Interpretation and utility: The Renaissance commentary tradition on Aristotle's 'Meterologica IV

Renaissance Aristotelianism expressed itself primarily through commentaries on Aristotle's texts that were printed or read as lectures as part of the curriculum of universities. These commentaries possessed a wide variety of forms and reflect the great diversity of Renaissance Aristotelianism. Meteorologica IV became associated with practical pursuits beyond natural philosophy narrowly defined. In particular, interpreters linked this book to medicine and alchemy.;Chapters one and two discuss the effects of humanism on commentaries and translations of Meteorologica IV. Revised sensibilities to ancient texts led many sixteenth-century commentators, including Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo, to reject the method of their predecessors in favor of a method of commentary that would illuminate the actual words of Aristotle and the interpretations of Greek commentators. Similarly, humanist translations sought to revolutionize scientific terminology by eliminating transliterations and what they considered to be medieval corruptions. While these translators often exaggerated their revolutionary nature, their new terminology created a new textual tradition sharply divided from that of the middle ages.;The third chapter addresses the issue of the place of Meteorologica IV in relation to the rest the Meteorologica and the Aristotelian corpus. The lack of continuity between the subjects of the fourth book and the previous three made this question controversial beginning with the Greek commentators.;The application of the commentary tradition on Meteorologica IV to medicine is the topic of the fourth chapter. In particular, I trace how beginning in the early sixteenth century commentaries written at Bologna and Padua typically emphasized the application of Meteorologica IV to medical issues. The desire to use Aristotle to explain Galenic and Hippocratic medicine culminated in the commentary of the Spanish physician Francisco Valles who wrote a commentary on Meteorologica IV for the explicit purpose of elucidating medical theory.;The final chapter discusses alchemical themes. Starting in the Middle Ages alchemical writers and commentators alike had linked this books discussions of homeomerous matter and distinctions between art and nature to alchemy. In the first half of the 17th Girolamo Trimarchi and Niccolo Cabeo integrated their commentaries with their knowledge of alchemy.