Annotating Aristotle’s Organon in the Byzantine Age: Some Remarks on the Manuscripts Princeton MS 173 and Leuven, FDWM 1

Abstract

In the Byzantine world, the activity of annotating the Organon – the collection of six treatises on logic written by Aristotle – was quite a customary practice in learning and teaching activities of educated people since logic was a constitutive part of the standard scholastic curriculum. Byzantine scribes and scholars used to fill the blank spaces in a manuscript with short glosses and excerpts mostly taken from pre-existing commentaries by Late Antique and Byzantine authors. Each manuscript that transmits Aristotle’s texts along with annotations reflects the scholarly activities carried out on those texts over centuries. The manuscript Princeton MS 173 of the Princeton University Library is analysed here as a case study. It was produced towards the end of the thirteenth century by a single scribe who copied Aristotle’s treatises as well as some commentaries on them placed in the margins. In the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the manuscript was in the possession of scholars who judiciously augmented the exegetical apparatus by inserting glosses and further commentaries. In the present paper, the exegetic activity on Posterior Analytics in this manuscript will be scrutinised and some exemplary passages from Book 2 selected. The interactions between this manuscript and another one now kept in Leuven (KU Leuven Libraries, Special Collections, FDWM 1) will be also investigated.