Scholar printer Aldus Manutius (Teobaldo Mannucci) of Venice issued Aristotle's Opera omnia in Greek in five volumes, often bound in six.
The Aldine editio princeps of Aristotle's collected works, containing all but the Poetics and On Rhetoric, appeared at the close of a century that had witnessed a strong revival in Greek and humanistic studies; it was the first major Greek prose text to be reintroduced to the Western world in its original language by means of the printing press. In addition to the Aristotelian works, the five volumes contain works by Theophrastus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyrius and Philon the Jew, along with the spurious De historia philosophia attributed to Galen.
" 'The Aldine Aristotle' remains, in terms of the labour involved and the magnificence of the result, the greatest publishing venture of the fifteenth century. The centrality of Aristotle in intellectual life of the time can hardly be overstressed. In Latin dress he lay at the heart of any university course in philosophy, as dominant at the end of the Quattrocento as in the preceding three hundred years. The humanist return ad fontes, to the original unobscured by imprecise translation and the encrustations of scholastic commentary, was the indispenable background to the edition. . . .
"Certain important Aristotelian works were as yet unfindable, notably the Rhetoric and the Poetics—Aldus was later to print the first Greek editions of both. The second volume is largely taken up with the works of Theophrastus, the sucessor of Aristotle in the Athenian Lyceum. . . . (Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (1999) 20-22.
Dibner, Heralds of Science, no. 73. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 38. Renouard, Aldus Manutius, pp. 7-9. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 70.
Filed under: Book History, Education / Reading / Literacy / Scholarship, Publishing, Science
