:: ARS MAGNA · PRAEFATIO ::
Ars Magna Generalis et Ultima
Ramon Llull · composed c. 1305 · edited by Bernard de Lavinheta, Lyon, 1517
Picture a friar on Majorca, cutting circles of parchment and pinning one atop another so they spin. On each rim he letters the great terms: goodness, greatness, eternity, the names of God and the questions a mind can ask. Turn the wheels and the words fall into fresh pairings, and every pairing is a thing you might think. It is a small machine, a stack of paper discs you could hold in one hand. But Ramon Llull believed that with enough discs and the right letters he could turn the whole of reasoning into a turning of paper, a contraption for finding truth that a patient hand could work. Centuries before anyone spoke of computing, here is someone trying to build thought out of moving parts. Ask yourself what it would take to make that claim and mean it. This is the book where the wheels are drawn.
Before the book is opened, let the terms be plain.
This room keeps no till. This edition is not sold and never will be: it is set down for the dissemination of knowledge, and the plain love of the game.
Here is the labour I am giving away. I set every figure beside its own leaf, so that when Llull says turn the wheel you can watch the very wheel turn next to the words that describe it. Ramon Llull went to his rest in 1315, and his Great Art has belonged to all of us for seven centuries. The leaves you are about to read are a faithful photographic reproduction of the 1517 Lavinheta printing, a work so far out of copyright that the word scarcely applies. What is the gift on top of that public inheritance? Only the labour: the English rendering, the apparatus, the setting of figure against leaf. That work is mine, and I give it away. Read it freely, carry it wherever you like, only never sell it.
Provenance & Thanks
- The work
- Ramon Llull, Ars Magna Generalis et Ultima, the combinatorial art. Public domain by some seven hundred years.
- The printing
- Lyon: Jacques Marechal for Simon Vincent, 1517, edited by Bernard de Lavinheta, from the Biblioteca de Catalunya copy.
- The digitisation
- Scanned by Google Books from the Biblioteca de Catalunya copy and preserved by the Internet Archive (bub_gb_rG_yINh8V1gC), catalogued there under Public Domain Mark 1.0. This edition thanks both institutions for the grace of keeping the door open.
- This edition
- Translation, apparatus, and interactive setting all mine, released for non-commercial use in the spirit of the open inheritance it draws from.
To the librarians, scanner-operators, and archivists whose patient, unglamorous work makes a 1517 book openable on a screen in the present — this edition bows. You are the reason any of this is possible. Thank you.