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Richard Rufus of Cornwall. Scriptum in Metaphysicam, Rega Wood, Neil Lewis and Jennifer R. Ottman (eds), 2022/2024, Oxford University Press, 2 vols., 764 + 837pp., $210.00, $245.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197266908, 9780197267646.
Reviewed by Robert Pasnau and Matthew Wennemann, University of Colorado Boulder
When the universities at Oxford and Paris were founded at the start of the thirteenth century, they took as their undergraduate curriculum the philosophical treatises of Aristotle. Given the intrinsic difficulty of those texts, it was inevitable, then as now, that a secondary literature of commentaries would grow up around that curriculum. This practice had begun already in late antiquity, mainly in Greek, and then shifted to the Islamic world, where Arabic translations of nearly the whole corpus yielded a new harvest of commentaries. When Aristotle finally made his way fully into Latin, these labors started anew.
Richard Rufus of Cornwall belongs to the first generation of scholars to write commentaries on the expanded corpus of the Latin Aristotle. Although his dates of birth and…
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