Interpreting the Ancients

Riccardo Saccenti, University of Bologna

Since its early translation into Latin in the mid-12th century, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics played a major role in shaping moral discourse within European philosophical thought. While it was certainly one of the primary subjects of study in medieval universities, its impact extended well beyond the cultural exchange between masters and students. From the second half of the thirteenth century onwards, vernacular epitomes and rearrangements of the text’s content began to appear, particularly within the intellectual framework of Italian communes.

This paper aims to explore the various readings and uses of Aristotle’s great moral treatise, examining both their differences and their mutual interconnections. It does so by analyzing specific manuscripts—both of the vernacular epitomes and of the Latin translations and commentary traditions. The focus will be on the reception of the Ethics in central and northern Italy, especially in major intellectual centers such as Florence, Bologna, and Padua, where university masters lectured on the Ethics. Attention will also be paid to the lectores of the mendicant studia generalia, who engaged deeply with the text, as well as to how its content was integrated into the thought of leading intellectuals of the time.

This approach allows for a better understanding of the significance of the Aristotelian legacy—not only for the development of philosophical discourse, but also for shaping the intellectual milieu that underpinned the civil and political life of the Italian communes on the threshold of the Renaissance.

David Lines, University of Warwick

This paper argues that one of the ways in which Aristotelianism lost a good portion of its reputational authority in the seventeenth century, at least in the physical sciences, was through an intensified use of questions. I will look specifically at a series of related material preserved in the Kislak Center and representative of the situation in Catholic Italy and Germany. I will show that the analysis of Aristotelian texts that characterized university lectures in the previous period gave way to an increasing focus on topics and questions. These enabled treatments of scientific problems whose solution did not necessarily depend (as in the past) on a direct interpretation of Aristotle’s works or the reconciliation of authorities. This approach opened the door for the classroom to become a place of discussion of the views of contemporary (or near-contemporary) thinkers as well as new directions suggested by experimental science, among others.

Stephanie Ann Frampton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Erasmus wrote of it as “three little books of pure gold.” Pliny the Elder as among books that one “ought to learn by heart, not just hold in your hand every day.” Petrarch lists it among the titles in his personal library, as do Ambrose, Hernando Colón, and John Adams. More than seven hundred manuscript copies are known, dating from twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. It was the first secular, classical text printed in Europe and appeared in seventy separate editions before 1500. Most often circulated alongside companion treatises Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Senectute, and De Amicitia, both manuscript and print copies are frequently annotated with extensive readers’ marks and marginalia. Focusing on literary and especially bibliographical traces of reading and reception, as well as on the work’s significant Aristotelian debts, this paper explores the outsized and yet still underappreciated impact that Cicero’s De Officiis had on post-classical readers up to the early modern period, from the 1400s to the 1600s, from Brescia to Boston.

Andrew Hicks, Cornell University

Although the transmigration of souls was taboo in medieval philosophical and theological thought, the World Soul from Plato's Timaeus was granted leave to wander far and wide. Late-antique diagrams of the World Soul's numerical structure were frequently copied into contingent and ancillary manuscript spaces (flyleaves, pastedowns, blank folios, and other marginal spaces), and the anima mundi was reborn into new mathematical and musical corpora, including surprisingly practical texts about chant performance. The World Soul thereby not only animated the macrocosmic world fashioned by the Platonic Demiurge but also lent its harmonies to the musical lives of men and women religious in the early Middle Ages. This contribution maps the transmigration of ancient Platonic cosmology from the late-antique exegesis of Calcidius, Macrobius, and Boethius into the quadrivial books of medieval schools and cloisters, which has striking implications for our understanding of the complex intersections of philosophical and musical experimentation in the early Middle Ages.

Ahuvia Goren, The Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem

In the Talmud—the central text of Jewish law and theology—the religious dissenter or heretic is known as an apikoros. Despite the phonetic similarity to the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE), a direct link between the two figures was only explicitly proposed in the medieval period, and even then, as just one interpretive possibility among several.

In early modernity, particularly in Italy, renewed engagement with classical sources through humanist scholarship prompted a reexamination of Epicurus and his relevance to the Talmudic apikoros among Jewish thinkers. As in contemporary Christian thought, Jewish thinkers in this period both condemned and reinterpreted Epicureanism, at times using Epicurus’ legacy to denounce contemporary forms of unbelief, and at other times to defend philosophical or theological positions.

The talk traces this understudied discourse, which remained mostly in manuscript form. It argues that familiarity with new scholarship on ancient philosophy enabled early modern Jewish thinkers not only to reject the perceived dangers of Epicurean thought, but also to selectively adopt aspects of it—such as mechanical philosophy and the emphasis on spiritual over material pleasures—in service of their own intellectual agendas.

Christian Brockmann, Universität Hamburg

Presenting a number of outstanding Greek Aristotelian manuscripts, the talk will shed light on the particular complexities involved in analysing multilayered written artefacts. The fact that the treatises of the Aristotelian Organon have been a central subject of instruction in the Byzantine culture is clearly reflected in the codices produced, used and transmitted during this time. These manuscripts were usually produced to combine the core text with huge commentaries, which is why producers had to allocate substantial space for the commentary portions in the layout of the single pages right from the start. But the explanatory paracontent was not always or not in all places added in the first production stages, so that in some cases large margins were left blank that had to be filled in by later generations of scholars. Another characteristic of the long use and lifespan of these manuscripts is that they were repeatedly reworked, corrected and enriched by webs of annotations. Due to these continuing processes, Organon manuscripts became prime examples of multilayered written artefacts. The talk will highlight the challenges and rewards that working with these manuscripts can offer.

Abdulaziz Alotaibi, University of Pennsylvania

This paper examines LJS 459, an unstudied Arabic manuscript of the Sirr al-Asrār (Secret of Secrets), housed in the University of Pennsylvania’s Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection. Attributed to Aristotle and framed as advice to Alexander the Great, the Sirr was one of the most influential pseudo-Aristotelian works in the medieval Islamicate world. As it circulated in manuscript form, Aristotle’s persona was reimagined as a master of esoteric political and cosmological knowledge, deeply embedded in Persianate ethical and statecraft traditions.

Produced in Mosul between 1193–1211 CE under Zangid patronage, LJS 459 offers new insights into the manuscript transmission of the Sirr. Its illuminated dedication to Nūr al-Dīn Arslān Shāh and variant titles signal a courtly context, while its unique marginalia and codicological features reflect centuries of scholarly engagement. One striking rubricated line—“and in it is the Secret of Secrets, known by the Eight”—is found only in this manuscript (based on an inductive survey of extant witnesses) and appears directly above the diagram of the Octagon of Justice. This passage presents the Persian ideal of just rulership as the esoteric core of the treatise, further establishing the Sirr al-asrār as a fusion of political instruction and occult science—a guide for imperial authority grounded in hidden knowledge.

Through ultraviolet and transmitted light imaging, the manuscript reveals layers of repair, annotation, and devotional Persian verse. While the material analysis focuses on LJS 459, the broader argument concerns the Sirr al-Asrār tradition it exemplifies: a corpus in which Aristotle is not merely a transmitter of ancient wisdom but a figure reinvented as a cosmological and political guide for Islamicate rulers. In LJS 459, this reinvention takes on a distinctly Persianate hue—visible in its embrace of motifs like the Octagon of Justice and in its integration of Persian scribal culture—marking a sharp departure from the historical Aristotle’s ambivalence toward Persian political models. As such, the manuscript provides a vivid case study of how the codex functioned as a medium not simply of reception, but of recontextualization and transformation in the long conversation with antiquity.

Christine Roughan, Princeton University

In the thirteenth century CE, the famed astronomer Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī set out to produce new Arabic editions of a cluster of originally Greek texts. These were works which by his time had already seen long circulation and study in Arabic: Ptolemy's Almagest, Euclid's Elements, and the whole of the "Middle Books" (Kutub al-Mutawassiṭāt) astronomical curriculum.

In his prefaces, al-Ṭūsī comments on several editorial choices that were motivated by the reality that the texts he edited were ones in active use, their propositions commonly cited by number in scholarly discussions or commentary. Al-Ṭūsī's comments are informative, but he was far from the only scholar to edit these works. This paper will examine several cases among the varied Arabic recensions of the Middle Books (including those of al-Ṭūsī) to illuminate how these works were shaped by the intersection of their curricular context and of the manuscript culture that circulated them.

Fabio Pagani, Catholic University of America

The role played by the re-discovery of Plato in the philosophical and intellectual life of the fifteenth and sixteenth century can hardly be overstated. Within this large and complex phenomenon, a crucial role was played by Byzantine scholar Gemistos Pletho (ca. 1360 - 1452). However, this figure has long proven controversial among scholars, who interpreted him in vastly different ways (Neopagan, bizarre Christian, radical philosopher, learned classicist). The discovery of Gemistos’ working edition of Plato allows us now to better understand Gemistos’ complex personality and the assumptions he made while working on the text of Plato. As I am going to argue, Gemistos’ role was both philosophical and philological. In fact, the mutual interaction of these two approaches is precisely what makes his work most fascinating.  

Elisa Coda, University of Pisa

In the history of Aristotelianism, the paraphrase of Aristotle’s On the Heavens by the fourth-century rhetorician and philosopher Themistius (d. ca 389 AD)  is widely acknowledged. The Greek original, however, is lost. Only a medieval Hebrew version carried out on the basis of an Arabic version, in itself lost, survives. An Early Renaissance Latin version was carried out on the basis of the Hebrew text. This paper outlines the nature of the Hebrew version by means of an examination of National Central Library of Florence, Ms. II.II.528 and discusses also an example of the Latin translation of the Hebrew text.

Priyamvada Nambrath, University of Pennsylvania

Kerala’s medieval mathematical tradition stretches across several centuries in a chain of teacher-student relationships that are attested in textual sources of the period. These mathematicians routinely quote the findings of their predecessors, both from their own lineage and from elsewhere, in their own compositions. The practice of quoting words or verses without explicitly naming the source is well-established commentarial practice, common to mathematical and non-mathematical genres across the subcontinent. In my talk, I survey a range of such instances in one sixteenth-century vernacular mathematical text, the Gaṇita Yuktibhāṣā,  that quotes extensively and exclusively from Sanskrit sources. I suggest that the rarity of attributions is itself a marker of respectful homage to earlier preceptors, as the scholarly community was expected to be able to recognize the provenance of quotations, in a culture that prioritized memorization. In its turn, the vernacular Yuktibhāṣā also became a quotable object, either partially or in full, and was subsequently reabsorbed into the Sanskrit canon.

Jeffrey Moser, Brown University

Walk into any museum gallery of ancient Chinese art today and you will find ceramic urns, bronze ritual vessels, and ceremonial implements sculpted from jade. Ask any scholar about the philosophy and literature of ancient China and you will hear citations from the Classic of Poetry, the Record of Rites, and the Analects of Confucius. Today our understanding of ancient Chinese civilization is built on these two great categories of evidence: one material, the other textual. The first was recovered by modern archaeologists and their antiquarian predecessors—scholars who studied the material remains of the past. The second was transmitted orally, then as manuscripts written on scrolls, then as woodblock-printed books, and finally in modern typeset and digital editions. Today, these two categories of evidence are equally vital: one cannot imagine writing a history of ancient China without recourse to the millions of artifacts that archaeologists have prized from the earth, nor to the enormous archive of ancient texts that scholars have passed down to the present.

Joshua O’Driscoll, The Morgan Library and Museum

By the mid-fifteenth century, the game of Tarot—a Renaissance invention—had developed into a standard format that is still recognizable today. Building on the structure of “regular” decks of playing cards, which were introduced to Europe only in the late fourteenth century, Tarot decks include an additional set of hierarchically arranged figural cards known as triumphs (or trumps) that represent the game’s defining feature. The imagery of these special cards famously draws on a broad range of Renaissance visual culture from jugglers, traitors, popes, and emperors, to personifications of virtues, heavenly bodies, and more cosmic forces like fortune, death, and time. Less well known, however, are the offshoots of this tradition, the variations and ad-hoc creations that had no lasting legacy but can nevertheless provide important insights into how Tarot was conceptualized and viewed by contemporary audiences. In a remarkable contrast to the main tradition of Tarot, these experimental forms of the game consistently rely on the ancient world for both their imagery and their subject matter. Considering works like the decks devised by Marziano da Tortona and Matteo Boiardo, the idiosyncratic Sola Busca deck and the enigmatic set of prints known as the Mantegna Tarot, this talk explores the intersection of antiquity with the new medium of playing cards.

Andrew Griebeler, Duke University

Ancient botanical authorities were vague when it came to fungus. Then classified as a plant, fungus nevertheless tested the limits of what could be called a plant. Written in the first century CE, Dioscorides’ De materia medica offered only cursory information on fungal organisms such as lichens, mushrooms, agarikon, and truffles. Ambiguity permeates both the textual and the illustrated traditions in both Greek and Arabic herbals. This talk explores how this apparent insufficiency necessitated the import of other, notably local and non-elite, knowledges. Through analysis of fungal organisms depicted in illustrated Greek and Arabic copies of Dioscorides, this talk argues that medieval users addressed the fungal limitations of the ancient botanical tradition through selective textual and pictorial additions that drew upon these other knowledges. This selective adaptation of pictorial and textual contents further suggests strategies for modern scholars to identify how traces of local and traditional ecological knowledges might appear within more conservative, text-centered, and elitist intellectual traditions.

Anne D. Hedeman, University of Kansas

Visual translation - the process by which images helped stories set in the past or in a different culture come alive and be current to a medieval reader - can only be properly understood within the framework of the history of the book. How a book’s message was created requires an analysis of the physical object (the book itself) and of the relationships between those involved in its making and the expectations of the intended audience. This paper is a case study that examines Laurent de Premierfait’s visual translation of representations of pagan gods in the densely illuminated copy of Statius’s Achilleid and Thebaid (London, BL Burney 257) made circa 1405 in Paris for an unknown noble patron and illustrated by 129 illuminations painted by at least four artists. Laurent helped craft these images with the artists, and their distinctive visualizations helped shape the reception of the illuminated classical texts that began to find a place in noble collections in France. The collaboration helped Laurent himself develop an increasingly sophisticated approach to the integration of text and images that he exploited just a few years later in the illustrations of his own translations of Boccaccio into French.