The Fourteenth Century: The Destructio destructionis and Other Personal Works

In the fourteenth century, a version was done (with an incomplete end) of the famous refutation of al-(Gazal! by Averroes, the Tahafut al-Tahafut (Destructio destructionis). It was translated in 1328 by the Jew Calonymos ben Calonymos ben Meir of Arles at the request of King Robert the Wise of Naples, but it had at the time a very limited circulation. Other texts translated in the Middle Ages had so a limited spread, that only recently their existence has been discovered. This is the case of a treatise entitled De separatione primi principii, which discusses issues relating to the exegesis of Physics VIII, 10, on the movement of the celestial bodies. The Latin version was done in 1334 by Alfonso Dinis in Valladolid (d. 1352), an alleged bastard of the Portuguese royal family. A bishop, a doctor, and a master of theology, Alfonso Dinis was assisted in the translation by Abner of Burgos, a well-known polemicist, a converted Jew, and Sacristan of the cathedral of Burgos. This text is preserved only in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 236, which also contains a compilation of two treatises by Averroes on the union of the human being with the Agent Intellect, reworked and enlarged with passages taken from al-Farabl. This compilation bears the title De perfectione naturali intellectus, and was anonymously translated into Latin in the fourteenth century, on the basis of a Hebrew text concocted in all likelihood by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides Hillel of Verona (d. 1295). This text, also known under the alternate title De animae beatitudine, did not emerge from the shadows until the commentary that the Paduan Averroist Agostino Nifo wrote on it; the commentary, completed in 1492, was published in 1503.