This week I completed the addition of another manuscript of the Almagest to my collection. This is the Cambridge MS 32 manuscript. And it’s very interesting.
This manuscript doesn’t have a lot of information on it. It’s one I stumbled across when doing some other research and was not included in Peters & Knobel’s work.
The Cambridge website itself gives precious little information. The manuscript itself is a composite, written by at least two hands, most likely in the early $16^{th}$ century. However, no information is given on the lineage of this manuscript, but we’ll shed some light on this here shortly.
While the larger text may be a compilation, the star catalog itself isn’t. It’s clearly written by a single hand. Compared with other manuscripts, it’s fairly well written; there are few errors that are corrected and the handwriting is generally quite legible. The rows do drift a bit, but this is quite common.
As usual, the scribe makes use of abbreviations for the constellation names1. There is some variation on how many letters are included in the abbreviation, but here are some common examples.
| English | Greek | Abbreviation |
| Aries | Krios |  |
| Taurus | Tavros |  |
| Gemini | Didimoi |  |
| Cancer | Karkinos |  |
| Leo | Leon |  |
| Virgo | Parthenos |  |
| Libra | Zygos |  |
| Scorpio | Skorpios |  |
| Sagittarius | Tokostis |  |
| Capricorn | Aigokeros |  |
| Aquarius | Ydrohoos |  |
| Pisces | Ihteis |  |
When I first started reviewing this manuscript, I was immediately struck by a very obvious issue: The zodiac sign and longitude don’t match up to the values we’ve seen previously, but the latitudes and magnitudes do.
It took me a bit of puzzling about it, but I quickly realized why: The scribe has adjusted the longitudes to account for axial precession. Each value has been incremented by $+17;00º$. Thus, when adding this catalog to the collection, I have adjusted the values the other way by the same amount to bring it back in line with the Almagest.
When entering these manuscripts into my catalog, I’ve been using a bit of color coding. None means it’s in agreement with Toomer. Yellow means it’s a known variant. Red means it’s unique.
When I find an unusual variant, I often compare it to other sources; both ones I’ve collected as well as ones I’ve yet to explore as reported in Peters & Knobel. With this manuscript, I kept noting that the rarest variants tended to come from another manuscript: The Venice Codex $312$.
While I haven’t found a copy of this one online yet, Peters & Knobel do give an important piece of information about it:
The longitudes of the catalogue are those of Ptolemy increased by $17º$.
Immediately, we can see that this manuscript is likely to be transcribed from the Venice Codex $312$!
I should note that the addition of $17º$ is, in and of itself interesting, but I’ll save commentary on that topic for a review of that manuscript.
The Cambridge manuscript also shares many other errors with the Paris Codex $2389$ which suggests that the scribe for this manuscript may have been relying on multiple sources.