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Dr Katja Krause, Lecturer in Medieval Thought, University of Durham, will a paper on "Medieval Philosophy of Nature and Its Afterlife: The Case of Albert the Great's De animalibus"

 The preface to Albert’s commentary on De animalibus identifies his inquiry into animals as ‘philosophical’. In constrast, the preface to book 22 of the same work identifies its last five books as methodologically ‘non-philosophical’. And yet Albert considers both treatments as genuine parts of his scientia de animalibus—some of them more easily grasped by a learned audience, others by an unlearned audience. For the reception history of Albert’s De animalibus, matters look somewhat different. Vernacular translators and Latin textbook compilers tend to proceed selectively from the outset, drawing on material mostly from the last five books of Albert’s De animalibus. Yet just like Albert, they label their treatises in oscillation between philosophy and non-philosophy. The purpose of my paper is to show how these boundaries between philosophy and its popularisation were negotiated over the course of history, grounded in each thinker’s own understanding of them; and how and why our historiographies can take these actors’ categories seriously.

Followed by drinks and nibbles, with generous funding from the Institute of Advanced Study.