Pini's Edition of Scotus' Metaphysics

Giorgio Pini has published a critical edition from two manuscripts of a lost commentary on the Metaphysics by John Duns Scotus. I have not seen the text, so it has hard to tell from the publisher's blurb what it is like. But it sounds like a series of notes. It seems to correspond to cross references in Scotus' Quaestiones super Metaphysicam to a literal commentary. Anyway, here is the link to the publisher, and I have pasted the info below:

Corpus Christianorum

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 287)

Ioannes Duns Scotus
Notabilia super Metaphysicam 

G. Pini (ed.)

LXXII+256 p., 155 x 245 mm, 2017
ISBN: 978-2-503-57785-2
Languages: Latin, English
Hardback
The publication is available.
Retail price: EUR 190,00 excl. tax    

John Duns Scotus’s Notabilia super Metaphysicam comprises a series of remarks on Bks. II–X and XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The extant evidence points to their originally being either marginal notes on Duns Scotus’s own copy of the Metaphysics or scrapbook entries linked to the relevant portions of Aristotle’s text by caption letters. It appears that Duns Scotus kept adding to those notes in the course of his career.

The Notabilia offers a unique perspective on Duns Scotus’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It also contains several original insights on key philosophical issues.

This work disappeared from circulation at Duns Scotus’s death and was consequently thought to have been lost. Several cross-references to and from other writings by Duns Scotus demonstrate both that the Notabilia here edited for the first time is a genuine work by Duns Scotus and that it is his allegedly lost commentary on the Metaphysics.
The current edition is based on the two extant witnesses, manuscript M (Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, C 62 Sup., f. 51ra-98rb), which contains the text in its entirety, and manuscript V (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2182, f. 58vb-60ra), which contains Bks. II–IV in what is probably an older stage of the text.

Giorgio Pini (PhD, 1997) is professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, NY. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy) and was a visiting fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto), Katholieke Universities Leuven, and All Souls College (Oxford). He has published extensively on later medieval metaphysics and theory of cognition, with a particular focus on the thought of John Duns Scotus.

Final Volume of the Ordinatio Now Available!

The Vatican Commission has completed their edition of the Ordinatio. The final distinctions of book IV are now available from Quaracchi. But their website is broken. If you want to order, down load this  order form. For the first time that I have seen, we even have the option of ordering the volume in hardcopy!

Here is the publishers' information:

Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia studio et cura Commissionis Scotisticae ad fidem codicum edita, Tom. XIV (A. 114). - Ordinatio. Liber Quartus. Distinctiones 43-49, pp 441

 Città del Vaticano, 2013                  ISBN 978-88-7013-314-1

Medievalists get some Props!

Some words of praise and appreciation for editors of medieval philosophical texts, here.

Durandus Edition

A volume of the new Durandus de Sancto Porciano edition has been published, containing distinctions 1-5 of Book II. It retains for the surprisingly reasonable price of 69 euros.

Marenbon on Textual Editions

The following is from a flyer for the Auctores Britannici series from the British academy, via  Brunellus (but I can't remember where). It was written by John Marenbon

Scholarly editing

Bringing a work like Anselm’s or Wylton’s into the form of an

accessible, edited, printed text is an extraordinarily time-consuming

and skilled job. First, the manuscripts must be transcribed. Whilst

scribes in the earlier Middle Ages used an easily-readable form of

handwriting that was revived in the Renaissance and provided the

model for print, most medieval philosophical manuscripts are

written in difficult to decipher Gothic and late medieval scripts.

Since parchment and then paper was precious, the hands are often

tiny; and a complex system of abbreviations was used to save more

space. Only someone specially trained in the reading of medieval

handwriting, with an excellent command of Latin, and who also

fully understands the often highly technical discussions in the text

can set about the task. Usually, there will be more than one

manuscript, and often dozens. They are rarely authorial autographs,

and so the editor needs to collate and classify the manuscripts, so as

to reconstruct as well as possible the text the author intended. And

then, if the text is to be accessible and useful, the sources it uses and

references it makes must be sought out, a translation provided, and

an introduction written on the work’s context and contents.

Unfortunately, universities and funding bodies in Britain today seem

blind both to the fundamental value of such editions for scholarship

and to the extraordinary skills needed in those who make them. Any

genuine scholar of the Middle Ages, even one not personally

inclined to text-editing, recognises that, without new editions,

scholarship in the area is condemned to try to build without

foundations, and that editing a text is one of the supreme tests of a

medievalist’s training and ability. Yet officially far less credit is given

for the years of patient work required to produce a good edition than

to a few articles or a monograph that catch a fashionable theme and

will probably no longer be read in a few years – whereas a good

edition can still be useful a century later. It is a tribute to a certain

self-sacrificing integrity that so many scholars continue to come

forward to make available, through their painstaking work, more of

the philosophical heritage of medieval Britain – but sad that so few

of them have been trained or work in this country.

In the Forest of the Text

This post may be the most pedantic, obscure, and boring of all posts on this blog of arcana. Here I will ruminate upon a problem that has been perplexing me of late, as I draw near to completing my edition of Petrus Thomae’s Questiones de esse intelligibili. This is the matter of orthography of medieval texts. There are two schools, or extremes, on this issue, someone has taken every position in between them. On the one side we have the what me might call the purists, or perhaps their relativists; these scholars think that one should only edit a text that actually circulated, and do reproduce one manuscript exactly. One the other side we have the realist, or Platonic, school, which holds that we should repair the faulty manuscripts that have come down to us by comparing the readings they contain to those of other manuscripts. Of course, they are attempting to recreate the ideal form of the text, which is supposed to be that of the author. My own views, such as they are, are in the middle. I find medieval spellings (and general chaos) aesthetically pleasing comforting in an odd way, and the “standardized” or “classicized” or “modernized” editions come off as antiseptic, and too-clean for my taste. Not to mention, anti-medieval. The cold dead hands of the humanists refuse to stay in their Ciceronian coffins. With this in mind, observe the following quote from Rega Wood’s edition of Richard Rufus’ Physics-commentary (a highly controversial edition whose attribution to Richard Rufus is contested by all scholars of medieval Physics-commentaries).

Richard Rufus of Cornwall, In Physicam Aristotelis, ed. Wood, 76:

In the critical text itself, we do not reproduce the abbreviations, the punctuation, the capitalization, or the spelling. To do otherwise would be to make the edition inaccessible to modern students of philosophy and useful only to trained medievalists. Medieval spelling practice is never uniform and often unclear. So if we followed scribal practice, we might spell the same word differently on the same page, noting in the apparatus cases where the abbreviation employed made it imposible to determine what spelling was intended. Like manuscript abbreviation, capitalization, and punctuation, medieval spelling reflects scribal, rather than authorial, decisions. Retaining manuscript spelling would make it difficult for philosophers equipped with an ordinary Latin dictionary to get through the text; modernizing it makes the text accessible to people with minimal competence in Latin.

Now most of this is fair enough. It would be impossible to reproduce most of what she mentions, as no two manuscripts ever agree on such things. Such and edition would be unintelligible to everyone, medievalists included. I also take offense at the jab at medievalists. Sadly, we are mighty among historians, but to philosophers we are mere nichileitates. One might mention that medievalists are just about the only ones actually interested in medieval philosophy. But I digress. Wood’s comment that such phenomena represent scribal, not authorial, intention is difficult to swallow. After all, all medieval authors wrote in ... (wait for it...) medieval latin. And in the case of Thomas Aquinas we have autograph material, which does not follow classical orthography. The Leonine commission is currently re-editing all their previous editions and preserving the original spelling. But all Wood may mean is that the individual spelling on a particular folio (say, “ydea” followed two lines later by “idea”) is not the result of authorial intention. Fine. Let’s move on to the final remark. Wood thinks that the manuscript spelling would make it hard for philosophers with an ordinary latin dictionary to get through the text, while modernizing (that word again!) the text means that minimally competent people will be able to read it. I have two responses to this.

1. Is it really that hard? Does ydea/idea, preterea/praeterea, ydemptice/identice, nichil/nihil really cause hardship? The only areas it might be tricky are when you have words that could be adverbs or adjectives: “obiective” could be either “obiective” or “obiectivae”. But context surely could be your guide (otherwise, I suggest attendence at one of the yearly academic conferences devoted to the theme of “Text and Context: Interdisciplinary Textual Communities”).

2. Why should it be accessible to people who are only minimally competent at latin? I would think that someone who was actually interested in reading philosophy in latin would not remain minimally competent for long. And someone who did not care enough to polish their latin would probably just be mining the text for something to run through the logic machine. Furthermore, I for one would not want to read an article about a medieval argument by an author minimally competent at latin; what guarantee would there be that they had the argument right? So, in the end, I think editions, like philosophy, should offer a healthy amount of forbidding gloom to the casual wanderer; enough to tantalize with half-guessed wealth, but not given freely from the street corner.