Boethius’ work in philosophy was augmented by his wide-ranging interests in other intellectual areas, including music,
theology, logic, and arithmetic. Those interests were indulged both in original works and in adaptations and translations of earlier
treatises of Greek and Latin antiquity. Much of the work he produced in this vein became central to the curriculum of the Latin
Middle Ages. This is true for the De Arithemtica, shown here, which Boethius adapated in around 520 from Nicomachus’
Introductio Arithmetica, and also for his De Musica, which held much the same place in the medieval curriculum,
both in the monastic schools that arose quickly in the west in the Carolingian period, and in the later cathedral schools and nascent
universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The manuscript shown here itself is a witness to medieval pedagogy, for Boethius' work is joined in it to a copy of the Computus
of Robert Grosseteste. Both works were copied together for the sake of pedagogical convenience around 1390. They are
written on paper, in dark brown ink, in a Gothic hand. The manuscript is double-columned and rubricated in red. The watermark
on the paper - a crossbow in a circle - locates the manuscript to Italy. The De Arithmetica runs to f. 64 a. recto; the
Computus from 65 a. verso to 93 a. recto. In the nineteenth century a third manuscript of several works of Fibonacci
was bound to it, forming a unique compendium of medieval mathematical texts. (commentary by J. Pucci)