GUGLIELMO di MOERBEKE. — Flemish Dominican, born ca. 1215, died in 1286. His name is associated with the Latin translations of Aristotle and his commentators, which he began at Thebes and Nicaea and through which he made an effective contribution to the Latins’ knowledge of the true and complete Aristotelian thought. He was a penitentiary and chaplain at the papal Court after 1260; he was appointed archbishop of Corinth in 1278. The years he spent at the papal Curia, in close cultural relations with St. Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics, mark the period of his most fruitful activity as a translator. At St. Thomas’s request, he revised and corrected, on the basis of Greek manuscripts, the already existing Greek-Latin Aristotelian versions and translated other works ex novo, with a rigorous fidelity that makes it possible to reconstruct the original Greek text, at times now lost.
A definitive list of G.’s translations ex novo and revisions is not currently possible: in many cases he retreats from the role of translator to that of simple reviser, while in others he proves to be the reviser or author of versions hitherto considered independent of him. A typical and much-debated case is that of the «translatio Lincolniensis» of the Ethica Nicomachea, in which E. Franceschini recognized (1934) G.’s revision; more recently (1947), L. Minio-Paluello attributed to G. the sole medieval Latin version of Aristotle’s Poetica. Scholars nevertheless agree in assigning to G. the version of bk. XI (K) of Aristotle’s Metaphysica; of the first three books of the Meteora; of bks. III and IV of the De coelo; of a large part of the 21 books of the De animalibus; of bks. III–VIII of the Politica; and of the Rhetorica. G. is also responsible for the version of Ammonius’s Commentaries (including the Aristotelian text) on the Perihermenias, of Simplicius’s on the Predicamenta and De coelo, of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s on the Meteora and De sensu, of John Philoponus’s on bk. III of the De anima, and of Themistius’s on the De anima. His versions of Proclus are of particular philosophical and philological importance: the Στοχεδιαος θεολογικῆς (Elementatio theologica), the Commentaries on the Parmenide and the Timaeus (partial), and three short works whose original text has been lost. He also translated works by Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, etc.