The project provides critical editions of ancient and, especially, Byzantine commentaries, paraphrases, compendia and scholia on the text of Aristotle.
Aristotle, probably the most influential philosopher of classical Antiquity, continuously attracted the attention of readers and commentators all throughout the Greek Middle Ages, far beyond the end of Antiquity itself. However, the texts documenting the Byzantine reception of Aristotle are still little known nowadays and only a small proportion of them has been made accessible through modern editions. By providing critical editions and source collections of these texts, CAGB will both enhance our understanding of Aristotle and originally contribute to the knowledge of philosophy and higher education in Byzantium.
The project will benefit from the co-operation with the Aristotle Archive of the Freie Universität Berlin, which hosts an extensive microfilm collection of manuscripts containing the works of Aristotle and his commentators. Along with inventories and descriptions of manuscripts (ca. 1,000 items), prosopographical data on Byzantine authors and on the people who commissioned, copied, owned and annotated the manuscripts will to be collected. The practices of medieval commentators will be studied in detail on the basis of individual manuscripts and with the aid of digital images. The editions and source collections will be published in the series „Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina” (De Gruyter).
The project is part of the Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities.