The Arabic Aristotle in Byzantine Constantinople

Abstract: This article documents our attempt, through primary and secondary source research, including French archival sources, to understand how a copy of Ibn Battuta's (d. 1369) Rihla manuscript, dictated to Ibn Juzayy (d. 1357) at the request of the Moroccan sultan in the 1400s, made its way from North Africa to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris during the 1800s. It also seeks to understand why there has been so little interest in the provenance of the Rihla manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Herein we describe and analyze the circumstances under which a French government functionary and Arabist, Jacques Denis-Delaporte, took an exemplar manuscript from North Africa during the early years of French colonization, and the many lives the text itself has had in the West.

Summary This paper examines the Demotic text of P. BnF 239, which is held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The text, written in the 2nd Century CE, contains several lists of wine deliveries that were likely brought to a temple in Thebes as payments in kind. The verso of the papyrus was reused for a Hieratic version of a Document of Breathing, a funerary composition that is typical of the Theban area.

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ‘ Phénoménologie et psychologie’ (‘Phenomenology and Psychology’). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to ‘The Notion of the “World” in Phenomenology’, written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault’s distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language.

This paper provides the first critical edition of two Greek lexica on accentuation and vowel quantity, recently discovered in a fourteenth-century manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. I shall argue that one of the main sources for the first lexicon (on accentuation) was the περὶ Ἀττικῆς προσῳδίας of the first-century BCE grammarian Trypho. As Trypho's work now survives only in fragments, this lexicon allows us to deepen our understanding and knowledge of his handbook. Additionally, some ancient fragments transmitted by these lexica are published here for the first time: one is attributed to the fifth-century BCE poet Eupolis, one to the famous Alexandrian grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (but it perhaps belongs to Demetrius Ixion (second century BCE) instead), four to Aristarchus of Samothrace (216–144 BCE) and one to the first-century BCE grammarian Seleucus (although this attribution is debatable: it overlaps with an already-known fragment attributed to Aristocles of Rhodes).

This study contributes to the history of paper in Central Asia during the first millennium C.E. and aims to create a typology of paper based on a systematic study of Chinese manuscript collections found along the Silk Roads. The further aspect of this study aims to improve our knowledge of archaeometric research considered with the revision and test of scientific methodology which can then be used for historical and philological scholarship. By using fibre analysis and the technological study of paper combined with codicological and textual information, research has aimed to explore the possibilities for dating these materials, and fingerprinting their places of origin. The fact that many of Chinese manuscripts being studied (which are the oldest preserved and dated artefacts from Central Asia) are fixed in time by dates mentioned in colophons makes them valuable and reliable references for building a typology of paper and for comparative study of any yet to be discovered papers from that region. A sample of studied manuscripts comprises a total of 182 Chinese manuscripts selected from the Dunhuang Collection in the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (BnF), the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, and the Turfan collection in the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) and the Berlin State Library (StaBi).

The paper is an attempt to systematize the liturgical books copied by the Cistercian brother Feliks Trzciński (d. 1649) in the monastery in Pelplin. Until now, four volumes written by his hand are known: two graduals: L 14 (1625) and L 12 (undated) as well as two antiphonaries: L 16 (1643) and L 4 (1648). In 2020, the author identified in the Bibliothčque nationale de France in Paris another manuscript (RES 2239) written by F. Trzciński in 1635, probably for the monastery of the Brigittine Sisters. In the manuscript a colophone has been preserved (f. 127v), and it confirms the authorship of F. Trzciński. In the last written book (antiphonary L 4) brother Trzcinski wrote: „opus 7”. It confirms that two volumes have not yet been identified.

The well-known Tibetan document P.T. 1283 is a unique historical source that contains significant information about mid-8th century Central Asia. Discovered at Dunhuang 敦煌 in 1908, P.T. 1283 is kept today in the collection Pelliot tibétain at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. One side of the document is in Chinese and the other side contains two different Tibetan texts. The title of the second Tibetan text, Byang phyogs na rgyal po du bzhugs pa'i rabs gyi yi geo (BNP), was translated into English by Venturi as Text on the sequence of however many kings live in the north, containing several myths belonging to the Türk (Tujue 突厥, Göktürks) and Kyrgyz. In conclusion, the Turkic myths narrated in P.T. 1283 are reflections of a very large collection of Central Asian folk beliefs, exemplified in numerous historical sources.

The well-known Tibetan document P.T. 1283 is a unique historical source that contains significant information about mid-8th century Central Asia. Discovered at Dunhuang 敦煌 in 1908, P.T. 1283 is kept today in the collection Pelliot tibétain at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. One side of the document is in Chinese and the other side contains two different Tibetan texts. The title of the second Tibetan text, Byang phyogs na rgyal po du bzhugs pa'i rabs gyi yi geo (BNP), was translated into English by Venturi as Text on the sequence of however many kings live in the north, containing several myths belonging to the Türk (Tujue 突厥, Göktürks) and Kyrgyz. In conclusion, the Turkic myths narrated in P.T. 1283 are reflections of a very large collection of Central Asian folk beliefs, exemplified in numerous historical sources.

This article analyses the late fifteenth-century booklist on folios 78r to 82v of Manuscript français 2912 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, listing over 267 books in French. A close study of the material aspects of the document itself and of the texts listed in the inventory has allowed for a new dating of the booklist, to shortly after 1494, and for a fairly reliable hypothesis concerning the owner of the books: a bookseller specialising in second-hand books in French. The geographical indication in the booklist, «In Tours in front of the hôtel [town house] of monseigneur de Dunois», can be located in the town on the basis of historical maps: in the Grand Rue (now the rue Colbert) against the southern wall of the church of Saint-Julien or next to its southern and main entrance. Comparison with other book producers and booksellers in Paris and in Flanders shows that this is a typical location. The names and locations of booksellers and artisans active in the production of books in Tours as contained in the notarial archives of the town have unfortunately not permitted an identification of the bookseller, although the printer Simon Pourcelet had his printing workshop and bookshop nearby. Documented lending activities of booksellers in Flanders and the open character of other late medieval libraries and book collections show that this remarkably rich collection of literary, historical, pragmatic, and religious books in French was most likely an open access hub for reading in the vernacular in the bustling heart of late medieval Tours.

The original manuscript of Casanova's Memoirs is stored at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. We have gained access to it and explored the surfaces of chapters one and two (via the ethylene vinyl acetate [EVA] film technology, i.e., of diskettes of ethylene vinyl acetate with embedded strong cation and anion exchangers and C8 resins) in search of potential diseases of the author, especially of the gonorrhea bacterium, since Casanova reported that he had several bouts of this pathology along his adventurous life. Although the bacterium was not found, we have detected high levels of HgS as red spots along the lines of the manuscript, suggesting that Casanova was using this chemical as a cure for his venereal disease. Additionally, among the several bacteria identified on the surface via mass spectrometry, we could detect traces of Streptococcus uberis, a typical animal infection, found also in humans, together with a few strains of Lactobacilli, probably present in his saliva. The EVA film technology appears to open new horizons for investigating the world Cultural Heritage.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (BnF, MS Latin 5184) holds a fragment of the ‘Manipulus florum’ of Galvanus Flamma. This copy of a milanese urban chronical dates back to 1340. In addition to a modified version of the text, it contains 118 geometrical schemata covered in text. The article focuses mainly on the circular representations of the city and – while exploring their variety – discusses the semantic field of these diagrams.

Aontia: an ancient toponym from the Aragon mapsThe Aragon geographical maps represent the territory of the ancient Kingdom of Naples. they date back to the second half of the fifteenth century, probably some of them or some copies were subsequently modified or updated. These ancient maps were rediscovered about thirty years ago in the State Archives of Naples and in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and they have been under study for some years. They are unfortunately still little used in the scientific field, although several contributions have demonstrated their validity as an investigation tool thanks to their undoubted information potential. In fact, thanks to the very high degree of characterization of these maps it is possible to advance hypotheses and considerations of a historical-archaeological nature of the territories they represent. It is often toponymic analysis that offers insights and guides the early stages of research: toponyms relating to natural and anthropic elements inform about landscapes rich of medieval and classical references. The case study proposed here relates to the toponym Aontia, located on the Aragon maps near the centers of the Basilicata of Cirigliano and Gorgoglione. It is a place currently unidentified and not attested in any medieval or modern source; its toponym may refer to some references relating to an epithet of the well-known Greek divinity Artemis and to the presence of a sanctuary dedicated to it or to an ancient settlement. Starting from the analysis of the toponym Aontia, a localization proposal will be carried out based on the etymological and historical study, on the topographic survey and on the remote sensing analysis.

The library of the White Monastery, founded during the 4th century by Apa Pegol, an uncle of Shenoute, went through an outstanding period in the centuries that followed its creation. During the 14th century, however, the Arab occupation and the Mamluk attacks sounded the death knell for this bastion of Christian culture in Egypt. The manuscripts it contained were stored, under circumstances that still remain obscure, in hidden rooms from which they were only rescued after several centuries. In 1778 Cardinal Borgia purchased, without knowing their exact origin, a portion of more than 2,300 pages and fragments, today preserved in the libraries of Naples and Rome. For about fifty years a number of libraries of the world were able to purchase important collections of manuscripts without being able to determine their origin. This source seemed to have dried up until Gaston Maspero, in 1882 purchased from a dealer of Cairo some very beautiful pages that he bought for the Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire (IFAO). Among these pages were some whose writing was clearly evocative of those bought in the past by Cardinal Borgia. As a result, the origin of all these manuscripts acquired earlier was established. Analysis of letters received by Gaston Maspero, currently preserved in the Institut de France in Paris, has shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the discovery of these manuscripts by Maspero, and in particular their acquisition by the Bibliothéque nationale de France. This chapter attempts to summarize this history as it is described in this correspondence.

French Jesuit Joseph Prémare, a missionary to Qing Dynasty China, had completed by the end of 1728 the draft of a book entitled Notitia linguæ sinicæ, intended to assist aspiring Catholic missionaries from Europe in learning the Chinese language. One of the original manuscripts sent from Canton to Paris, now held in the Bibliothæque nationale de France in Paris, was rediscovered in the 1810s by the French sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, and became the source for some manuscript copies, made mostly before the work’s eventual publication in 1831. This paper examines two of these manuscript copies dated between 1825 and 1830, held respectively in the Archive of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, both important in their own ways, and both somewhat misunderstood and largely neglected by recent studies.

In 1956 Alain Resnais opened his film-essay Toute la mémoire du monde with the statement that owing to the short-lived nature of human remembering, people tend to accumulate countless auxiliary memories. The issue of “auxiliary memories” related to the search for one’s own identity is an ostinato theme of Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz where the titles and certain motifs articulated in three films by Resnais are appropriated in order to depict the twentieth century in terms of the uncanny. It was not by chance that a Jewish boy named Jacques Austerlitz, before he was sent from Prague in England by the last Kindertransport, and his mother to Theresienstadt, spent his last summer with the parents in Marienbad, a place to which he would return many years later and become haunted by something unknown. In Sebald’s narrative tissue such reference to L’Année dernier á Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) rhizomatically lead to 1955 Resnais’s film-essay Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), as well as to the psychoanalytic notion of the originally lost object. But, in the novel, Resnais is explicitly mentioned only once, in Austerlitz’s remembrance of the scene from Toute la mémoire du monde as fantastic and monstrous owing to footage of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris that shows the transportation of notes from reading room to storage. The performative of Sebald’s “monstrosity” is through narrative transversal related to the erasure of historical (holocaust) memory: the new library—erected on a site where Nazis had stored Jewish property which they had stolen during the Second World War—was, following a 1988 decision by the French president, to be the most modern and biggest library building in the world.