Note 2792 — Chapter XXX · GERBERT AND THE INTRODUCTION OF ARABIC ASTROLOGY

Incipit “Quicumque astronomiam peritiam disciplinae”; the printed editions insert a discere after astronomiam, but it has not been there in the MSS which I have seen and is not needed. Printed by Pez, Thesaurus Anecdotorum Noviss. III, ii, 109-30, (1721) and incorrectly ascribed by him to Hermannus Contractus, because it often occurs in the MSS together with another treatise on the astrolabe by a “Herimannus Christi pauperum peripsima et philosophiae tyronum asello imo limace tardior assecla.” Of this last we shall have more to say presently. The edition of Pez reappears in Migne, PL vol. 143. Bubnov (1899), 114-47, gives a new edition, and at pp. 109-13 a list of the MSS of the work, in which, however, he fails to note the following: and they are also absent from his general index of 153 codices at pp. xvii-xc. BM Additional MS 17808, 11th century, fols. 73v-79r, under the title as in other MSS of “Regulae ex libris Ptolomei regis de compositione astrolapsus.” Yet Bubnov says, p. cxvi, “Catalogues of Additional MSS (omnia volumina inspexi, quae ante a. 1895 edita sunt).” BM Egerton 823, 12th century, fol. 4r. BN 7412, 12th and 13th centuries, fols. 1-9, “Waztalkora sive tract. de utilitatibus astrolabii.” Professor D. B. Macdonald suggests that Waztalkora is for rasmu-l-kura, “the describing of the sphere in lines.”