The heart of medieval scholarship: the authoritative statements of Aristotle

Aristotle / Johannes de Fonte. Praepositiones universales Aristotelis [Auctoritates Aristotelis, Parvi Flores].

€ 35,000.00

A beautifully bound, meticulously penned compendium of the works of Aristotle in Latin, here in a rare variant of their most popular form in the later Middle Ages.

The so-called Parvi Flores were the dominant collection of Aristotelian florilegia, which circulated under various titles, mainly Auctoritates Aristotelis. In Italy, the collection was somewhat different and bore the title Praepositiones Aristotelis, which is shared by this volume, written in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. A selection of passages from the Aristotelian corpus are offered, along with brief commentary, as well as some selections from other authors such as Seneca, Boethius, and Averroes.

This manuscript is distinguished by the presence of a different prologue ("Alexander magnus rex fertur magistrum habuisse acutissimum philosophum [...]"), which the text's modern editor, Jacqueline Hamesse, lists as shared by only two other manuscripts (Hamesse 1974, p. 46, n. 6) and two northern Italian incunabula of 1476 and 1488. To these we can add a manuscript of similar date in the Abbey of Melk (Cod. 1834). Against the backdrop of a textual tradition of nearly 200 manuscripts and around 40 incunabula, a version of the text with this prologue is thus extremely rare, particularly in manuscript form.

A notable feature of this volume is the preservation of the handsome contemporary (since repaired) binding, made of wooden boards half-bound with leather and a fragmentarily preserved clasp. The front interior bears the date 1539 underneath the name "Julius (Giulio) Zoboli", which is also found written on the first folium and two other places in the volume, once next to the date 1499. The back bears an offset of another manuscript written in a hand of the fifteenth century, with few words fully legible but seemingly of a poem in Latin, which must have once been used as a paste-down. At the back there is a table of contents and four pages of handwritten notes by Zoboli.

The Parvi Flores were originally compiled sometime between 1267 and 1325 by Johannes de Fonte, a Franciscan scholar and teacher active at Montpellier. They were particularly designed for use in faculties of arts and schools of the preaching orders, and achieved wide circulation throughout the west, but particularly in German-speaking Europe. Previously they had been attributed to the Italian scholar Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1270-1342) or the English scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (ca. 1275-1345), but following the work of Jacqueline Hamesse, the attribution to Johannes de Fonte is now well established.

The Latin West barely knew the works of Aristotle before the sixth century AD, and even after this point, only the Categories and On Interpretation were known, in Boethius' translation. In the twelfth century, the increasing opening of intellectual channels to the Islamic world allowed for a rapid transmission of vast amounts of the Aristotelian corpus to the West, translated from Arabic and Greek. This resulted in a revolution in western intellectual culture, described by some as the "twelfth-century Renaissance", and for the rest of the Middle Ages, no thinker would enjoy such great authority: any reference merely to "the Philosopher" could be none other than Aristotle.

Aristotelian philosophy formed the basis of the works of the greatest thinkers of the High Middle Ages, such as William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas, and through the latter's influence in particular, it came to provide the intellectual framework for modern Catholic thought.

A compendium of the work of Aristotle, such as this one, was an extremely handy source of authoritative statements, valuable for philosophers, theologians, and students of natural science alike. An elegant, concise volume that represents the centrepiece of western medieval philosophy.