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Robert Grosseteste as Translator, Transmitter, and Commentator: The ‘Nicomachean Ethics’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Jean Dunbabin
Jean Dunbabin*
Affiliation:
Southernwood, Combe Oxford
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Extract

Because Robert Grosseteste's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is now seen as having provided the framework for a dynamic study of Aristotle's moral philosophy, more significance must be attached to what itself became the standard translation in the Middle Ages. That Grosseteste was responsible both for the full translation of Aristotle's text and for the translation of the Greek commentaries which accompany the Ethics in twenty-one known manuscripts modern scholars are now in agreement. Grosseteste's work on the Nicomachean Ethics has been dated confidently to the 1240s, arguably to 1246–47, and scholars have tended to stress the rapidity with which the Aristotelian ethics were assimilated in the thirteenth century, in contrast, for example, with the slow progress recorded by John of Salisbury on the Posterior Analytics in the twelfth. These results of recent research seem, it should be notd in passing, strangely at odds with the verdict of Roger Bacon, that there was comparatively little work on the Ethics in his period. He, Grosseteste's most ardent admirer, appears not to have known that this master translated the text and comments: ‘Tardius communicata est Ethica Aristotelis et nuper lecta a magistris et raro.’

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Type
Miscellany
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Traditio , Volume 28 , 1972, pp. 460 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University Press 

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References

1 Lists of the manuscripts and editions of Grosseteste's works on the Aristotelian Ethics are provided by Harrison Thomson, S., The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235–1253 (Cambridge 1940) 65f. (Ethica), 68–70 (Greek comms.), 85f. (Notulae), 88 (Summa). Books I-II of the translation of the Ethics have been edited by H. P. F. Mercken, Aristoteles over de menselijke Volkomenheid (Brussels 1964), Books VIII-IX by W. Stinissen, Aristoteles over de Vriendschap (Brussels 1963). For citations of the text of these books these editions have been used; elsewhere I have used Oxford Balliol College MS 116, a late-thirteenth or early-fourteenth-century MS, in which the text of Grosseteste's work fills fols. 1r-266v. For the text of Grosseteste's Notulae I have used the following MSS: Eton College 122 (s. XIII) fols. 1r-221v; Oxford All Souls College 84 (s. XIII) fols. 10r-240v; Paris Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal 698 (s. XIII) fols. 3r-155v.Google Scholar

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8 Callus, ‘Robert Grosseteste’ 65.Google Scholar

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10 These texts have been edited by Marchesi, C., L'Etica Nicomachea Appendice l-xxvi (Ethica vetus), xxvii-xl (Ethica nova). Cf. Aristoteles latinus Codices I (Rome 1939) 67–71; II (Cambridge 1955) 788; Supplementa altera (Bruges-Paris 1961) 21.Google Scholar

11 Pelzer, ‘Les Versions latines’ 329–35.Google Scholar

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23 Franceschini, ‘Roberto Grossatesta’ 63–7.Google Scholar

24 Thomson, ‘The “Notule”’ 214.Google Scholar

25 Ibid. 204.Google Scholar

26 On the Florilegium see Franceschini, ‘Roberto Grossatesta’ 67 note 2.Google Scholar

27 E.g. Albertus Magnus, In I Ethicorum tr. VII cap. 8 (ed. Borgnet VII 118f.).Google Scholar

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29 Lottin, O., Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles I (2. éd.; Gembloux 1957) 515–19.Google Scholar

30 Ibid. 521f.Google Scholar