[839] R. Förster, De Aristotelis quae feruntur secreta secretorum Commentatio, Kiliae, 1888; Handschriften und Ausgaben des pseudo-aristotelischen Secretum secretorum, in Centralblatt f. Bibliothekwesen, VI (1889), 1-22, 57-76. And see Steele (1920).
[840] M. Gaster, in his “Introduction to a Hebrew version of the Secret of Secrets,” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1908, part 2), pp. 1065-84; for the Hebrew text and an English translation, Ibid. (1907), pp. 879-913 and (1908, part 1), pp. 111-62.
[841] Ed. Robert Steele, EETS, LXVI, London, 1894. Volume LXXIV contains three earlier English versions. There are numerous MSS of it in Italian in the Riccardian and Palatini collections at Florence.
[842] De Somno et vigilia, I, ii, 7.
[843] Tanner 116, 13th century; Corpus Christi 149, 15th century. Recently edited by Robert Steele, 1920, as Fasc. V of his Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi.
[844] There are considerable discrepancies between the different early printed editions, which differ in length, order of arrangement, tables of contents, and number of chapters. And in the same edition the chapter headings given in the course of the text may not agree with those in the table of contents, which as a rule, even in the MSS, does not fully cover the subject-matter of the text. The different printers have probably used different manuscripts for their editions rather than made any new additions of their own. The following editions are those to which references will be made in the following pages.
An edition printed at Cologne about 1480, which I examined at the Harvard University Library, divides the text into only thirty chapters and seems imperfect.
An edition of about 1485, which I examined at the British Museum, where it was numbered IA.10756, has 74 chapters, and the headings of its 25th and 30th chapters, for instance, agree with those of the 11th and 13th chapters in the Harvard copy.
A third edition of Paris, 1520, has no numbered chapters and contains passages not found in the two earlier editions.
As a check upon these printed texts I have examined the three following MSS, two of the 13th, and one of the 14th, century. Of these Egerton 2676 corresponds fairly closely throughout to the edition numbered IA.10756 in the British Museum.