Sources

According to the preliminary results of our survey, the manuscript tradition of the Logic section of the “Shifāʾ” counts at least 207 manuscript witnesses. These copies were produced over a period of about eight centuries (from the 6th/12th to the 14th/20th century) and were disseminated throughout the areas under Islamic influence, from Al-Andalus to India. Figure 2 shows the current global distribution and concentration of these witnesses, most of which appear to be concentrated in libraries in Iran (97 manuscripts, 46.9%), Turkey (34 mss, 16.4%), and India (27 mss, 13%). This corpus forms a stream of knowledge from the 6th/12th century until 1924-5, year of the copy recorded in the colophon of the most recent dated manuscript of the work. A mere 27 years separate the last handwritten copy of the work from the appearance of the first printed volume in 1952.

The colophons of the manuscripts we have inspected so far have provided a fair amount of data regarding the places where the text was copied – both in terms of geographic locations and the institutions involved – and the individuals responsible for the production of the copies (namely, copyists and patrons).

So far, we are aware of at least 19 mentions of cities and regions as well as 6 mentions of schools in which copies of the “Shifāʾ” were produced and studied over eight centuries.

The locations that we have been able to identify of where copies were made are marked with black dots in the map in Figure 3.

Through the analysis of this extensive manuscript tradition, we aim to trace a history of the circulation of Avicennian logic, drawing in particular on the study of various types of paratexts that provide information about the contexts of production and transmission.

Such paratexts include colophons, ownership statements, owners’ seals, certificates of authorisation to teach the text ("ijāzāt"), certificates of audition ("samāʿāt"), certificates of reading ("qirāʾāt"), study notes ("muṭālaʿāt"), and other codicological features that allow for a contextualisation of the manuscripts’ production.

The corpus also contains marginal commentaries that have so far remained largely unexplored (see, for example, Figure 4).

Our research on the analysis of the content of these marginal apparatuses and on the identification of the philosophers responsible for them is currently focused on a selection of twenty-two manuscripts (highlighted in bold in the Catalogue provided below).

This selection – already expanded from an initial set of twenty manuscripts – remains open and is likely to be further enlarged as the research progresses and additional witnesses are identified.