Commentaries on Aristotle

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Oversize LJS 453. Germany?, 1446. 15th-century copies of 13th- and 14th-century Hebrew translations of 12th-century commentaries by Averroës on scientific works attributed to Aristotle (De caelo, De mundo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica) and a Hebrew translation of Aristotle's Book 9 of Historia animalium, with frequent marginal notes, some of which show signs of trimming (f. 182r). The end of the volume, with a different scribe and different readers, may have been bound with the rest at some later date; it includes a Hebrew translation of Aristotle's De somno et vigilia, Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary on the Song of Solomon, and a Hebrew translation of Maimonides' letter to the Jews of Yemen. The letter of Maimonides has marginal notes in Latin by a reader comparing a few leaves of the manuscript to a printed version of the text (f. 261r-263r) and a concluding note in a combination of Hebrew and Latin (f. 269v), by the same hand that converted dates in the main section of the manuscript to the Gregorian calendar (f. 84v, 162r, 250v). Penn Libraries Catalog: go to Find