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Abstract
Thirteenth-century discourse on animals was organized around two main poles: the Aristotelian commentaries and the encyclopedias or works about the properties of things. This dissertation focuses on the relationships among the thirteenth-century commentaries and collections of quaestiones on Aristotle's De animalibus by Peter of Spain and Albert the Great, and considers also their connections with works like Thomas of Cantimpre's De natura rerum. From a historical-textual point of view, the following conclusions were obtained: (1) Of the two commentaries in the form of quaestiones disputatae on Aristotle's De animalibus attributed to Peter of Spain, only the one in the Madrid, Bibl. Nac. 1877 can be safely considered authentic. (2) Albert the Great's Quaestiones super de animalibus are a reworked synthesis of these two commentaries (the Madrid text and the Florence, Bibl. Naz., Conv. Soppr. G 4853): 76.8 % of the questions in Albert's work have been taken either from one or the other. (3) The Problemata or Quaestiones de animalibus by Peter of Spain are a selection of questions from the first 10 books of his Madrid commentary, in the form of a collection of quaestiones and responsiones. A discussion on the introduction of De animalibus to the West and the role of Peter of Spain in the development of the quaestio genre follows these conclusions. An appendix is included with the transcription of the totality of the questions of the Madrid and the Florence commentaries, and the text of the Problemata of Peter of Spain in Florence, Bibl. Naz., Conv. Soppr. J.IX.26. ff. 1-12.
From a genre-theoretical point of view, the various literary techniques used in the commentaries and encyclopedias, the competing programs of scientia embodied in them, and the confrontation between different bodies of knowledge in the middle of the thirteenth century are discussed. Albert's De animalibus is considered as an attempt to obtain a synthesis in two senses: (1) between philosophical and medical discourse on animals, and (2) between the genre of the commentaries and that of the encyclopedias or works de natura rerum closely linked to the literature of exempla.
