Avicenna’s Šifāʾ and a Commentary on It in Twenty-five Volumes: the Bodleian Pococke Collection and Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī

The present paper overviews the Pococke collection of manuscripts of Avicenna’s magnum opus Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing) preserved in the Bodleian Library of Oxford, which originally consisted, in all likelihood, of twenty-five items. This codicological evidence is then confronted with the historical report according to which Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī commented on the Šifāʾ by means of an exegesis made of twenty-five volumes. The contribution explores whether these two apparently unrelated pieces of evidence – relevant, respectively, for the transmission of Avicenna’s masterpiece in philosophy and the history of Avicennism – may be interconnected, trying to determine which relation, if any, links the twenty-five codices of the Šifāʾ actually preserved in the Bodelian Pococke collection with the twenty-five volumes of the alleged commentary on the Šifāʾ by al-Rāzī.