The Reception of Aristotle’s Study of Animal Motion in the Latin World

The De motu animalium and the De incessu animalium did not receive much attention in antiquity. Knowledge of these works seems to have been only indirect in the Arabic tradition. For their rediscovery we have to wait until the middle of the thirteenth century. Moerbeke translated both the De motu animalium and the De incessu animalium (the latter with the title De progressu animalium). His translations circulated widely. They initiated an intense debate on how these works contribute to Aristotle’s explanatory project. A critical edition of these translations is offered in the second of the two volumes under review (Aristoteles Latinus, XVII, 2, II-III). If Moerbeke was the first to translate the De progressu animalium, he was not the first to produce a translation of the De motu animalium. We know of an earlier, anonymous translation. A reconstruction of this now lost version, which is known only through the paraphrase produced by Albert the Great in his De principiis motus processivi, is attempted in the first of the two volumes under review (Aristoteles Latinus, XVII, 1, III).