Aristoteles Latinus Database - online (2023)

In 2009 the Aristoteles Latinus Database was launched online on the Brepolis website where, today, it is part of a comprehensive cluster of databases relating to the study of Latin.

This cluster consists of full-text databases (namely, the Library of Latin Texts, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature and the Aristoteles Latinus Database) and Latin dictionaries (under the heading of the Database of Latin Dictionaries).

When the project started in 2003, the aim of the Aristoteles Latinus Database was to offer a database of the Medieval Latin translations of Aristotle’s works made on the basis of the Greek original text.

The critical edition of the Medieval Latin Aristotle is one of the main projects supervised and supported by the Union Académique Internationale / International Union of Academies and hosted by the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Philosophy of the KU Leuven. The most important objective of the project is to bring to scholarly attention the various forms in which Aristotle’s texts came to be read in the West. The Latin versions of these texts constituted the main tools for the study of science and philosophy in the Middle Ages. They were considered to be the canonized littera to which all the commentaries on Aristotle’s works referred. The role played by these translations in the development of Western philosophical and scientific terminology can thus hardly be overestimated.

In the years just before 2000, the decision was made to produce a database of the collection of the Aristoteles Latinus texts. The International Union of Academies, which is patron of the Aristoteles Latinus project, gave its immediate support to undertaking this database.

The Aristoteles Latinus Database was conceived on the model of the Library of Latin Texts. The first edition, the ALD-1, was published by Brepols in 2003, a collaboration between the Aristoteles Latinus Centre, at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven under the direction of the late Pr. Jozef Brams and the Centre ‘Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium’ (CTLO) under the direction of Pr. Paul Tombeur. It consisted essentially of the Latin texts published in the Aristoteles Latinus series.

In January 2017 there appeared the third release of the database, the ALD-3, under the direction of Pr. Carlos Steel, Pr. Pieter de Leemans, and Pr. Paul Tombeur. This release has been enriched with Latin translations of Aristotle’s works published outside the Aristoles Latinus series, with the translations of Greek commentaries on Aristotle and with other texts associated with the Corpus Aristotelicum.