Aristotle: from antiquity to the modern era

Uittreksel

Aristotle's influence towers over western philosophy and science. His astonishing range and depth - philosophy and logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics - made him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the western tradition before the modern age. Although he has been studied continuously for more than 2,000 years, his individual works were dispersed, lost, recovered and very gradually reunited. This new volume illustrates the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time. In particular, it focuses on the crucial moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle's works became widely available in Latin, Greek, and in vernacular languages in the 15th and 16th centuries. The extraordinary books and manuscripts in this volume, selected from the collection of the Martin J. Gross Foundation, demonstrate just how intellectuals received and interpreted Aristotle. Through commentaries, treatises, lecture courses in schools and above all in the written marginalia of books, the volume reveals the extent of the era's engagement with Aristotle. It includes essays by leading scholars as well as a beautifully illustrated catalogue section featuring the covers and pages of works on Aristotelian texts from the 13th to the late 17th century, many of which show the annotations of contemporary readers and teachers.