The essay focuses on vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, which began to gain currency in the 1540s, just as the vernacular was beginning to establish itself as a language of culture and the Counter-Reformation was getting underway. With over three hundred printed and manuscript works, the statistics of this phenomenon are impressive. Even so, the vulgarization of Aristotle in the Italian Renaissance has never received the scholarly attention it deserves. The paper examines (1) the identity of the recipients of Aristotle’s vulgarizations, (2) the meaning of the process of vulgarization, and (3) the conception of knowledge that such writings brought to the culture of the Cinquecento. The purpose is to show that (1) vernacular renderings of Aristotle’s works were aimed at the “people,” including “idiots” (men lacking culture or knowledge of Latin), “simpletons,” “ignorants,” and “illiterates” as well as princes, men of letters, women, and children, (2) vulgarization was not simply a matter of disseminating, simplifying, and trivializing knowledge, and (3) vulgarization upheld the notion of widespread knowledge. L’article se concentre sur l’aristotélisme vernaculaire en Italie de la Renaissance, qui s’est grandement développé au cours des années 1540, au moment où la langue vernaculaire s’est imposée comme langue de culture alors que la Contre-Réforme débutait. Avec plus que quatre cent oeuvres imprimées ou manuscrites, les chiffres de ce phénomène sont impressionants. Malgré tout, la vulgarisation d’Aristote pendant la Renaissance italienne n’a jamais reçu l’attention savante qu’elle mérite. L’article examine 1) l’identité des destinataires des vulgarisations d’Aristote 2) le sens du processus de vulgarisation, et 3) la conception de la connaissance que représentent ces textes dans la culture de Cinquecento. L’objectif est de démontrer que les traductions vernaculaires des oeuvres d’Aristote s’adressaient au peuple, y compris les “simples” (les hommes sans culture ni connaissance du latin), les nigauds, les ignares, et les illettrés ainsi que les princes, les hommes de lettres, les femmes, et les enfants, 2) la vulgarisation n’était pas une affaire simple de dissémination,qui simplifie et fait circuler le savoir, et 3) la vulgarisation sert l’ambition d’une circulation des savoirs

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Sgarbi, M., (2025), "Aristotle and the People: Vernacular Philosophy in Renaissance Italy", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Sgarbi, Marco. "Aristotle and the People: Vernacular Philosophy in Renaissance Italy." Renaissance and Reformation 39 (3): 2017. 59-109. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v39i3.27721. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.