History
A copy of a document dated 10 December 1371 mentions a payment of 100 livres to Nicole Oresme for his translation of the Ethics and Politics .[2] The patron, translator, and date of 1372 are mentioned in the colophon of this manuscript. In recent publications, scholars are reluctant to accept such a precise dating, as 1372 refers not to the manuscript itself but to the transcription of the translation. Since A is found in Gilles Malet's inventory of the Louvre library dating from 1373 (item A 237 and B 240; see Delisle, Recherches , vol. 2, no. 481, 81), the manuscript must have been completed by that year. On 7 October 1380, following the death of Charles V, his brother Louis, duke of Anjou, took the manuscript, along with its counterpart volume of the Politics and Economics (MS B ), from the Louvre library. Both A and B , examples of the deluxe, presentation copies of Oresme's translations destined for stationary use in Charles V's library, found their way into the collections of the dukes of Burgundy. MS A appears in the inventories of the Burgundian library compiled in Dijon in 1404 and 1420, and again in the one prepared in Bruges about 1467.[3] An even more complete description of A occurs in a third Burgundian inventory dated 1485. The manuscript remained in the Burgundian collections in Brussels until the French Revolution. In 1796 A was taken to Paris, where it stayed in the Bibliothèque Nationale until 1815. After its return to Brussels, the red stamp of the Bibliothèque Nationale, located on the last folio of the volume, was erased and replaced by that of the Bibliothèque Royale.