Testante Aristotele (logic) and Circa communes passiones (grammar), unpublished didascalic compilations with “sophismatic” content
Reflexive chronicle of a significant discovery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34096/petm.num.esp.2025.17379Keywords:
Unpublished Didactic Texts, Faculty of Arts, Medieval Logic, Medieval Grammar, Exercitative FunctionAbstract
This article, in the form of a chronicle, focuses on two unpublished didascalic texts from the milieu of the thirteenth-century Faculty of Arts, presumably that of the University of Paris. Although these texts are anonymous, in the current state of research, they are clearly important for the study of medieval logic and grammar, if not in terms of the theoretical development of these disciplines, at least in terms of the practical development of their teaching. We have named these two texts after their incipit, respectively: Testante Aristotele (logic) and Circa communes passiones (grammar). Testante Aristotele was previously known only through a description provided by Lambert Marie de Rijk, based on an Erlangen manuscript: three other witnesses have now been discovered (one from Salamanca by René Létourneau, two by us, one from Pesaro and one from Prague). Circa communes passiones was totally unknown until its discovery by René Létourneau, in 2014, in the Salamanca manuscript: we add here our identification of two other manuscripts, those of Erlangen and Prague, which means, notably, that in three out of four manuscripts Testante Aristotele and Circa communes passiones constitute a textual duo. Testante Aristotele, the treatise on which we place most emphasis and which is structured around ten theses, is presented under the aegis of Aristotle’s Sophistic Refutations, and could just as easily be characterized as belonging to the sophistic genre (in fact antisophistic) than sophismatic (the Prague manuscript calls it Decem sophismata), not to mention its link, explained in the article, with the literary genre De modo opponendi et respondendi. In this respect, among others, we suggest that Testante Aristotele and Circa communes passiones may testify to a fourth, ‘exercitative’ or ‘gymnastic’ function, of didascalic texts (in addition to the theoretical, practical and ideological functions already suggested by our earlier work). We are currently preparing a critical edition and French translation of Testante Aristotele and Circa communes passiones.
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