William of Moerbeke

WILLIAM OF MOERBEKE. - Flemish Dominican, b. ca. 1215, d. 1286. His name is linked to the Latin translations of Aristotle and his commentators, which he began at Thebes and Nicaea and with which he contributed effectively to the knowledge, among the Latins, of the true and integral Aristotelian thought. He was penitentiary and chaplain at the pontifical Court after 1260; appointed archbishop of Corinth in 1278. The years spent at the pontifical Curia, in close cultural contact with St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, mark the period of his most fruitful activity as a translator. At the commission of St. Thomas he revised and corrected, on the basis of the Greek manuscripts, the existing Greek-Latin Aristotelian versions and translated other works anew, with a rigorous fidelity that makes it possible to reconstruct the original Greek text, at times lost.

A definitive list of G.'s translations anew and of his revisions is not currently possible: in many cases he recedes from translator to simple reviser, in others he turns out to be the reviser or author of versions hitherto held to be independent of him. Typical is the case, much debated, of the «translatio Lincolniensis» of the Ethica Nicomachea, in which E. Franceschini recognized (1934) G.'s revision; recent (1947) is the attribution to G. (made by L. Minio-Paluello) of the only medieval Latin version of Aristotle's Poetica. Scholars are nevertheless agreed in assigning to G. the version of book XI (K) of Aristotle's Metaphysica; of the first three books of the Meteora; of books III and IV of the De coelo; of a good part of the 21 books of the De animalibus; of books III-VIII of the Politica; of the Rhetorica. Also attributable to G. is the version of the Commentaries (including the Aristotelian text) of Ammonius on the Perihermenias, of Simplicius on the Predicamenta and the De coelo, of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Meteora and the De sensu, of John Philoponus on book III of the De anima, of Themistius on the De anima. Of particular importance, philosophical and philological, are his versions of Proclus: of the Στοιχείωσις θεολογική (Elementatio theologica), of the Commentaries on the Parmenides and the Timaeus (partial) and of three opuscules whose original text is lost. He also translated works of Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, etc.

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