ABSTRACT
Contemporary scholarship has studied medieval Latin translations of the Greek and Arabic corpus Aristotelicum chiefly through a philological lens, turning a sharp eye onto linguistic equivalence between source and target texts. Yet the thirteenth-century Latin audience approached these translations through a different lens, a scientific one. Eminent thinkers such as Albert the Great (1200–1280), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and John Buridan (c. 1300–1361) measured the different Latin translations predominantly by their faithfulness to scientific practices, and this shaped their reading of the epistemic concepts transmitted. This essay applies the lens of epistemic translation, and unpicks the different ways in which the Greek concept of empeiria in Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.1 was subject to scientific readings in the Latin translations and by the Latin audience. It also shows how emphases on practices of orality, exegesis, and medicine generated new scientific meanings of experientia and experimentum among Latin readers.
