Small fragment of a single leaf, trimmed at upper and outer edges and with one entire side and base of other side torn away, original text in double column of 41 remaining lines of a tiny and precise university hand, with frequent abbreviations, recovered from reuse in a later binding as a pastedown and hence with small stains and scuffs, torn edges, overall fair condition and mostly legible on both sides, 230 by 160mm
A leaf from the same parent manuscript was sold in our rooms, 29-30 September 2023, as lot 889. This is a rare witness to a complex and multi-layered text. Somewhere in the fourth century BC. the celebrated polymath Aristotle wrote his Nichomachean Ethics, on the science for the good of human life and its ultimate goal. Then in the first half of the twelfth century, in the circle of the Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena (1083-1153), a small number of Aristotelian scholars set about uniting and completing the previous partial commentaries of Aristotle's extant works. As part of this, the original author here, Michael of Ephesus, produced a commentary in Greek on books V, IX and X on the Nichomachean Ethics. A copy of the resulting compilation then reached the hands of the English scholastic philosopher Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253, bishop of Lincoln from 1235) in the last two decades of his life. Despite failing health and heavy work commitments, he thought the text important enough to translate into Latin in its entirety. Since 1973 to date, H. Paul F. Mercken has been engaged on its edition. He notes only twenty-two manuscripts and fragments, all in European institutional collections (pp. 53-4), and the Schoenberg database records no manuscript copies of these commentaries ever for sale, but does include a fifteenth-century witness to Grosseteste's translation of the Nichomachean Ethics by Les Enluminures in 2016
