This volume, ASL 5.1a History of Animals, contains the edition of books I to III, together with Introduction and Notes, of Michael Scot’s Arabo-Latin translation of Aristotle’s Historia animalium, the tract forming the first ten books of the Libri de animalibus, his work on animals (Περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν). It continues the edition of the previous volumes ASL 5.2 De partibus animalium (Parts of Animals, 1998) and ASL 5.3 De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals, 1992).
The text has been made up with the help of the Classical Text Editor programme (CTE) of Stefan Hagel (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften). Without the kind assistance of my colleague Dr. Peter Boot in using the programme this volume could never have appeared.
Professor Erik Kwakkel (Leiden University, now iSchool of The University of British Columbia, Vancouver) kindly contributed to the section on The Manuscripts in the Introduction with a new and extensive palaeographical and codicological description of the base manuscript of this edition, MS Vaticanus Chisianus VIII 251, entitled The Base Manuscript of the Edition, for which I am very grateful. Dr. Rijcklof Hofman (Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen) performed, with the greatest precision, the first collation of the Latin manuscripts EHW (Pisanus, Berolinensis, Viennensis) and was thus of the greatest help in establishing the Latin apparatus.
The edition is appearing in the framework of the twofold project of the text critical edition of both the Arabic (ed. L.S. Filius, ASL 23, 2019) and the Arabo-Latin translations, led by Professor Remke Kruk (Leiden University) in the Series Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus, patronized by the Union Académique Internationale (UAI). It was subsidised by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the period 1990–1994. From 1994 onwards I continued my activities at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Huygens ING in Amsterdam, previously the Constantijn Huygens Institute, The Hague) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). I owe the managing director, Professor Lex Heerma van Voss, and the head of the Department of History and Scholarship and professor of Digital Methods and Historical Disciplines, Charles van den Heuvel, my deepest gratitude for facilitating the project and for arranging for a subsidy of the English translation of the Introduction and Notes. I am most grateful to Professor Alastair Hamilton (The Warburg Institute, London) for his expert translation. My thanks are also due to my colleague Dr. Irene O’Daly for many minor corrections in the English on this and other occasions. Dr. Pieter Beullens of the Aristoteles Latinus (Brussels) was kind enough to succeed the late Jozef Brams in providing the edition with his highly relevant commentary and has been a great support while I was working on it. I would also like to express my gratitude to the successive Brill editors who have put ample time and effort into the production of this volume, especially Kathy van Vliet, Maurits van den Boogert and Teddi Dols, as well as to Johannes Rustenburg of TAT Zetwerk (Utrecht), who supervised the conversion of the text into the Brill Typographic Style.
Finally I would like to thank the members of the editorial board of the Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus for their constructive interest, and the editors Professor Hans Daiber and Professor Remke Kruk for their willingness to include this volume in the Series.
Amsterdam, December 19th, 2019.