Robert Grosseteste as Translator, Transmitter, and Commentator: The ‘Nicomachean Ethics’

Abstract

Because Robert Grosseteste's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is now seen as having provided the framework for a dynamic study of Aristotle's moral philosophy, more significance must be attached to what itself became the standard translation in the Middle Ages. That Grosseteste was responsible both for the full translation of Aristotle's text and for the translation of the Greek commentaries which accompany the Ethics in twenty-one known manuscripts modern scholars are now in agreement. Grosseteste's work on the Nicomachean Ethics has been dated confidently to the 1240s, arguably to 1246–47, and scholars have tended to stress the rapidity with which the Aristotelian ethics were assimilated in the thirteenth century, in contrast, for example, with the slow progress recorded by John of Salisbury on the Posterior Analytics in the twelfth. These results of recent research seem, it should be notd in passing, strangely at odds with the verdict of Roger Bacon, that there was comparatively little work on the Ethics in his period. He, Grosseteste's most ardent admirer, appears not to have known that this master translated the text and comments: ‘Tardius communicata est Ethica Aristotelis et nuper lecta a magistris et raro.’