Reflections on The Twenty-One of Engineering and Machines of Juanelo Turriano
therefore it may be affirmed that the copy and the first arrangement occurred in the last third of the 16th century or the first years of the 17th. While the second was produced in the first half of the 17th century, it was at this moment that the title pages were introduced, which belong to the same hand that retouched the numbering of the books. These title pages use a round, humanistic script which is repeated in the inscriptions that enunciate the different books, according to the current order.
IX I am going to dedicate only a small space to the characteristics of the text from a philological point of view. And this brevity is explained because Juan A. Frago Gracia and I published a book whose title may be translated ÂŤAn Aragonese Author for the Twenty-One Books of Devices and MachinesÂť. Well now, its first 93 pages constitute an excellent and detailed philological study by Frago, Professor at the University of Zaragoza, and considered to be the best specialist in Aragonese dialects, as much in Spain as outside of the country. As such, he was recommended to me by an illustrious member of the Royal Spanish Academy, certainly Aragonese, though not Aragonist. Those interested in this material should read, in its entirety and carefully, this part of our work. It affirms and reasons, in an exhaustive manner, that the author was from Aragon, as I already indicated in my first general introduction -they helped me with it, of course. But also I am corrected in something important, since I affirmed then, mistakenly, that the codex was not uniform, which would certainly lead us to suppose that it had been a collective work, although I never believed that. He has justified the unity of the text, demonstrating that the internal differences depend on the treated subject and on the sources used in each case. The lexical Aragonism is constant; it may be scarce in some cases, but it is never missing. Now, I will say for myself that the author knew Italian, and in the codex there are some Italicisms. But he did not know Latin; in the manuscript, of some 950 pages, there are only, in this language, two phrases and the scholarly name of a plant. For so little hecould have asked a friend or a priest, for they were numerous at the time. This is very important since not knowing Latin was a certain sign of not having had a university education, and even of not belonging to a higher enlightened class. It is well known that, although it seems incredible, not knowing Latin was one of the things that embittered the life of Leonardo da Vinci, producing in him a feeling of inferiority. In summary, the codex is written in Castilian Spanish, but full of Aragonism. It is so much like that, that the book of mills, especially important, has some things that I have not managed to understand; in spite of the fact that the study of mills is a matter which has occupied me quite a deal. 40