GUGLIELMO DI MOERBEKE. - Flemish Dominican, b. ca. 1215, d. 1286. His name is linked to the Latin translations of Aristotle and his commentators, which he began in Nicaea and with which he effectively contributed to the knowledge, among Latins, of the true and integral Aristotelian thought. He was penitentiary and chaplain at the papal court after 1260; appointed archbishop of Corinth in 1278. The years spent at the papal curia, in close cultural relationship with St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, mark the period of his most fruitful activity as a translator. At the request of St. Thomas, he revised and corrected, on Greek manuscripts, the existing Greek-Latin Aristotelian versions and translated new works ex novo, with a rigorous fidelity that allows the reconstruction of the original Greek text, sometimes lost.
It is not currently possible to compile a definitive list of G.'s new translations and revisions: in many cases he moves from translator to mere reviser, in others he appears as reviser or author of versions hitherto considered independent of him. A typical case, hotly debated, is the "translatio Lincolnensis" of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which E. Franceschini recognized (1934) G.'s revision; recent (1947) is the attribution to G. (by L. Minio-Paluello) of the only medieval Latin version of Aristotle's Poetics. Scholars are, however, unanimous in assigning to G. the translation of Book XI (K) of the Metaphysics; of the first three books of the Meteorology; of Books III and IV of On the Heavens; of a large part of Books II of On Animals; of Books III-VIII of the Politics; of the Rhetoric. Also attributed to G. are the translations of the Commentaries (including the Aristotelian text) by Ammonius on the Peri Hermeneias, by Simplicius on the Categories and On the Heavens, by Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Meteorology and On Sense, by John Philoponus on Book III of On the Soul, by Themistius on On the Soul. Of particular philosophical and philological importance are his translations of Proclus: of the *Elementatio theologica*, of the Commentaries on the Parmenides and the Timaeus (partial), and of three opuscula whose original text is lost. He also translated works by Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, etc.