The Libro de los Epítomes is an enormous work. The first epitome that we have (or at least have part of) is numbered 140, and the last is numbered 3130. What’s more, we know from Colón’s other bibliographical reference tools that the original number was considerably larger. Even so, the part that does survive is still a huge mine of information, and the aim of our project is to make it accessible to scholars and the broader public via a Latin edition with an English translation.

The surviving epitomes are contained in two manuscripts: a rough draft in Seville and a fair copy in Copenhagen. Their contents do overlap, but each manuscript also contains material that the other one lacks. That is, for each epitome we either have (1) a rough draft but no fair copy, (2) a fair copy but no rough draft, or (3) both a rough draft and a fair copy.

You might think that where we have both a rough draft and a fair copy (as we do for a quarter of the epitomes) we could ignore the draft and just use the fair copy. Alas, the trouble is that scribes are not perfect copyists, so if you want to know what an author wrote, the original is more important than a copy. The real value of the manuscript that was dramatically discovered a few years ago is that it has catapulted the number of epitomes that we have from around 825 to over 2150.

An important part of our task, therefore, is working backwards from the imperfect copy to the lost original. Sometimes this is a simple matter of correcting the manuscript equivalent of a typo, e.g. where the scribe has mistakenly written ‘tractatus novus’ (new treatise) instead of ‘tractatus nonus’ (ninth treatise). But sometimes it requires a degree of ingenuity, e.g. where the scribe has written ‘communem’ (common) by misreading an abbreviated version of ‘rationem’ (method). You can see some other examples of the corrections we have been making, but without English translations, here.

Our work has benefited from a preliminary “diplomatic” (i.e. unedited) transcription of the fair copy that was kindly made available by Alessandro Gnasso and his colleagues on the Book of Books project at the University of Copenhagen.