Aristotle Transmitted: Reflections on the Transmission of Aristotelian Scientific Thought in the Middle Ages

摘要

This article focuses on the relation between translations and the transmission of scientific thought in the Middle Ages, and proposes a means to evaluate the degree of this transmission. It shows by examples that translations, on the one hand, and the reception of these translations, on the other hand, are intrinsically related phases of one and the same process of transmission. Both phases must be combined to measure whether or not transmission of scientific knowledge has actually taken place. This also requires insight into the social and intellectual contexts in which the translations were made, read, and used. Moreover, the article shows how the comprehensibility of texts and translations could be impeded by textual variants and discusses some strategies that medieval writers developed to solve the resulting problems. Throughout the article, examples are taken from Medieval Latin and vernacular translations of and commentaries on the works of the Corpus Aristotelicum.