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Concept
Livre de Politiques
Summary
The Livre de Politiques (commonly shortened to Politiques) is an extensively annotated Middle-French translation of Aristotle's Politics by 14th-century scientist and philosopher Nicole Oresme. It is the first extant translation of the Politics into a modern vernacular language.
There is no evidence for the reception or translation of Aristotle's Politics by Arabic philosophers during the Islamic Golden Age. It was introduced to the Latin West by William of Moerbeke's Latin translation from the Greek original in the 1260s. Soon after the translation was finished, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on it, trying to illuminate its sometimes obscure meaning and to reconcile it with Christian doctrine. Thomas' unfinished commentary was continued by Peter of Auvergne. The first known French translation of the Politics by Pierre de Paris is lost.
Before starting work on his own translation, Oresme was already a distinguished academic. Having probably studied the artes liberales with Jean Buridan at the University of Paris, he was admitted into the Collège de Navarre at the same university in 1348. In 1356, he acquired a master's degree in theology and become grand-maître of the Collège, before receiving a doctorate in theology in 1362. While studying and teaching there, he had contacts with Pierre Bersuire, Jean de Muris, Philippe de Vitry, and Guillaume Machaut. It is unclear whether Oresme was officially commissioned to come up with a solution for the financial crisis of the French monarchy in the 1350s, or whether he gained the royal family's attention by presenting said solution of his own accord. In 1355, he published his Tractatus de mutatione monetarum, followed a year later by a French translation (known as the Traictié de la Monnoie). In this work, he used Aristotelian thought to promote an end to the constant debasement of coinage practiced by King John II to pay for the Hundred Years' War.
Official source
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