Abstract:

Aristotle’s sixteenth-century readers were the first for a thousand years to be in a position to look beyond the reputation of the Poetics to the text itself. What they found took them far beyond the familiar ethical contexts in which poetics had long been located. Reading across the corpus aristotelicum, Francesco Patrizi advanced a detailed argument that cast the Poetics in a civic light, and Jacopo Mazzoni after him labelled it the ninth book of the Politics. Despite disagreement on technical grounds from commentators such as Paolo Beni, numerous editions of Aristotle’s Opera omnia agreed that the Poetics numbered, at very least, among the moral works. By the seventeenth century, Patrizi’s theories had travelled as far north as England, informing Theodore Goulston’s translation and commentary on the Poetics in 1623 and contributing to developing notions of a civic role for catharsis.