Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Latin West

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-202
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Chapter 4 turns from following the long and varied tradition of stylistic teaching and practice to dedicated theory: now the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and especially its analytic of the emotions from antiquity to the late thirteenth century. This chapter treats pathos and enthymeme in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It contrasts other ancient philosophical traditions of the passions with Aristotle’s phenomenological treatment of emotion in the Rhetoric. It traces the post-classical reception of the Rhetoric through medieval Arabic commentators on the emotions, Moerbeke’s authoritative Latin translation, Giles of Rome’s important commentary on the Rhetoric, c.1272, and other scholastic commentators on the relevant sections of Aristotle’s text. It also contrasts other medieval philosophies of the passions with what readers would have found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In his first engagement with the Rhetoric, Giles did not grasp the political significance of Aristotle’s treatment of emotions because his thinking was still embedded in contemporary medieval theories of the passions.

Traditio ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 394-402
Author(s):  
Wilfred Theisen

Witelo, the thirteenth-century author of an extensive treatise on optics entitled Perspectiva, was thoroughly acquainted with most of the optical works available in the Latin West at that time. Among the works he studied was Euclid's Optica (in a Latin translation under the title De visu). It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that in fact Witelo had produced an earlier recension of Euclid's treatise, a work not generally attributed to him. Although this earlier investigation into optics is also entitled Perspectiva, to avoid confusion it will be referred to here as the Recension. This Recension is found in the following manuscripts:Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 885 (s. xiv) fols. 132r–143v (Props. 1–15, 18, 17–23, 26–28, 16).Milan, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS R. 47 sup. (s. xiii) fols. 133r–148r (Props. 1–23, 26–61).Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS lat. 7366 (s. xiv) fols. 90v–97v (Props. 1–23, 26–34).Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS lat. 10252 (a.d. 1476) fols. 159 (154)v–172 (167)r (Props. 1–23, 26–30).Toruń, Ksiąžnica, Miejska im. Kopernika, MS Gymnasialbibl. R.4°.2 (s. xiv) pp. 3–30 (Props. 1–23, 26–61).Vatican, Bibl. Apost. Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 3102 (s. xiv) fols. 37v–50r (Props. 1–23, 26–61).Vienna, Österr. Nat. Bibl. MS 5303 (s. xv–xvi) fols. 32r–41v (Props. 1–23, 26–30).


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


1996 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 488-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri D. Saffrey

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Marija Koprivica

The first collection of canon law translated from the Greek into the Slavic language in the ninth century supported the consolidation of Christianity among the Slav peoples. This article focuses on the nomocanon of St Sava of Serbia (Kormchaia), a collection which was original and specific in its content; its relationship to other contemporary legal historical documents will be considered. The article also explores the political background to the emergence of Orthodox Slav collections of ecclesiastical and civil law. The political context in which these collections originated exercised a determinative influence on their contents, the selection of texts and the interpretation of the canons contained within them. The emergence of the Slavic nomocanon is interpreted within a context in which Balkan Slav states sought to foster their independence and aspired to form autocephalous national churches.


Author(s):  
Janine Larmon Peterson

This chapter explores antipapal views that increased in the wake of popes' decisions to use the charge of heresy to achieve temporal as well as spiritual control over communities in northern and central Italy. This region was the geographic arena for the political struggle that occurred between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, which divided Italian communities into rival factions. It was also the locus of papal efforts to assert religious authority over independent-minded towns that were responding to papal bureaucratization and consolidation of power. Within this context, the accusation of heterodoxy became one means by which the papacy punished those who refused to support papal aims. “Heresy” no longer reflected doctrinal error alone by the late thirteenth century. It had become a characteristic of political orientation, an expression of disaffection with the papacy, and an avowal of regional interests that superseded loyalty to Rome. The chapter then traces the steps that led late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italian communities to have political and spiritual antipathy toward the popes and their agents, which became a driving force for these communities to actively contest popes through championing suspect saints, heretical saints, and holy heretics.


Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 105-138
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski

This chapter addresses an early modern instantiation of the effacement of the interpersonal political in the Talmud by conceptions of universal (inter)subjectivity and logical-apodictic reasoning. This process first tacitly erases the interpersonal political in the late ancient Talmud by reducing it to dialectical irony. In a second step, the erasure advances from irony, a Platonic concept, to logical-apodictic reading of it in the Aristotelian tradition. Only when viewed through a post-Kantian lens could it become clear that this was not merely a Platonic interpretation of the late ancient Talmud in early modernity, followed by an Aristotelian interpretation, but rather a complex and multistep process of the effacement of the interpersonal at the advent of intersubjective. The chapter arrives to that result through a case-study of staging and analyzing of a fourteenth century logical commentary on the thirteenth century rhetorical interpretation of a discussion in a late ancient text in the Talmud.


Traditio ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 149-166
Author(s):  
John R. Clark

Around the year 1200 there appeared a Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's De mineralibus, in which the author denied the possibility of the transmutation of metals. This statement, especially when placed in the mouth of the revered Aristotle, was a severe blow to the aim of the alchemists. Indeed it had been Aristotle's theory of the generation of metals in his Meteorologica and his theory of a common origin of all metals that had encouraged the alchemists in their efforts to transmute base metals into gold. This pseudo-Aristotelian challenge to the truth of alchemy seems to have elicited at least one previously unrecognized response. In a short treatise, tucked away in a sixteenth-century manuscript of alchemical miscellany, an anonymous author quotes “Aristotle” saying that the species of metals cannot be transformed or transmuted, but includes the proviso, also taken from Aristotle: unless they be reduced to their primary matter. This materia prima is identified by our author as the moistness that comes from water, water whose creative power our author grounds in Holy Scripture, especially in the hexaemeral tradition of the story of creation from the book of Genesis.


Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 63-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland J. Teske

William of Auvergne became a master of theology in the University of Paris in 1223 and was appointed bishop of Paris by Gregory IX in 1228. William governed the church of Paris until his death in 1249, while continuing to write the works which constitute his immense Magisterium divinale et sapientiale. Despite the fact that he was the first of the thirteenth-century theologians to appreciate the value of the Aristotelian philosophy that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, his writings have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Étienne Gilson has sketched well the impact of the influx of Greek and Arabian philosophical works into the Christian West: Up to the last years of the twelfth century, when the Christian world unexpectedly discovered the existence of non-Christian interpretations of the universe, Christian theology never had to concern itself with the fact that a non-Christian interpretation of the world as a whole, including man and his destiny, was still an open possibility.


1892 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. S. Margoliouth

A pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called de pomo et morte incliti principis philosophorum Aristotelis has been printed several times in Europe, the earliest editions being without place or date. This work is a Latin translation of a Hebrew tract bearing the name “The Book of the Apple,” the translator being Manfred, King of Sicily (ob. 1266), or, as Steinschneider suggests, a Jew employed by him. The Hebrew text professes to be a translation from the Arabic made by R. Abraham B. Hisdai, an author who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. There are MSS. of B. Hisdai's work in the Vatican and at Oxford, and it has been repeatedly printed, first at Venice, 1519. It was republished with a new Latin translation and a copious but irrelevant commentary by J. J. Losius, at Giessen, in 1706.


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