Toledo’s Biblioteca Capitular 17.14 (13^th c.) contains three Latin translations of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics followed by a Latin version of Themistius’ commentary on the same work.  The first translation is anonymous, but opens with a prologue in which the translator claims to have undertaken the work for two reasons: 1) the Latin version of Boethius in his possession was incomplete and corrupt; and 2) that of James of Venice (the second text included in this same codex) was so exceptionally obscure that “Francie magistri… quamvis illam translacionem et commentarios ab eodem Iacobo translatos habeant, tamen noticiam illius libri non audent profiteri” (fr. 1r). 

Our first testimony for a person called “Jacobus Venetus Grecus” is Cerbano Cerbani, a Venetian cleric active at Constantinople as a functionary in the court of Alexius I Comnenus.  His account of how the relics of St. Isidore were transported from the island of Chios to Venice in 1125 AD mentions a Venetian campaign in Dalmatia about which “Jacobus Grecus prosaico … stylo luculenter inchoavit historiam” (“Translatio mirifici martyris Ysidori a Chio insula in civitatem Venetam,” in Recueil des historiens des Croisades.  Historiens occidentaux, Vol. 5.  Paris, 1895: 340).  As James’ account of the campaign has not come down to us, Cerbano’s Translatio is the only record of its existence: it is possible that the two men were personal acquaintances and that James, like Cerbano, also worked in the court at Constantinople (Petrusi 1974).  The epithet “Grecus” probably has a geographical force in this context: it is possible that James was a citizen of Venice-in-Greece, the Venetian colony of Byzantium.  Again like Cerbano, he was perhaps a functionary who served the Byzantine emperor: translators of imperial edicts in the court at Constantinople were frequently westerners, and the marked literalism of James’ Latin translations of Aristotle may ultimately derive from the strict rules for translation that were enforced by the imperial chancery (Brams 2003).  Anselm of Havelberg records that a certain “Iacobus Venetus” participated in the Council of Constantinople, which was held on 3 April 1136 to discuss the problem of the procession of the Holy Spirit (Dialogi; PL 188: 1163).  A codex in Modena’s Biblioteca Estense (alfa.P.4.9, f. 25), meanwhile, identifies “Iacobus Veneticus Grecus philosophus” as the author of a response sent to the archbishop of Ravenna in 1148; the text of this response includes a few passages translated from Greek that employ formal elements of the translational technique used in the Latin rendering of the Posterior Analytics under consideration here and that a marginal note in Oxford’s Balliol College 253 (f. 242r) attributes to our author (Minio-Paluello 1952).

James of Venice did, in fact, work on translating Aristotle’s philosophical corpus: he may have translated the Posterior Analytics, the Physics, the Metaphysics (ll. 1-4.4), the De anima, most of the Parva naturalia, and an introduction to Aristotle’s Physics known from 1200 to 1400 AD as the De intelligentia; for a few of these works he may have also rendered into Latin the scholia that he found in the Greek manuscripts, and it is possible that the fragments of an anonymous Medieval version of the Sophistic Confutations also go back to him (Brams 2003).  None of these texts, however, is explicitly attributed to him in the manuscripts: his authorship has only been suggested on the basis of external testimony and internal critical judgments (Minio-Paluello, AL 7.1.xv-xx).

Our first evidence for the diffusion of his translations comes from the Chronica of Robert of Torigny, the abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel: he attests a cleric from Venice named James who translated into Latin and commented on the Topics, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and the Sophistic Confutations even though there was an older translation of those works (Chronica; PL 160: 443; Howlett 1889: 114).  Robert of Torigny wrote that notice between 1157 and 1169, but when working it into his annals utilized a blank space that had been left between his accounts of events from 1128 and 1129 - an indication that he thought the translations dated to that period (Minio-Paluello 1952: 194-5).

James’ Latin versions enjoyed a wide diffusion in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, being used, inter alios, by Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon. A critical edition of most of these texts was published in the second half of the last century as part of the collection Aristoteles Latinus.  [M. Ferroni; tr. C. L. Caterine].