This collection of essays is the result of a conference organised by the inter-university research centre GrAL that studies the transmission of philosophical and scientific texts from Late Antiquity to the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages. The series (Greco, Arabo, Latino: le vie del sapere) is already well known among scholars interested in the reception of Classical texts. The volume focuses on the interesting and much discussed topic of Aristotle's zoology, which, on one view, seems to disappear after the philosopher's death until Alberto Magno's De animalibus. This opinion is defended by J.G. Lennox, and the aim of the present book is to challenge it. As A. Falcon and C. Cerami noted recently (Antiquorum Philosophia 8 [2014], 35–56), the transmission of Aristotle's zoology is sometimes under the radar in Greek culture, but it flourishes in the Arab tradition, and this is the route by which it reaches Michael Scot and eventually Albertus Magnus. However, this complicated story of transmission is not one of a completely marginalised corpus of texts, and the authors of this book want to trace the permanence of this important part of Aristotle's reflection, which occupies a quarter of his extant works.

Sassi, in ‘I trattati di Aristotele “sugli animali”: nascita di una disciplina’, establishes some points on Aristotelian zoological treatises. Aristotle's reflection on this topic can be considered as the birth of zoology as a discipline worthy of theoretical attention and autonomous in its methodology. Whereas in the ethical works human beings are sharply opposed to animals, because they are the only animals that can, strictly speaking, act (πράττειν), in zoology there is a continuity between human beings and other animals, in so far as they both have the principle of movement in themselves, notwithstanding the superior and paradigmatic nature of human beings. Sassi highlights the tight bonds that link the treatises to the rest of the corpus and in particular to the Organon, the Metaphysics and the works on physics. This seems convincing in respect to the alleged problem of the relative chronology of the treatises. The division between the Historia animalium (HA) on the one hand and the De partibus animalium and the De generatione animalium on the other should thus be interpreted as a difference of scope. The former work is concerned with the science of the hoti, the knowledge of the facts concerning a science, which Aristotle gained from direct observation, medical writings and other sources; the latter constitutes the science of the dioti, namely of the causes of the information already acquired. In the same vein, Feola, in ‘Alcune considerazioni sull'ordinamento del corpus biologico di Aristotele’, considers modern interpretations of the dating of the treatises. Since it is impossible to reconstruct the original facies of Aristotle's works, and considering the peculiar and troubled history of their transmission, the scholar must be extremely careful in adopting evolutionary models, as W. Jaeger, F. Nuyens and, in a rather different fashion, D.M. Balme did in the last century. Feola defends the communis opinio that HA is a collection of data that Aristotle employed in other treatises, but HA is to be considered as the main trunk, whose branches are the specific works. Therefore, Aristotle did not consider HA as an ‘abandoned project’ once its metaphysics changed, and he never really stopped reworking it and adding new data until his death.

The other papers delve into the reception of Aristotle's legacy. T. Dorandi, in ‘La ricezione del sapere zoologico di Aristotele nella tradizione paradossografica’, analyses the paradoxographical tradition, in particular Antigonus’ Mirabilia, ps.-Aristotle's De mirabilibus auscultationibus and Aristophanes of Byzantium's Epitome. At the centre of Dorandi's argument is the denial of the identification of Antigonus with Antigonus of Carystus, claimed since Xylander and Wilamowitz. With solid arguments, Dorandi suggests a hypothetical dating towards the second–third century ad or even later, when an anonymous compiler collected and copied ancient materials, including excerpta from HA. Apart from this case, other works show a direct use of Aristotle's doctrines in Ptolemaic Alexandria and Attalid Pergamum, even though the reconstruction of specific ‘editions’ is almost impossible.

A different approach is adopted by P. Li Causi, in ‘Un Aristotele romano? Ricezione e metamorfosi del corpus zoologico in Plinio il Vecchio’, about Pliny the Elder. Instead of focusing on the intermediate sources of the author, Li Causi considers the representation of Aristotle in Pliny's environment during the writing of the Naturalis historia. The Aristotle known by the Romans is essentially an ethologist and the author of a collection of data and observations, a metamorphosis that Li Causi suggests started immediately after the philosopher's death with Theophrastus and Aristophanes of Byzantium. Pliny is thus involved in a complex dialogue with Aristotle. He thinks himself a successor in his project of cataloguing the living world, but he also corrects some wrong or incomplete information collected by Aristotle (or handed over to Pliny as genuinely Aristotelian) and gets rid of any theoretical excess.

L. Perilli, ‘Il bestiario di Galeno’, shows a radically different scenario with Galen. Galen had copies of Aristotle's works; he corrected and commented on them, made much use of his observations and acknowledged his debt to Aristotle. Galen had a primary interest in the study of the animal for dissection – inherited by Alexandrian medicine – and considered it an analogical model for the human being, more difficult to study for obvious reasons; however, it is interesting that Galen explicitly endorses Aristotle's conceptions of teleology, drawing some important consequences. In particular, his studies on animals isolate six classes, more or less similar to human beings (De anatomicis administrationibus 4.2–3: 2.422–30 Kühn and 6.3: 2.548, 1–549, 4 Kühn), starting from the ‘perfect ape’, the next step below us in the scala naturae: in this description Galen relies on Aristotle's terminology. The underlying idea of Galen's agenda is that a benevolent nature shows regularity, rationality and teleology and acts as a ‘single mind’ (ἕνα τὸν νοῦν). Therefore it is possible to hypothesise some bodily structures in animals never studied just by looking at their functions. But if Aristotle is fundamental for the taxonomy and the theoretical principles (integrated by the Platonic idea of a demiurgic activity), nonetheless he failed in some descriptions (e.g. for the ventricles of the heart) and is less useful for specific anatomical observations, which Galen preferred to take autoptically.

P. Hoffmann, in ‘I trattati di storia naturale e la zoologia nella classificazione neoplatonica degli scritti di Aristotele tra il V e il VI d.C.’, explores an uncertain path of Aristotle's reception, namely fifth–sixth centuries ad Neoplatonic commentaries by Ammonious, David-Elias, Simplicius, Olympiodorus and Philoponus. The zoological treatises do not disappear but are considered as ‘intermediate’ (μεταξύ) between particular (μερικά) and general (καθόλου) writings. Therefore they should be read, but the commentators did not comment on them in so far as they do not have the anagogic value towards the Universal that is afforded by the other treatises on nature (Phys., De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteor., De anima).

The special case of the oriental reception is tackled by H. Hugonnard-Roche, in ‘Les Livres sur les animaux d'Aristote dans la tradition syriaque: quelques aperçus’, and Coda, in ‘Il “Libro degli animali” (Kitāb al-ḤHayawān). Materiali di studio sulla zoologia aristotelica nel Medioevo arabo ed ebraico’. One of the key sources for the spread of Aristotle's zoology is the Arabic translation of the HA, De generatione animalium and De partibus animalium in the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (Book of Animals). Hugonnard-Roche reminds us that Ibn al-Nadīm mentions the existence of an ‘ancient Syriac translation’, earlier to that in Arabic ascribed to Ibn al-Biṭrīq. In addition, a wider audience might have been reached by epitomes like the one composed by Aristophanes of Byzantium, which disassembled Aristotle's criteria of classification, and other Greek materials. As Hugonnard-Roche shows well, one of the most intriguing parts of this line of transmission is the role of intermediary played by Basil of Caesarea and his commentary on the hexaëmeron, because it adds the imprint of Christianisation to the ethological and moral interest in zoological research. Coda considers more specifically the case of the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān. Coda registers the first attestations of the title in al-Kindī, addresses the problems of attribution of the translation and collects the information concerning lost and available compendia and commentaries (Avicenna, Avempace and Averroes) in Arabic and Hebraic circulation. Aristotle provided these cultural environments with a finalism intrinsic to nature, and his Book of Animals argues for the existence of an intelligent and providential project that governs the animal and its relation with human beings.

The last two essays cover the Medieval Latin reception. P. Bassiano Rossi, in ‘L'entrata dei libri De animalibus nel Medioevo latino’, sketches the diffusion of Aristotle from the twelfth century. The expansive impulse of Christianity in geographical, political and cultural border areas (Toledo, Byzantium and the Near East) made access to scientific traditions, including the Aristotelian heritage, considerably easier. Pivotal moments are Michael Scot's Arabic–Latin translation of De animalibus (c. 1215) and William of Moerbeke's Greek–Latin version from the middle of the thirteenth century. In particular, Scot's work had an immediate and considerable impact on the scientia de animalibus. Bassiano Rossi shows the Arabic influence of five prefaces to De animalibus (by Peter of Spain, Gérard du Breuil and three anonymous authors) in addressing the methodological issue arising from PA 1.

S. Perfetti's contribution, ‘La disseminazione del sapere sugli animali (dalla tarda antichità al XIII secolo) e l'iperaristotelismo di Alberto Magno’, aptly concludes the volume by revisiting the whole story in the last chapter, Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus libri XXVI. Again, Lennox's idea of a disappearance of Aristotle's zoology until Albertus Magnus, together with M.W. Tkacz's thesis that Albertus Magnus revives Aristotle's zoological research programme, is criticised. On the one hand, Perfetti investigates some significant cases of circulation of Aristotelian materials outside the universities (e.g. Thomas of Cantimpré’s De natura rerum) around Albertus Magnus’ time, on the other he questions the supposed continuity with Aristotle's science after a close scrutiny of the epistemological, methodological and operative differences between the two authors.

The overall quantity and quality of the information collected in the ten essays is impressive. So is the coherence of the project behind them: the idea that Aristotle's zoology did not abruptly disappear after his death, but that it was transformed over the centuries depending on the sometimes difficult circulation of the texts and on the cultural agenda of the authors and their time. For these reasons, this volume should be on the table of anyone interested in this fundamental part of the history of science.