculum was based on the study of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).
Works by Aristotle were fundamental to the program of studies in the arts faculty. Aristotelian logic was the underpinning of dialectic, which served as a basic way of presenting information and of using logical argument to reach understanding, and students heard lectures on Aristotle’s texts, including works on ethics, physics, metaphysics, economics, and politics. Porphyry’s Isagoge, written in the fourth century, is, as its name indicates, an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories addressed to a pupil named Chrysaorius. It circulated in the West during the Middle Ages in a translation by Boethius and served as the standard introduction to logic in the schools, included in almost all extant manuscripts containing the corpus of works by Aristotle and Boethius known as the logica vetus (the Old Logic). Porphyry’s text provided essential introductions to concepts important to medieval philosophy, including the nature of genera and species and the question of universals.
The text on the Isagoge by Brito in our manuscript is a particular type of commentary, or perhaps a better word would be investigation, known as Questiones (Questions). A topic was presented by the master or teacher in the form of a question (often beginning with utrum or “whether”) to which two different responses were possible. The same teacher then presented negative and positive responses, and after carefully examining all the possibilities, would arrive at a final answer or determinatio. This form of debate was essential to medieval teaching and reserach, not only in the arts faculty, but also in the faculties attended by more advanced students, including theology.
Brito’s questiones on the Isagoge explore logic, including a discussion of what it is, its subject matter (second intentions), and a discussion of the ontological status of universals (a subject left unresolved by the Isagoge, but explored in a series of questions by Brito (see overview in Mora-Márquez, Ana María and Iacopo Costa Online Resources, and Pinborg, 1980). The content of the second commentary remains a subject for further research.
Radulphus Brito. Quaestiones Radulphi super artem veterem, Venetiis: per J. Rubeum et Albertinum fratres, c. 1499.
http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=inkunabeln/3-8-log-1&distype=thumbs)
Courtenay, W. J. “Radulphus Brito, master of arts and theology,” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Age Grec et Latin 76 (2005), pp. 131-158.
https://cimagl.saxo.ku.dk/download/76/76Courtenay131-158.pdf
Deuffic, J.-L. “Un logicien renommé, proviseur de Sorbonne au XIVe siècle: Raoul le Breton de Ploudiry. Notes bio-bibliographiques,” Pecia. Ressources en médiévistique 1 (2002), pp. 145-154.
Ebbesen, S. “Radulphus Brito. The last of the great arts masters. Or: Philosophy and Freedom,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 27 (1999), pp. 231-251.
Ebbesen, Sten and Jan Pinborg. “Gennadios and Western Scholasticism. Radulphus Brito’s Ars vetus in Greek Translation,” Classica et Medievalia 33 (1981-1982), pp. 263-319.
Franciscus Maioranis, Passus super universalia, praedicamenta, et perihermenias Aristotelis, Bologna, Johannes Schriber, de Annunciata, 1 Apr. 1479.
https://data.cerl.org/istc/im00088000; https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00066927?page=,1
Lohr, Charles H. “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors A-F,” Traditio 23 (1967), pp. 313–413.
Pinborg, J. “Radulphus Brito on Universals,” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Age Grec et Latin, 35, 1980, pp. 56-142 (ed. Quaestiones super librum Porphyrii, qq. 5–8, pp. 60-123).
https://cimagl.saxo.ku.dk/download/35/35Pindborg56-142.pdf
Robinson, Pamela R., Richard Gameson, and Rodney Malcolm Thomson. Catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts of Latin Commentaries on Aristotle in British Libraries, 3 volumes, Turnhout, 2011-2020.
Roßmann, H. “Die Quodlibeta und verschiedene sonstige Schriften des Franz von Meyronnes OFM,” Franziskanische Studien 54 (1972), pp. 1-76.
Roth, Bartholomäus. Franz von Mayronis O. F. M.; sein Leben, seine Werke, seine Lehre vom Formalunterschied in Gott, Werl in Westfalen, 1936.
Wilson, Gordon, ed. Radulphus Brito, Quaestiones super Priora Analytica Aristotelis, Louvain, 2016.
Peter Adamson, “Philosophy for the Young, Medieval Style,” Philosophy Now, Issue 129, 2018
https://philosophynow.org/issues/129/Philosophy_for_the_Young_Medieval_Style
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Porphyrii Isagoge translatio, ed. L. Minio-Paluello (Bruges-Paris 1966), Corpus scriptorum latinorum, A Digital Library of Latin Literature
http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/boethius/isag.html
“Cracking a Medieval Code,” March 23, 2018
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/03/cracking-a-medieval-code.html
“Anglo-Saxon Cryptography: Secret Writing in Early Medieval England,” May 15, 2017
https://thijsporck.com/2017/05/15/anglo-saxon-cryptography/
Incunable Short Title Catalogue
ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) (cerl.org)
ir00240000, listing 14 copies in 13 institutions (two in US)
Mora-Márquez, Ana María and Iacopo Costa, “Radulphus Brito,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/radulphus-brito/
Bert Roest and Maarten van der Heijden, “Franciscan Authors, 13th-18th Century: A Catalogue in Progress”
https://applejack.science.ru.nl/franciscanauthors/
Jean-Luc Solère, “Medieval Philosophy: Digital Resources” http://capricorn.bc.edu/siepm/
Zdeněk Uhlíř and Mark Vermeer, “Reading and debating at the Arts Faculties; University life in the Middle Ages,” February 2, 2022
https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/reading-and-debating-at-the-arts-faculties
TM 1308
