Hytpibbius: Radulphus Brito’s Emulator on the Ars Vetus I. The Questions on Porphyry

During the 1970s, Heinrich Roos began the study of Brito’s Questions on the Ars Vetus publishing some questions from the two extant redactions of the work: q. 13 of the A-version of the Questions on Porphyry (Roos 1974), and qq. 25 and 44 of the B-version of the same work (Roos 1978). After a few years, Jan Pinborg (1980a) published qq. 5-8 from both redactions of this work, allowing scholars to easily compare the two versions and evaluate their differences. Finally, in a 1981-82 article, Jan Pinborg and Sten Ebbesen published the critical edition of the Prologue to Brito’s Questions on the Ars vetus, based on a complete collation of all the witnesses, and tried to give a first tentative picture of the relations between them. About the same time, the edition of q. 8 (A-version) on the Categories appeared (McMahon 1981), but with no mention of the problem of the two redactions. As Heinrich Roos pointed out, editing Brito’s Questions on the Ars Vetus is a complicated task because one of the redactions (the B-version, in Roos’ and Pinborg’s labelling, transmitted only by ms N = Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cent. V.21, ff. 58ra-77rb; and 79va-124ra) indicates two authors of a very large set of questions: Radulphus Brito and a mysterious Hytpibbius. The Ars Vetus here includes four books, i.e. Porphyry’s Introduction (Isa- goge), Aristotle’s Categories, his De interpretatione and the anonymous Liber sex principiorum (usually attributed to Gilbert of Poitiers). One might wonder who collected these texts and for what purpose. I would like to try to give an answer to these questions, picking up again the problem of the two versions, hoping to shed some light on the mysterious Hytpibbius and his contribution to this set of questions (excluding those on the Liber sex principiorum). However, in the present article I will limit my research to the questions on the Isagoge. As Appendix I will give the complete list of questions on Porphyry of the ms. N, and the working edition of 10 questions attributed to Hytpibbius.