Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) writes:
This may be of some interest to the general philosophical community. For those who don't read Dutch, it says "Unknown Manuscript of Spinoza's ETHICS Found", and the article details how a Dutch scholar, Leen Spruit, discovered, in the Vatican archives, a Latin manuscript copy of the ETHICS from 1675. The manuscript apparently belonged to Spinoza's erstwhile friend, Nicholas Steno, who was living in Rome after his conversion to Catholicism; and Steno may have gotten the manuscript from Walther von Tschirnhaus, another friend of Spinoza's who was passing through Rome on a "grand tour" and whom we know to have had in his possession a copy of the ETHICS while he was in Paris (which Spinoza refused to allow him to show to Leibniz when the latter was also in Paris). This new manuscript would be earlier than whatever manuscript Spinoza's friends had on hand when, in 1677, they set to work preparing his writings for publication. Whether or not it differs from that later manuscript (and thus from the first published Latin edition) remains to be seen.
UPDATE: Daniel Garber (Princeton) writes:
It should be noted on the discovery of the new Spinoza ms. that Pina Totaro was a full collaborator in the project. She had predicted that there was a copy in the Vatican Library, given by Steno, on the basis of mss. she had found earlier, and it was she who had asked Spruit to look out for indications of it. When he found something he thought might be interesting, she is the one who actually identified the ms. as a ms. of the Ethics and traced its provenance. The Brill website lists her as the co-discoverer of the ms.
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