The Vernacular Aristotle

The first study of the reception of Aristotle in Medieval and Renaissance Italy that considers the ethical dimension of translation.

This volume is based on an international colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, London, on 21-2 June 2013, and entitled 'Philosophy and Knowledge in the Renaissance: Interpreting Aristotle in the Vernacular'. It situates and explores vernacular Aristotelianism in a broad chronological context, with a geographical focus on Italy. The disciplines covered include political thought, ethics, poetics, rhetoric, logic, natural philosophy, cosmology, meteorology and metaphysics; and among the genres considered are translations, popularizing commentaries, dialogues and works targeted at women. The wide-ranging and rich material presented in the volume is intended to stimulate scholars to develop this promising area of research still further. Table of Contents: Preface (pp. ix-x) Introduction (pp. 1-5) Luca Bianchi, Simon Gilson and Jill Kraye Giles of Rome's De regimine principum and the Vernacular Translations: The Reception of the Aristotelian Tradition and the Problem of Courtesy (pp. 7-29) Fiammetta Papi Uses of Latin Sources in Renaissance Vernacularization of Aristotle: The Case of Galeazzo Florimonte, Francesco Venier and Francesco Pona (pp. 31-55) Luca Bianchi Alessandro Piccolomini's Mission: Philosophy for Men and Women in their Mother Tongue (pp. 57-73) Letizia Panizza Francesco Robortello on Popularizing Knowledge (75-92) Marco Sgarbi Aristotelian Commentaries and the Dialogue Form in Cinquecento Italy (pp. 93-107) Eugenio Refini Aristotle's Politics in the Dialogi della morale filosofia of Antonio Brucioli (pp. 109-122) Grace Allen 'The best works of Aristotle': Antonio Brucioli as a Translator of Natural Philosophy (pp. 123-138) Eva Del Soldato Vernacular Meteorology and the Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (pp. 139-159) Ivano Dal Prete Vernacularizing Meteorology: Benedetto Varchi's Comento sopra il primo libro delle Meteore d'Aristotile (pp. 161-181) Simon Gilson Bartolomeo Beverini (1629-1686) e una versione inedita della Metafisica di Aristotele (pp. 183-208) Corinna Onelli Index of Manuscripts and Incunables (p. 209) Index of Names (pp. 210-216)

The Italian Mind explores Italian vernacular logical textbooks and shows their fundamental contributions to the thought of the period, which anticipated many of the features of early modern philosophy and contributied to a new conception of knowledge.

Examines the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time, focusing on one crucial, extended moment: the moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle's works became widely available.

Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.

Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 40Medieval translators played an important role in the development and evolution of a scientific lexicon. At a time when most scholars deferred to authority, the translations of canonical texts assumed great importance. Moreover, translation occurred at two levels in the Middle Ages. First, Greek or Arabic texts were translated into the learned language, Latin. Second, Latin texts became source texts themselves, to be translated into the vernaculars as their importance across Europe started to increase.The situation of the respective translators at these two levels was fundamentally different: whereas the former could rely on a long tradition of scientific discourse, the latter had the enormous responsibility of actually developing a scientific vocabulary. The contributions in the present volume investigate both levels, greatly illuminating the emergence of the scientific terminology and concepts that became so fundamental in early modern intellectual discourse. The scientific disciplines covered in the book include, among others, medicine, biology, astronomy, and physics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and durable ethical tool for premodern writers, many of whom used it to explore what it meant to be an embodied creature or to ask whether human experience is independent of the natural world in which it is forged. The history of the late medieval period can be retold as the story of how nature gained an authoritative voice only to lose it again at the onset of modernity. This distinctive voice, Kellie Robertson argues, emerged from a novel historical confluence of physics and fiction-writing. Natural philosophers and poets shared a language for talking about physical inclination, the inherent desire to pursue the good that was found in all things living and nonliving. Moreover, both natural philosophers and poets believed that representing the visible world was a problem of morality rather than mere description. Based on readings of academic commentaries and scientific treatises as well as popular allegorical poetry, Nature Speaks contends that controversy over Aristotle's natural philosophy gave birth to a philosophical poetics that sought to understand the extent to which the human will was necessarily determined by the same forces that shaped the rest of the material world. Modern disciplinary divisions have largely discouraged shared imaginative responses to this problem among the contemporary sciences and humanities. Robertson demonstrates that this earlier worldview can offer an alternative model of human-nonhuman complementarity, one premised neither on compulsory human exceptionalism nor on the simple reduction of one category to the other. Most important, Nature Speaks assesses what is gained and what is lost when nature's voice goes silent.