Pseudo-Aristotle was, one might say, a man of many faces. He was a great imposter and a master of disguise. He was fluent in multiple languages. Already of a venerable age when he first came to Latin Europe on a number of visits during the twelfth century, he showed up again repeatedly in the century that followed. There were many times when scholars accepted him as being the Stagirite himself; welcomes were typically warm. His writings, what historians call collectively pseudo-Aristotelica or Aristotelian spuria, were mixed in with the genuine Aristotelian corpus, sometimes even with a claim to be part of an authentic work. Separating them out has required a lot of time and effort. A few might be with us still. The major instances of unmasking occurred from the thirteenth century into the Early Modern era. The authenticity of several texts or portions of texts remains an issue to this day in Aristotelian scholarship.
Modern awareness of the importance of pseudo-Aristotelica in the Middle Ages can be said to begin in 1939 with the formal inclusion of some of these texts in what would grow to be the great three-volume repertorium, Aristoteles Latinus. Codices. [1] The 1985 publication Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus both built and expanded upon this important foundation. [2] These two scholarly tools proved to be crucial for what has been a great flowering of studies on this fascinating part of medieval intellectual history. The volume under review here is just one example of the fine work that has been done over the last several decades on the topic.
The volume includes an Introduction, thirteen articles, and a double Index (Names, Manuscripts).
The Introduction combines what we often see in a Preface, namely, background information on a book’s genesis (in this case, a conference intended to call attention to the Center of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University In Cluj-Napoca, Romania), and the kind of introductory matter that often fronts a volume such as this one, with a substantive paragraph devoted to each article. There are no concluding remarks either here or at the end of the volume. The present review will attempt to provide something of a corrective to this shortcoming after some preliminary comments in the paragraph just below.
The contents of “proceedings” volumes are typically varied, just like the conferences on which they are based; the challenge for an editor then becomes locating a common theme or raison d’être for the volume that is accurately reflected in a focused title. Pseudo-Aristotelian Texts in Medieval Thought is rather broad, promising more than it delivers; Studies on... would have more accurately described what we find within. The volume includes articles on the following pseudo-Aristotelian texts: Secretum secretorum (3); De causis (2) and the related Theology (1); De pomo (2); De plantis (1); De inundatione Nili (1); De mundo (1). There is also an article on Albert the Great’s use of pseudo-Aristotelian texts. [3] The volume’s first article, “Translating and Reading Pseudo-Aristotle in the Latin West” by Pieter De Leemans (†) and Lisa Devriese, serves as a kind of second Introduction all its own, giving us an excellent survey of where things stood ca. 2020 with respect to pseudo-Aristotelica translated into Latin. Of the thirteen articles, eleven treat the Latin tradition; one concerns the Hebrew tradition, another the Arabic and Hebrew together. All but one of the articles are in English (the exception is in German). Finally, note that the vernacular tradition, wherein Pseudo-Aristotle enjoyed a separate, impressive reception, isn’t represented here.
Taken together, the articles in the volume provide an abundance of confirmatory evidence for the large role that Aristotelian spuria played in the life of the Schoolmen. A few of the spuria had major careers (De causis; Secretum secretorum); most were minora, though many of these received not insignificant notice. They were mentioned of a variety of the debates in which the Schoolmen engaged, including a few that dominated discourse for several centuries. They were often part of the manuscripts that the Schoolmen owned and used. They were sometimes taught in universities, sometimes the subject of written commentaries, and sometimes cited in other kinds of publications. On occasion they had a noticeable impact on a scholar’s position re this or that issue. No survey of scholasticism generally or Aristotelianism specifically during the Middle Ages can satisfactorily proceed without taking the widespread presence of Pseudo-Aristotle into account.
Along with what is described in the preceding paragraph, there is another way, albeit much less discussed, that these spuria impacted the Schoolmen. The Schoolmen saw the corpus Aristotelicum as a tightly organized system. They also had some historical sense that what had been whole during Aristotle’s lifetime subsequently traveled via multiple paths of transmission over many centuries’ time to come to them broken up into pieces. The scholastic project of Aristotelian exegesis, which included reading Aristotle closely, comparing texts and passages, and trying to discern Aristotle’s intention, had as its goal putting it all back together again and restoring the integrity of the system. To have pieces mixed in that did not belong complicated the task enormously. Simply stated, it forced the Schoolmen to think philologically to a degree they had not done before. The Schoolmen were made aware of the problem of Aristotelian spuria because of what their predecessors in Antiquity and the Islamic world had told them. Those same predecessors had provided hints for dealing with the problem. In the event, the Schoolmen were able to up their critical game, with the consequence that most of the Aristotelian spuria passed on to them were at least suspected as such by the end of the Middle Ages, and some of them were known outright by the majority of scholars as not Aristotle’s work.
A wonderful close-up from Schlatt, Eisenbibliothek, Ms 20 (s. xiii 3/3), fol. 29r graces the volume’s front cover—the image that begins Pseudo-Aristotle De bona fortuna. We see, fittingly enough, God in control of Fortune’s Wheel, with three persons hanging on as it takes them (and us) around. The background is gold leaf. It is worth noting that the first part of this MS includes five other pseudo-Aristotelian texts—Secretum secretorum, De pomo, De coloribus, Physiognomia, and De lineis indivisibilibus; an authentic text, Aristotle’s De motu animalium, sits in the middle of all this, as does an anonymous astrological text,De planetis, which the scribe disputes (correctly) as being a chapter of the Secretum. Each is fronted by an illumination; the Secretum has several others besides. There are a variety of scholarly texts in parts 2 and 3 of the MS; it ends with Pseudo(?)-Aristotle De inundatione Nili. Available digitally on the library’s website, the MS is definitely worth a look for the images alone; what’s more, it gives us a concrete sense of Pseudo-Aristotle’s presence in the medieval intellectual world. [4] In the later Middle Ages that presence caused considerable trouble for the Schoolmen, but there were times when it made for happy consequences, like here.
As De Leemans and Devriese point out in their essay, there is still a lot of work to be done on the topic ofpseudo-Aristotelica. The high quality of the articles in this collection, plus the text editions that have appeared recently, bodes very well for the scholarship that lies ahead. [5]
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Notes:
1. Aristoteles Latinus: Codices. George Lacombe, et al. Pars Prior, Pars posterior (Roma: La Libreria dello stato, 1939), and Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, Supplementa altera (Bruges: Desclée De Brouwer, 1957).
2. Charles B. Schmitt and Dilwyn Knox, Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus. A Guide to Latin Works Falsely Attributed to Aristotle before 1500 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1985).
3. The volume’s Table of Contents can be easily found on the publisher’s website.
4. https://www.e-codices.ch/en/ebs/0020.
5. There is the recent edition of both the Physiognomica (2019) and De coloribus (2025) by Lisa Devriese in the Aristoteles Latinus series published by Brepols. The parallel series Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus published by Brill handles texts coming from the Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.