A fifteenth-century neglected florilegium : Teofilo Ferrari’s Propositiones ex omnibus Aristotelis libris philosophie excerpte

Published in Venice in 1493, the Propositiones ex omnibus Aristotelis libris philosophie excerpte are an original but neglected collection of Aristotelian sayings. Authored by the Dominican friar Teofilo Ferrari (and completed by his brother Benedetto da Soncino), this collection is part of a larger publishing project inspired by Domenico Grimani and Antonio Pizzamano, two outstanding Venice patricians who supported the renewal of Aristotelianism and of Thomism, but were also interested in the growth of humanism. Breaking with the medieval tradition of florilegia, which gave a condensed and often deformed version of their sources, Ferrari relied systematically on Aristotle’s works and Aquinas’ commentaries, but he also devoted attention to textual and philological issues, used a few Greek terms and took advantage, however critically, of new Latin translations of humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Theodore Gaza, George of Trebizond and Antonio Beccaria. The Propositiones provide therefore evidence for interesting interactions between the so-called ‘scholastic’ and ‘humanistic’ Aristotelianism.