[Organon]

MS Codex 765 contains the text of De Interpretatione as well as the other five texts that constitute Aristotle’s works on logic, collectively referred to as the Organon. Although MS Codex 765, like LJS 101, contains the De Interpretatione, it reflects vastly altered circumstances in which that text was translated and studied. The Latin translation in this volume was completed by John Argyropoulos, a fifteenth-century Greek scholar who emigrated to Italy. The first page, shown here, contains a preface naming John Argyropoulos and dedicating the text to Piero de’ Medici. When this manuscript was made, it would have been perceived as a cutting-edge edition of Aristotle’s text. MS Codex 765 is significant as it contains an early copy of Argyropoulos’s translation. Despite its modernism, MS Codex 765 also shows that Aristotle’s texts on logic, central to education in the early middle ages, continued to be highly important texts in the fifteenth century, worthy of intense study and carefully made copies.

Next section