Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram as a Commentary on the De anima: a significant Case of Comparison between Authority and translations in the thirteenth Century

The transmission of a philosophical text cannot be circumscribed only by the practical process of transposition into another language, but it implies, more extensively, its actual assimilation into a new cultural context. This holds true particularly for those standard sentences, which are a sort of stereotype or saying circulating separately and quoted orally. Therefore, when investigating the reception and the function assumed by some Aristotelian quotations in thirteenth-century writings, it is not suf-ficient to examine the different Latin translations of the Aristotelian text, for single passages or adages are frequently quoted by memory and revised according to the linguistic needs of the readers in writing their own works. Moreover – and this is the aspect on which I intend to focus – some adages were made similar to other authorities. In other words, in order to support some of Aristotle’s views, many thirteenth-century masters judged it appro-priate to combine them with the theses of other authors, which were a more traditional cultural reference point.