Il trattato ps.-aristotelico De mirabilibus auscultationibus. Storia della tradizione, edizione critica e commento filologico.

The Ps.-Aristotelian treatise De mirabilibus auscultationibus, a collection of 178 brief chapters dealing with a wide range of topics, has been transmitted to us in little more than 20 Greek manuscripts, copied between the XIIth and the early decades of the XVIth century. The present study aims to reconstruct the relations between all the extant witnesses in view of a new edition of the text, which will finally substitute the one established by Immanuel Bekker in 1831: to this end all manuscripts have been collated afresh and studied in detail from a palaeographical and codicological point of view. The main results of our research may be summarized as follow: 1. The direct tradition of the text can be divided in three main branches (alpha, beta and gamma); the first two families, however, seem to be closely related and it is possible to infer the existence of a common ancestor (psi) linking these branches of the stemma. 2. After a careful eliminatio codicum descriptorum, only 7 manuscripts turned out to be independent witnesses: only these Greek manuscripts should therefore be retained for the constitution of the text. The study also includes some preliminary observations on the text of the extant Latin translations (the one by Bartholomew of Messina, XIIIth century, and the later Latin paraphrase by Antonio Beccaria, XVth century) and on the fragments of the medieval translation by Leontius Pilatus, preserved only in brief quotations by other authors (mainly Boccaccius and Domenico Silvestri). A section of the work is consecrated to the study of the most ancient indirect tradition (testimonia) and the early printed editions of the text (from 1497/98 up to the XVIIth century). The dissertation is concluded by a new edition of the Greek text, with an Italian translation, and a philological commentary.