Joëlle Ducos and Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, eds.Lire Aristote au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance.Réception du traitéSur la génération et la corruption. Colloques, congrès et conférences sur le Moyen Âge 10. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2011. 342 pp. €68. ISBN: 978–2–7453–2166–4.
The volume of papers devoted to the reception of Aristole’s De generatione et corruptione is an important contribution to the study of Aristotle in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The studies provide a thorough and interesting investigation of the reading, interpreting, and translating of Aristotle among philosophers, theologians, and poets. As the editors show in their preface, the work has long emerged as one of Aristotle’s ‘‘unloved’’ treatises, and it is only in recent years that researchers turned their interest to this text. The volume is highly valuable because of the deep analysis of the various aspects of its reception, and those who deal with Aristotle’s texts in their research of medieval and Renaissance philosophy, philology, and culture will find the book very interesting. The volume starts with a long introductory study written by the editors, who offer an analysis of the reading of De generatione et corruptione. The book is then divided into two periods, relating to translations and commentaries. The first part contains studies on translations, commentaries, and influences in various periods of the Middle Ages. Pieter De Leemans devotes his attention to medieval translations of De generatione et corruptione (Gerard of Cremona, Burgundio of Pisa, Guillaume of Moerbeke) and outlines commentaries by Averroes, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Sutton, and Gilles of Rome. The next two studies (by Bertrand Souchard and Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht) provide a wonderful illustration of Aquinas’s reading of the treatise against the background of physics, metaphysics, and theology. Bertrand Carroy continues on Aquinas and provides a subtle analysis of differences between Aquinas and Albert the Great’s commentaries. Joël Biard focuses on the commentaries as a place of epistemological reflection in some texts of the fourteenth century (Giles of Rome, John Buridan, Nicolas Oresme, Marsilius of Inghen, Blaise of Parma). The detailed study by Isabelle Draelants looks at the presence of the treatise in medieval encyclopedias in the first half of the thirteenth century (Alexander Nequam, Daniel de Morley, Thomas de Cantimpré, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Arnoldus Saxo, Vincent de Beauvais, the Compendium Philosophiae). The last study in the section is Joëlle Ducos’s analysis of De generatione et corruptione in relation to medieval commentaries on the Meteorology. The second part of the volume intensifies the debate concerning the growing interest in and concern about the treatise in philosophical and political thought in sixteenth-century Italy and France. This part of the volume might be seen as complementary to volume two of Latin Aristotle Commentaries by Charles Lohr,