Liber de pomo, o della morte di Aristotele. Edizione del volgarizzamento aretino (ms. Paris BNF It. 917), a cura di Marco Maggiore, premessa di Luca Serianni

The Liber de pomo is a Latin dialogue written in the second half of the 13th century, which narrates the death of Aristotle. This short text is preceded by an accompanying epistle in which Manfred of Hohenstaufen declares that he has translated the text from a Hebrew original into Latin for the first time. Although obviously apocryphal, as it is already indicated by Manfredi’s letter, the text circulated under the name of Aristotle, and was included almost immediately in the corpus of the Stagirite’s works. The success of the De pomo in medieval philosophical culture is shown by the large number of manuscript copies, over 120, as well as by its presence in scholastic florilegia like the Auctoritates Aristotelis. Also, the work was translated into various Romance languages: the oldest translation is an anonymous Tuscan volgarizzamento, until now unpublished, discovered by Fabio Zinelli in the manuscript Paris, BNF It. 917. Two other Romance translations of the De pomo, one Catalan and one Castilian, both anonymous and dating back to the 15th century, were published respectively by Jaume Riera i Sans (1981) and Francisco Bautista (2015). This book contains the first commented critical edition of the Old Aretino translation of the De pomo, an important document of the vernacular philosophical culture in Arezzo at the end of the thirteenth century. The cultural liveliness of this town is well known: besides being the seat of a university in the Middle Ages, Arezzo is the birth place of both Guittone, the main Tuscan poet before Dante, and Restoro, who wrote the vernacular scientific treatise La composizione del mondo colle sue cascioni (1282). The edition of the text is preceded by a critical introduction. Here we first reconstruct the history of the Latin text, which has been the subject of two critical editions (Marian Plezia, 1960; Paolo Mazzantini, 1964). A wide philological investigation, extended to the entire Latin manuscript tradition, aims to identify the version of the text used as a model by the Aretino translator. A linguistic survey is conducted on all the texts of the Paris codex, providing first-hand data for our knowledge of Old Aretino. The synoptic edition of the Tuscan volgarizzamento and its Latin model is completed by a selective glossary of about 140 entries, which documents the text’s rich lexicon.