ARISTOTLE: From Antiquity to The Modern Era

Aristotle towers over Western philosophy and science and as they have come down to us, his works comprise a veritable encyclopaedia of philosophy and invented the field of formal logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics. He created a basis for a great deal of today's scientific knowledge, such as the classification of organisms and objects. Although he has been studied continuously for more than 2000 years, his individual works were dispersed, lost, recovered, and very gradually reunited. The physical transmission of the Aristotelian corpus was a long, complicated, uncoordinated process. From the Roman Empire, through the mediation of Arab and Jewish scholars, to the western Middle Ages and scholasticism and up to the cusp of modernity in the late 15th century, Aristotle's works were copied and recopied by scribes in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin before finally becoming available again in their original Greek. The volume focuses on one crucial, extended moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle's works became widely available in Latin, Greek, and even in vernacular languages in the late 15th and 16th centuries. At that moment, Aristotle's authority comes under increasing scrutiny as the new science and philosophy of early modern Europe chart different courses for the future. The extraordinary books and manuscripts in this volume, selected from the collection of the Martin J. Gross Foundation, demonstrate just how intellectuals have received and wrestled with Aristotle. Through commentaries, treatises, lecture courses in schools, and above all in the written marginalia of books, the volume reveals the extent of the age's engagement with Aristotle. Many of these books and manuscripts have never before been studied and many colour images show them in their magnificence. Colour plates, 20.96 x 28.58cm, 128 pages.