The natural encyclopedia composed around 1150 by Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) and known today under the title Physica was published in the last century by Charles-Victor Daremberg in Patrologiae Latina [volume 197] according to the current ms lat . 6952 from the Bibliothèque Nationale. In addition to this 15th century version, the Physica has been preserved for us in four other complete manuscripts: Cod. Guelf. 56.2 Aug. 4° of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (early 14th century), Cod. 2551 from the Royal Library of Brussels (15th or 16th century depending on the author2) and two recently unearthed manuscripts. The ms. Ashburnham 1323 from the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (c. 1300) was discovered in 1983 by Paulus Becker, and Ferraioli 921 from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (15th century) in 1985 by Ursula Heierle. Added to this are a few fragments, mostly from the 15th century, contained in the following manuscripts: Cod. 525 from the Burger Bibliothek in Bern, manuscript 178a from the Universitätsbibliothek in Freiburg im Breisgau (discovered and edited by Raimund Struck in 19853) and Cod. III 1, fol. 43 of the Öttingen-Wallerstein Library in Harburg, today in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, to which Melitta Weiss-Amer has just devoted an article. This last fragment has the particularity of its bilingualism, and passages from the Physica in Latin are mixed with others in their German translation; another clue to the transmission of this work in the vernacular language is given to us by the ms. Germ. Fol. 817 from the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin: this unpublished manuscript, which Jessen pointed out in 1864, in fact contains a German translation of the praefatio of the first book of the Physica. Now it is with four new fragments in Latin that we must now count: one of them was first reported by Ludwig Schuba but is still unpublished (ms. Pal. lat. 1207, f. 65v), and a scholarship from the French School of Rome allowed me to discover a second in the same manuscript (f. 64r), as well as two anonymous fragments within collections also part of the Palatine collection Latin from the Vatican Library. It is these two anonymous fragments (ms. Pal. lat. 1216, ff. 91v-95r, and ms. Pal. lat. 1144, ff. 128v-129r), of which we give a transcription in the appendix, which will detain us at greater length here.

Language: French

HALId: halshs-00608746