Reductio ad auctoritatem. The Medieval Reception of Pseudo-Aristotle's Epistola ad Alexandrum

This article focuses on the reception of the so-called Epistola ad Alexandrum,a Greek-Latin translation of the dedicatory letter and the opening lines of the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, which was probably made by William of Moerbeke (d. 1286), and circulated as a part of the Corpus Recentius at the University of Paris. By analysing the manuscripts that contain the Epistola as well as studying quotations of the text in florilegia and in other texts, I will argue that medieval and early modern readership essentially reduced the Epistola to some nice-sounding sentences but that it was exactly this evolution that guaranteed its survival for centuries to come.

Publication year:2017

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