Review of Bryan Brazeau, ed. The Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Pp 299. ISBN 9781350078932. (original) (raw)

Aristotles Poetics by Jillian Godsil Jan 2015

This short essay will look at the definition of Aristotle's Tragedy, concentrating on the concept of mimesis, and what Aristotle meant by this term. In particular, I am interested in Aristotle's view that music was the highest form of mimesis. While there is some wriggle room in evaluating his principles in a modern context, I would agree that music has become more, and not less, important in the execution of mimesis and in the delivery of an emotional reaction in the audience. The erosion of key principles from Ancient Times has created a shift in how we evaluate his definition, in particular in the underpinning tenets of Aristotle's world.

Vernacular Encounters with Aristotle’s Politics in Italy, 1260‒1600

2015

This dissertation explores the use and dissemination of Aristotelian political theory in Italian literature from the late medieval period, when the first fragments of Aristotle’s political thought appeared in the West, to the sixteenth century, when vernacular Aristotelian literature flourished. I show how late medieval and Renaissance authors employed Aristotle’s Politics in various ways, according to their political background and allegiances, their approach to the text and their intended audience. I also demonstrate how, reciprocally, the vocabulary and classifications in the Politics shaped their understanding of their own political context. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter offers an overview, for comparative purposes, of the Latin and Greek reception of the Politics in Western Europe. The remaining chapters proceed chronologically. Chapter Two explores the place of the Politics in Italian vernacular literature of the late thirteenth and the fourteenth ...