Medieval Manuscripts of Practical Philosophy

Convenors

• Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)
• Christian Brockmann (University of Hamburg)
• Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)
• José Maksimczuk (University of Hamburg

Abstract
Medieval practical philosophy is the focus of the fourth annual workshop dedicated to the material expression of intellectual activity in different philosophical genres. This field encompasses the Aristotelian domains of ethics, politics, and economics, as well as the surrounding literature. The event brings together a diverse group of scholars at various career levels. They tackle the subject matter using methodological approaches like codicology, philology, historiography, and material analysis.

The first three workshops focused on manuscripts of logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics and philosophical theology. These covered the medieval Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin linguistic domains. They proved productive for cross-pollination among scholars studying different fields, languages, and periods. This resulted in interesting connections and avenues for further collaboration. Continuing this trajectory, the current workshop will examine the manuscript traditions of practical philosophy in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew.

Poster
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Tuesday, 30 June 2026 | Institute for Jewish Studies

10:00–10:20
Welcoming Remarks  

• Welcoming Address
  Giuseppe Veltri (University of Hamburg)
• Introduction
  Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

10:20–12:40
Session 1

10:20–11:20
A New Text of the Magna Moralia. Manuscript Transmission and Constitutio textus
Christian Brockmann (University of Hamburg) and José Maksimczuk (University of Hamburg)

11:20–11:40
Coffee Break

11:40–12:40
Marginal Voices: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Its Readers in Twelfth-Century Byzantium
Ciro Giacomelli (University of Padua)

12:40–13:30
Lunch Break

13:30–17:10
Session 2

13:30–14:30
The Edition of the Latin Translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics: Philological and Methodological Challenges

Frédérique Woerther (CNRS Paris)

14:30–14:50
Coffee Break

14:50–15:50
The Evolution of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and Their Ethical Ideal
Janne Mattila (University of Helsinki)

15:50–16:10
Coffee Break

16:10–17:10
Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City in Jerusalem
Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

19:30
Dinner

Wednesday, 1 July 2026 | Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

10:30–15:00
Session 3

10:30–11:30
The Two Medieval Latin Translations of Aristotle’s Politica
Lisa Devriese (KU Leuven)

11:30–12:00
Coffee Break

12:00–13:00
Johannes Argyropoulos in Florence and the Notebook of Donato Acciaiuoli
David Lines (University of Warwick)

13:00–14:00
Lunch Break

14:00–15:00
What Did Fifteenth-Century Jews Make of Aristotle's Ethics? The Case of Hamburg MS Levy 114
Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)

15:00–15:20
Coffee Break

15:20–16:30
Final Discussion

in alphabetical order

A New Text of the Magna Moralia. Manuscript Transmission and Constitutio textus
Christian Brockmann and José Maksimczuk (University of Hamburg)

The Magna Moralia is one of the ethical treatises transmitted under the name of Aristotle. As is the case with a few other Aristotelian treatises, the Magna moralia has never been edited following modern text critical approaches based on a fully understanding of the stemmatic relationships between its manuscript witnesses. While discussing links between some of the main manuscripts transmitting the Magna Moralia and some critical points of the constitutio textus, this talk presents the main aspects of Hamburg-Paris project aiming at producing a new critical edition of the Magna Moralia.

The Two Medieval Latin Translations of Aristotle’s Politica
Lisa Devriese (KU Leuven)

This presentation examines the Latin medieval translations of Aristotle’s Politics. The thirteenth-century translator William of Moerbeke initially composed a partial Latin translation of the Politics, which was soon followed by a complete version after he gained access to a full Greek manuscript. These translations played a crucial role in the transmission of Aristotelian political thought to the Latin West, especially since the Politics were not translated in the Arabic world.
The presentation first addresses the manuscript tradition of the Latin translations, paying particular attention to the relationship between Moerbeke’s partial and complete translations.
The core of the discussion is devoted to Moerbeke’s translation method and the specific difficulties posed by the Greek text. Aristotle’s Politics contains a high density of technical terminology, place names, and personal names that were often unfamiliar to a Latin translator. Moerbeke’s efforts to render these elements into Latin resulted in translations of varying degrees of clarity and precision.

What Did Fifteenth-Century Jews Make of Aristotle's Ethics? The Case of Hamburg MS Levy 114
Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)

This presentation focuses on MS Levy 114 (Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky) which contains a unique Hebrew version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Unlike the widely circulated Hebrew translation by Meir Alguadez, this version, attributed to Baruch ibn Ya'ish, bears witness to the engagement of fifteenth-century Jewish scholars with the new humanist translations emerging from Leonardo Bruni and John Argyropoulos. This study offers an analysis of the version preserved in MS Levy 114 and situates it in the context of the renewed study of the Nicomachean Ethics among fifteenth-century Jews both in relationship with the existing Arabic-Hebrew commentary tradition and in light of the interest in the new humanist versions that were circulating at the time, with particular attention to the broader phenomenon of Latin-into-Hebrew translations of Leonardo Bruni’s works.

Marginal Voices: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Its Readers in Twelfth-Century Byzantium
Ciro Giacomelli (University of Padua)

This paper examines the scholia written in the margins of Paris. gr. 1854, a twelfth-century manuscript that bears witness to the active reception of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in Byzantium. The density and variety of the annotations suggest that the codex circulated within a reading circle engaged in close, collaborative study of one of antiquity’s most influential ethical texts. Through a systematic analysis of the content, structure, and distribution of the marginal notes, this paper reconstructs the intellectual context in which the manuscript was read and discussed, shedding light on the practices of philosophical reading and commentary in the middle Byzantine period.

Johannes Argyropoulos in Florence and the Notebook of Donato Acciaiuoli
David Lines (University of Warwick)

When the Greek scholar Johannes Argyropoulos was lecturing on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics at the University of Florence (c. Feb. 1457-May 1458), his teaching was recorded by one of his most devoted students, the Florentine patrician Donato Acciaiuoli. The resulting manuscript (Florence, BNC, ms. II I 104) preserves these notes in what is doubtless a fair copy, but one that is of considerable interest, particularly since it can be compared with the printed versions, prepared some years later, of both Acciaiuoli’s commentary (1478) and Argyropoulos’s translation (1480?), both of which were among the most influential for the whole Renaissance period. This paper will consider what the manuscript can tell us about the teaching of moral philosophy in the period, particularly within the Italian context, and what changes took place in the transition from manuscript to print.

The Evolution of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and Their Ethical Ideal
Janne Mattila (University of Helsinki)

The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ; 9th-10th cent.) is probably the first complete encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences in Arabic. Besides the technical aim of introducing the reader to the subject matter of these sciences, the authors present it as serving the ethical-eschatological goal of bringing about moral virtues and soul’s salvation. The manuscripts of the work attest to considerable evolution in time, which, arguably, relates to its gradual adoption by Ismāʿīlī theologians. The aim of this paper is to address the ethical ideal of the Epistles from the perspective of their evolution. I will, first, discuss the general evidence provided by the manuscripts, and, second, the evidence that concerns the Fihrist and Epistles 9 (Ethics) and 50 (Governance), in particular.

Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City in Jerusalem
Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

MS Vat.ebr.335, which was written in Jerusalem in the 1380s, is full of surprises. One of them is an anonymous treatise in Jewish theology, which on closer examination turns out to be a Judaized, uncredited appropriation of Al-Farabi’s Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, based on a nearly complete translation of the text. My presentation will have three parts: (1) contextualization of the composition within the codex and its material properties; (2) explanation of the structure of the composition itself and the logic behind it; (3) analysis of its repurposing of Al-Farabi’s list of the First Ruler’s necessary qualifications to render it applicable to the figure of Moses.

The Edition of the Latin Translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics: Philological and Methodological Challenges

Frédérique Woerther (CNRS Paris)

This presentation addresses the philological and methodological challenges involved in producing a critical edition of the Latin version of the Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by Averroes. Composed in Arabic on 26 May 1177, the original text survives today only in approximately thirty fragmentary excerpts preserved in the margins of a unique manuscript from Fez (dated 1222), which transmits an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
By contrast, the commentary itself is fully preserved in two medieval translations: the Latin version produced by Hermannus Alemannus in Toledo in 1240, and the Hebrew translation completed in 1321 and revised in 1322 by Samuel of Marseille. The latter is now available in a modern critical edition by Lawrence V. Berman.
Building on previous work devoted to Books VI and X, this contribution presents the manuscript tradition of the Latin text, outlines the relationships between witnesses, and proposes a provisional stemma codicum based on selected textual samples. It then turns to a central editorial question: how should one edit a Latin translation of a lost Arabic original, when a parallel Hebrew translation is also extant? This inquiry raises broader issues concerning the Arabic exemplars used by the translators, as well as their respective translation techniques. In particular, the paper evaluates to what extent the Hebrew version can serve as a control or corrective for the Latin text, and identifies the limits of such cross-linguistic comparison in the absence of the original Arabic.