RISULTATI RICERCA

The author’s point of departure is Alf Ross’s analysis of ownership as a tool of presentation for a set of disjunctive conditioning facts and conjunctive legal consequences. The author first analyses Ross’s conjunctive component, and shows that, if one adopts the perspective of Polish-Russian legal realism, it can be provided with a full-blown meaning. Then, the disjunctive component is discussed. By drawing inspiration from prototype theory, the author argues that a specific set of disjunctive conditioning facts and of conjunctive legal consequences can be regarded as making up the core - albeit in a gradual way - of ownership phenomena, provided that one restricts them to movables. Finally, the author presents two Freudian hypotheses that can explain the emergence of the prototype of ownership. This explanation is based on the way babies conceive of their bodily parts and feces. Based on that, an archeotype (i.e., archaic conception) of ownership is proposed.

The rise of the vernacular as a language of culture in Italy after the 1540s was accompanied by a contamination of genres within the activity of translation. Ambiguously shifting from commentary to paraphrase, from exposition to "proper" translation, the introduction of Aristotle’s works into the realm of the Italian vernacular, in particular, offers a vast range of different textual solutions. This paper will consider the case-study of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, who in his Retorica (1559) explicitly refuses to publish a translation of the Aristotelian work. Nonetheless his treatise offers lengthy renderings of the Aristotelian text in the vernacular as well as other classical authorities (Cicero and Hermogenes in particular). This option responds not only to theoretical considerations about the possibility of producing a "good" translation, but also to the practical use of the work, conceived by Cavalcanti as a handbook for modern diplomats.

Giulio Ballino, a little-known sixteenth-century Venetian translator from Greek into Italian, was trained as a young man in the household of Paolo Manuzio. His scholarly ambitions were foiled by the need to earn his living as a lawyer as well as by flaws in his character. Nevertheless, he produced vernacular versions of Philo Judaeus’s Life of Moses, the sermons of St Basil the Great and a collection of moral works, which included the Enchiridion of Epictetus, a tract from Plutarch’s Moralia and the pseudo-Aristotelian On the Virtues and Vices. An analysis of his version of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise shows that he did not follow his own pronouncements on translation but that his techniques were well suited to vernacular readers who were unlikely to be familiar with Aristotelian philosophy and who were seeking entertainment as well as enlightenment.

Aristotle presented an influential theory for the explanation of comets in his work entitled Meteorologica. This work and the cometary theory within have had an unaltered fortune which lasted for more than a millennium, up to their Renaissance acme and subsequent progressive dismissal. The present article focuses on the developlment of the Aristotelian "after-effects" cometary theory as evolved in Italian vernacular translations, metaphrases, commentaries on Meteorologica and Italian vernacular cometary treatises in general, from Angelo de Forte’s Dialogo de le comete et loro effetti nel mondo (1533) to Scipione Chiaramonti’s Discorso della cometa pogonare (1619). In the analysis are taken into account also several medical treatises of the time, both in Latin and in the vernacular, that recurringly studied cometary aftereffects from an epidemiological and preventive point of view. Passing through such a long reworking period of the Aristotelian cometary ideas will be useful to assess at the end of this span of time Mario Guiducci’s and Galileo Galilei’s critical confutation of the theory on its own grounds as proposed in their famous Discorso sulle comete.

In a passage in the Meteorology (359a16-­22) Aristotle says that some authors µ????????s? (which was usually translated as «fabulantur») about the Dead Sea and its properties. The interpretation of the verb was less innocent than one might expect, as demonstrated by oscillations in its translation, and by some later debates about the compatibility of Aristotle with Scripture in that context. In particular, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the debate on the meaning of the verb divided the Franciscan Mattia Ferchio (1583-­1669) and the arch-­Aristotelian Fortunio Liceti (1577-­1657). At stake was no less than Aristotle’s reputation as a natural philosopher and as a man of religion. This paper aims to investigate the story of the rendition of the passage in Latin and vernaculars, in order to reconstruct Ferchio and Liceti’s respective agendas.

This article explores the sixteenth-century reception of Aristotle’s Meteorology in relation to contemporary theories of translation and textual reception. Fausto da Longiano’s Meteorologia (1542) and his literary theory are taken as salient points for a discussion of the forms and genres of vernacular Aristotelianism. While translations have been the subject of numerous studies, less attention has been paid to vernacular texts that tread the line between translation and other forms of metatextual discourse, such as compendia, paraphrases, metaphrases, dialogues, discorsi, poems, and others. This study seeks to contribute to the understanding of this relevant section of the Italian Aristotelian corpus by reconsidering the work of one of the most prominent literary theorist of sixteenth-century Italy.

This article investigates the claims made in the dedicatory epistle to Girolamo Manfredi’s De homine (also known as Il libro del perché) to have effected an Italian translation of various earlier works. First published in 1474, the De homine is strongly dependent on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, for which several translations into Latin were available by Manfredi’s time as well as the highly influential commentary by Pietro d’Abano. Focusing on one particular section of the De homine (II.x), on voice, this article offers an analysis of the various sources used and of the extent to which Manfredi is indeed offering a translation or something different. This study concludes that Manfredi closely followed the translation by Bartolomeo da Messina and the commentary by Pietro d’Abano; it finds no clear evidence of his use of the translations by George of Trebizond or Theodore Gaza. Other sources used include especially Rhazes’ Ad Almansorem.

For modern historians of criticism, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics was decisive in popularizing a definition of «poetry» that hinged on fictiveness rather than verse, a definition typically associated with «modern» as opposed to «medieval» poetics. Renaissance critics and translators, however, approached the crucial passage in the Poetics with more caution than this triumphal narrative would suggest. The Greek text was problematic and appeared to contradict the obvious truth about ancient epic;; lacking a word for «literature» in general, Aristotle was forced to communicate in terms that obfuscated as much as they clarified. When the Poetics arrived in England, moreover, it met a lexicon of «verse», «poetry», and «feigning» that had its own internal coherence, and prompted deep reflection on the relationship of classical poetics to modern literary composition. This paper explores the intersections of these new Aristotelian categories with long-­standing English taxonomies of literary composition, and their consequences in modern critical historiography.

The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Peri kosmou or De mundo is not a text of great philosophical interest, but it was very important for French Renaissance culture, in a time when none of Aristotle’s treatises of natural philosophy was available in French. This short pedagogical text was translated into Latin by Guillaume Budé in 1526, and into French for the first time as early as 1541 by the French grammarian Louis Meigret (Le Livre du monde faict par Aristote et envoyé à Alexandre le Grand). In spite of this first French translation, the Calvinist theologian Lambert Daneau translated it once more (Traitté du monde et des plus nobles et principales parties d’icelui) and published it in a book entitled Physique françoise (1581), along with Basil of Cæsarea’s Homilies and fragments of John of Damascus. This article focuses on Daneau’s translation, which raises several questions: Why publish the translation in a book called Physique françoise? What were the issues of such a translation, made in order to restore a pious, Mosaic, natural philosophy? Did the context shape the way Daneau translated the text? What are the differences and similarities both with Meigret’s translation and with the humanistic Latin paraphrases by Budé?

This article explores the phenomenon of philosophical and scientific selftranslation in sixteenth-century France, focusing on the «astrophile» physician Antoine Mizauld (c. 1512-1578) - who, in the 1540s and 1550s, translated several of his own astrometeorological works from Latin into French but also placing Mizauld’s work in the broader context of sixteenth-century movements towards the vernacularization of philosophical knowledge. By paying as much attention to the textual and paratextual features of Mizauld’s self-translations as to Mizauld’s cultural milieus, marketing strategies, and possible goals in self-translating, the article aims at studying Renaissance self-translation not only as a literary practice but also as a social practice of cultural mediation, shaped by contextual pressures such as book market dynamics, changing reading publics, and the political implications of language use in a time of nationbuilding.

This paper analyses Ficino’s self-translation of his Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore (1469). After discussing the author’s position on language (in particular concerning the potentiality for Florentine vernacular of being a proper vehicle for philosophical discourse), the paper takes first into account the textual features shared by both the Latin and the vernacular versions, deeply rooted in some basic assumptions of Ficino’s thought. Then the proper translation strategies are considered. A spontaneous search for increasing the accessibility of the text, on the one hand, and for getting it closer to the naturalness of spoken language (possibly reducing philosophical technicality) on the other, appears to be the main guideline of the process of vernacularization: this is coherent with the general ideal, so praised by Ficino in this phase, of a non-scholastic, Socratic and dialectical philosophy.