WALTER BURLEY'S DE VITA ET MORIBUS PHILOSOPHORUM

one would dispute the truth of the aphorism attributed to Donatus that it would be far less difficult to wrest his club from Hercules than to steal a single verse from Homer. For writers of smaller stature, however, the case would have been quite different, particularly in the Middle Ages. Then it must have been easy and relatively safe to pirate even an entire book. Yet, strangely enough, this kind of plagiarism was rare. It seems all the more remarkable then that, long after the Middle Ages, in 1603, an Italian lawyer, Anastasius a Sala, did have printed and attempted to pass off as his own a very famous book indeed.1 The rash purloiner must have been inordinately impressed by the work to take the risk involved in appropriating it. Written more than two and a half centuries earlier by the English scholar Walter Burley, it had hosts of other admirers. If one uses the simple criterion of popularity, this by-product of Burley's serious work in philosophy far outshadowed and outlived all of his erudite treatises on Aristotle. Long before the end of the sixteenth century, this book, the De vita et moribus philosophorum (The Lives and Manners of the Philosophers), had been circulated all over Europe, for over 150 manuscripts of it are still extant. It had been printed in thirty editions by 1530. For a wider audience it was translated into Spanish in the early fifteenth century, into Italian by 1475, into German (by two different translators) by 1490, and into Polish in three versions by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Burley, often designated doctor planus et perspicuus for his precise and lucid writings, was born in 1275, probably in Yorkshire, and was educated at Merton College, Oxford.2 His early interest in philosophy