Deinde, cum dicit... Text and its exposition in the late XIIIth cent. sententiae commentaries. The case of Fernand of Spain

Łukasz Tomanek

The sententiae commentaries, popular especially in the second half of the XIIIth cent. not only give us a deep insight into the commenting strategies of schoolmen from the period, but also cause a large number of problems for modern editors. Two of such commentaries composed by Fernand of Spain (fl. 1290) — one on De substantia orbis of Averroes, the second on Metaphysics of Aristotle — are an illustrative example of such problems which concern the way the authoritative texts are handled by the master. The primary difficulty we face in Fernand's works is that Aristotle's and Averroes' texts are incorporated into commentary and it is usually hard to distinguish the commentary from the text commented upon. The specific editing problems concerning each of Fernand's works might be enumerated as follows:

• How to mark the presence of the authoritative text in expositio (italics, parentheses)?
• While having a fragment close to the source, though with some variations and minor additions, which criteria should be adopted to decide whether it is commented text (its other lectio known by the author) or still a commentary?
• When there is no critical edition of the commented text, and also its early modern editions are full of omissions and do not correspond with the text in the commentary, what solution is preferable: to provide a provisional edition trying to choose up to ten from numerous manuscripts that seem to be close to the text used by the author, or to simply stick to the early modern edition known and used by scholars, yet containing the text that does not correspond with both text used in the commentary and texts from manuscripts dated to the XIIIth cent.?

These are the difficulties which I would like to present in my paper and I hope to discuss during the conference.