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  • Lecture

From Ethics to Philology and Back: The Fortune of Taddeo Alderotti’s Liber ethicorum between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Riccardo Saccenti, Università degli Studi di Bergamo & SIMS 2022-2023 Visiting Research Fellow

Presented in partnership with the Center for Italian Studies.

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October 27, 2022, 5:15pm - 6:30pm
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NEW LOCATION: Seminar Room 627, Kislak Center, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 6th floor
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Open to the Public
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Manuscript opening of Taddeo Alderotti's translation of the Summa Alexandrinorum with a decorative roundel in red, green, and gold.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics plays a crucial role in the intellectual history of Latin Europe and its impact was not limited to the universities. Brunetto Latini used an abridgment of Aristotle’s Ethics, the so-called Summa Alexandrinorum or Liber ethicorum, in his Tresor and the same text was translated into Italian by Taddeo Alderotti, spreading the Aristotelian ethics among the urban culture in Italy. Making use of three manuscripts and a printed edition of this Liber Ethicorum preserved at Penn Libraries, it is possible to go through the diffusion of this text, evaluating its impact in the building of the moral behaviour of the Italian and European elites between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries.

Riccardo Saccenti

Riccardo Saccenti  teaches the history of medieval philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. His interests concern the relationship between medieval doctrines on the law of nature and the teaching of the church (7th-14th centuries). He has been a team member of the ERC ‘Authority and Innovation in Early Franciscan Thought’ project at King’s College London. He published a critical edition of John of La Rochelle’s Quaestiones disputatae de legibus and his monographs include studies on the moral doctrines between the 12th and 13th centuries. 

Headshot of Riccardo Saccenti

Image: Taddeo Alderroti's Leticha del magnio filosefo Aristotile, UPenn Ms. Codex 243, fol. 1r.