Euclid in Latin: a fifteenth-century witness
A fifteenth-century Paris manuscript preserves Euclid in Latin, translated from Arabic. The copy, the translation, and Euclid’s life belong to different dates.
Start with the manuscript
Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus records Paris BnF Lat. 7292 as a fifteenth-century manuscript witness to a Latin Euclid translated from Arabic. The research record dates the witness, not the translation, and not Euclid. Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus / Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities ↗
An attribution waiting for its object
The Latin translation has often been attributed to Gerard of Cremona, whose Toledo Almagest translation the same database documents between about 1140 and 1175. The record declines to make the Euclid attribution canonical until a translation-work object exists with its own evidence. Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus / Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities ↗
Who named the translator?
A translator's name on a later copy is a claim made by that copy. Before accepting it, look for the translation's earliest witnesses and whether their style matches the translator's known work.
What could change across seventeen centuries?
Euclid composed in Greek around 300 BCE; this copy is Latin from Arabic, some 1,700 years later. Which features of the text would you expect to survive that journey intact, and which would you expect to drift?