The Manuscript Dissemination of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme. With an Edition of the Tractatus de homine a Cartesio

In this book I provide the study of a foremost case of manuscript dissemination and fostering of knowledge production in the early modern age, namely of the covert circulation of a pivotal text in the history of science: the Traité de l’homme of René Descartes, completed in 1633, from the 1640s up to the appearance of its first editions in the 1660s. By disclosing unexplored sources and figures, I discuss a number of manuscripts (all but one now lost), shedding light, in particular, on the role of Elisa- beth of Bohemia, Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey and Aernout Huyberts in the dissemination and use of the treatise, and the attempts at securing and publishing it by the Elzeviers, Pierre-Hector Chanut, and Claude Clerselier. On the basis of this reconstruction I provide a study and edition—with an apparatus of different read- ings—of the handwritten translation of the treatise recently brought to the attention of scholars (ms. ATH 1444), relating it to the efforts at making sense of the text by the Leiden scholars, and showing that it conveys a version of the treatise akin to the one published (1662) by Florentius Schuyl, while Clerselier might have published a text revised by Descartes around 1647.