Una scienza dei "loci". La ricezione dei Topica di Aristotele fra la fine del XII e la prima metà del XIII secolo

The Topica is a crucial section of Aristotle’s logical writings, and its prominence in the Middle Ages is clearly evident from the vast number of manuscripts that transmit the text. However, it was only from the central decades of the twelfth century that this work began to be read and studied in its Latin translation. This contribution offers a reconstruction of the early reception of the Topica over a chronological span from 1140/45 to 1240/45. It reviews the early manuscript circulation of the text and considers the traces of its use in twelfth-century schools, mapping how it entered the corpus of the Logica and became part of the university curriculum. The paper also focuses on the role that the contents of the Topica played in the development of dialectic and how its critical study contributed to establishing the major elements of the interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of topics. The paper provides an analysis of the tabulae on this Aristotelian text found in the manuscript Pisa, Biblioteca Cathariana 124, and includes an edition of some parts of these tabulae in the appendix.