A Student’s Aristotle
ARISTOTLE.
De animo, libri III. Ioachimo Perionio interprete, per Nicolaum Grouchium correcti et emendati. Paris, Thomas Richard, 1561.
4to, ff. 48; woodcut device to title, woodcut initials, italic type; title a little dusty, a few small marks; a very good, wide margined copy in modern buff wrappers, title in manuscript to spine, small label to upper cover; marginal and interlinear annotations in Latin in a contemporary hand to 17 pp., underlining and marginal marks.
Added to your basket:
De animo, libri III. Ioachimo Perionio interprete, per Nicolaum Grouchium correcti et emendati.
Rare edition of Aristotle’s On the Soul in the Latin translation of Joachim Périon (d. 1559), edited by Nicolas de Grouchy (d. 1572), with scattered contemporary student annotations.
Aristotle’s three-book treatise criticises materialist views of the soul and Plato’s dualistic view of a soul dwelling in a body and instead proposes ‘that the soul of any living thing relates to its body as form to matter. Thus the soul, which is the life force, does not survive the death of the body though Aristotle seems also to say that the human soul possesses a portion of “active reason” which is immortal and eternal’ (OCCL).
The Parisian imprimeur-libraire Thomas Richard (d. 1568) occupied a shop opposite the collège de Reims, and this edition of a staple of the university curriculum was clearly aimed at the college’s students.
The few annotations here, in one such student’s rapid cursive, engage with the Pythagorean idea that any soul might pass into any body, a concept which Aristotle dismisses; with the statement that ‘the body cannot be the actuality of a soul, but the soul is the actuality of some body’; and with the mechanics of hearing and smell.
No copies located in the UK, and only one in the US (University of Chicago). Not on USTC.