The Treasure of Alexander – Stories of Discovery and Authorship

In modern times, the author has acquired a role and a connotation that deeply influence our perception of the ways in which texts were produced and circulated in different historical contexts. Authorship of mediaeval texts worked differently, and this peculiarity is even more evident in the case of pseudo-authorship. The case of Alexander the Great as the alleged author of technical treatises is an example of the emergence of a new syllabus by means of the attrib-ution of a specific corpus to an authoritative, though fictional, author. The mate-rials ascribed to Alexander found their way into many different texts dealing with technical and scientific topics. This paper explores the contents of The Treasure of Alexander, and attempts to delineate the complex dialogue between The Treasure and other works. The known manuscript and new witnesses are brought together and become objects of a comprehensive philological analysis, in order to reconstruct the textual history of The Treasure. In the appendices to this paper, I offer a new edition and English translation of the Fundlegende, which serves as frame tale for the technical syllabus, along with its table of contents.