The scholastic background of Scaliger's Poetics

Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices Libri septem (1561) is widely recognized as the leading Neo-Latin Poetics of the second half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, it is well known that Scaliger had a good scholastic training, having also produced books of natural philosophy in the scholastic trend (among others his Exotericae exercitationes, 1557, and commentaries on treatises by Aristotle), and that his Poetics itself has a pronounced philosophical ambition, being pervaded by Aristotelian concepts. But the bridge between these two fields (literary criticism and scholasticism) illustrated by Scaliger has not yet been fully made. This paper gives a general overview of the way Scaliger structures his whole Poetics by way of Aristotelian concepts ; it gives special interest to the parallels he makes between the composition of poetry, the production of visual artefacts (painting, sculpture, imprints…) and the generation of natural beings.