 Lefèvre’s early publications are punctuated by his three journeys to Italy. Colleagues mentioned his contact with the great humanists of fifteenth-century Italy as much as they lauded his encyclopedic learning. He undertook these journeys, apparently, to pursue models of scholarly inquiry which might leaven his teaching in Paris. In 1491 he traveled to Venice, ostensibly to meet Ermolao Barbaro, who was famous as an eloquent translator of Themistius, the fourth-century paraphrast of Aristotle. (Barbaro was in Rome at the time, so Lefèvre changed his travel plans to include Rome and Florence.) On his return, he published his first work in print, Totius philosophiae naturalis paraphrases (1492). In these 600 octavo pages, he presented students with short epitomes and digested paraphrases of Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, the minor works of natural philosophy (i.e., Parva naturalia or Little Naturals), and On the Soul. The next few years were immensely productive, and with the help of colleagues and students, Lefèvre published similar epitomes for the standard university course on logic (1496b), Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1494a), and the Nicomachean Ethics (1494b).