Buridan's Questions on the Physiognomy Ascribed to Aristotle

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SOME mention of Jean Buridan's Questiones based upon the Physiognomy, which in the middle ages was attributed to Aristotle, might well have been included in the third volume on the fourteenth century of my History of Magic and Experimental Science.' In September, 1929, with this end in view, I took notes upon a manuscript of Buridan's commentary at Oxford, but somehow these notes were side-tracked and lost sight of until now. Born at Bethune and rector of the university of Paris, Buridan was one of the leading schoolmen and commentators on Aristotle of the fourteenth century, while Duhem made much of him as a precursor of Galileo and modern dynamics.2 We now consider his activity in a borderland between biology and divination. The Greek treatise on physiognomy ascribed to Aristotle is now believed to be spurious, but was generally accepted by the mediaeval schoolmen as genuine. For the sake of brevity and convenience we shall refer to it as the Physiognomy of Aristotle. It seems to have been translated into Latin only at a rather late date, that is, by Bartholomew of Messina for Manfred, the natural son of Frederick II, between the years 1258 and 1266.3 Before this the Latin West had been familiarized with the subject itself through the Phisionomia which Michael Scot had addressed to Frederick II. This work, which held its own during the later middle ages, ran through some eighteen printed editions between 1477 and 1660, nor was the edition of that date the last. Three manuscripts of Buridan's commentary on the physiognomy are known to me: one that which I examined in 1929 at the Bodleian library in the collection which formerly belonged to the abbot Canonicus of Venice, the other two which I have not seen in the Amplonian collection at the Stadtbuicherei in Erfurt. In the first manuscript4 which is a paper folio of the fifteenth century written in double columns Buridan's commentary is preceded by the commentary of