In Alfonso de Cartagena’s ‘Memoriale virtutum’ (1422) María Morrás and Jeremy Lawrance offer a new edition from the manuscripts of a compilation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics addressed by the major Castilian intellectual of the day, bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, to the heir to the throne of Portugal, crown prince Duarte.

The work was a speculum principis, an education for the future king in the virtues suitable to a statesman; Cartagena’s choice of Aristotle was thus a significant index of the advent of new Renaissance ideas. This edition shows how the “memorial” throws light on the ideological transformation of society those ideas would bring, setting new ethical guidelines for the ruling class at the crossroads between medieval feudalism and Renaissance absolutism.

María Morrás Ph.D. (1990, Berkeley), professor in Humanities at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona and Special Lecturer at Oxford, studies medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature, particularly the cultural impact of humanism. She has edited Cartagena’s Ciceronian translations, Libros de Tulio (Alcalá, 1996).

Jeremy Lawrance, DPhil (1983, Oxford), former Professor of Spanish at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham, studies the history of ideas. He has edited and translated Latin works by Cartagena (Bellaterra, 1979), Vitoria (Cambridge, 1991), and Palencia (Madrid, 1998–99).

Table des matières : ici

Informations pratiques :

Alfonso de Cartagena’s ‘Memoriale virtutum’ (1422). Aristotle for Lay Princes in Medieval Spain, dir. María Morrás et Jeremy Lawrance, Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2022 (The Iberian Religious World, Volume: 8). ISBN : 978-90-04-41115-9. Prix: 128 euros.

Source : Brill