1921 THE 'DE ARTE VENANDI CUM AVIBUS' 335 the earlier literature on falconry l is still insufficient to permit these specialists to assign the treatise to its final place. Still, a beginning must sooner or later be made, and the fresh use of manuscript material may enable even a layman to draw certain provisional conclusions concerning the sources and composition of the De Arte and the light it throws on the workings of the emperor's mind. The chief obstacle to a study of the De Arte Venandi cum Avibus is the lack of a complete edition. The treatise contains six books, yet only two have been printed, from an incomplete manuscript then in possession of Joachim Camerarius of Niirn- berg, and since supposed lost, but now clearly identifiable with MS. Pal. Lat. 1071 of the Vatican. The editio princeps of Velser (Augsburg, 1596), reprinted with a valuable zoological commentary by J. G. Schneider (Leipzig, 1 788-9), 2 not only has lacunae which correspond to the considerable lacunae and the faint and illegible portions of this codex, but it is in places quite careless, so that it does not furnish a satisfactory edition even of this mutilated copy of the first two books. It became the basis of two transla- tions into German, 3 yet, with all the learning lavished on Frederick II by German writers, no one has published a com- parison of the different manuscripts or edited a complete and critical text. There are two principal classes of manuscripts : I. Containing the first two books only, with Manfred's additions : M. Vatican, MS. Pal. Lat. 1071. Parchment, 111 folios, 360 x 250 mm., written not long after the middle of the thirteenth century, with valuable illustrations in a contemporary hand. The chapters are rubricated but not numbered. The first page, as well as many later pages, has been partly defaced by moisture, and has two holes in the parchment, hence the lacunae in the first two pages of the editions. The text breaks off in c. 80 of bk. ii, shortly before the end of the book. As this text contains the additions made by Manfred as king, it falls between his coronation in 1258 and his death in 1266. The considerable lacuna between fos. 16 and 17 (bk. i, c. 23), which fills pp. 47-72 of MS. B, existed already in the thirteenth century, since it is found likewise in MS. m. (fo. 28). The con- clusion of bk. ii was probably also missing when the version of m was made, for m carries the text no further than the last folio of M and rounds out the sentence with a general phrase. On the other hand, the lacuna of 1 The principal study of this material is by Werth, ' Altfranzosische Jagdlehrbucher nebst Handschriftenbibliographie der abendlandischen Jagdlitteratur iiberhaupt ', in Zeitschrift fur romanische Philohgie, xii. 146-91, 381-415, xiii. 1-34 (1888-9), who reviews the important medieval works on falconry without throwing any new light on the work of Frederick II. He overlooks the Vatican MS., mentioned by Seroux d'Agincourt in 1823, by Huillard-Breholles in 1859, and by Bethmann in 1874 (Pertz, Archiv, xii. 350), and makes no advance in relation to the six-book text, first indicated by Jerome Pichon in 1863 {Bulletin du Bibliophile, xvi. 885-900). 2 In the citations below I have referred to Schneider's text as the more accessible, but all such passages have been collated with the Vatican MS.
- By Johann Erhard Pacius, Onolzbach, 1756 ; and by H. Schopffer, Berlin, 1896.
