Treatise

Abstract

The Renaissance treatise (Latin, tractatus) is an explanatory text presenting descriptions, arguments, and evidence to formulate a valid opinion about an object of knowledge. The variety of topics in this format covers the entire range of scholarly disciplines. Renaissance authors used the notion of tractatus in philosophy, broadly defined, to present the following types of reasoning: encyclopedic overviews of a discipline; interpretations and reorganizations of ancient and medieval texts; mathematical, astrological, and cosmographical descriptions; and logical thinking. Whereas these forms evince different aspects of reasoning and modes of discussion, the term tractatus was also employed merely as an organizational element, in the manner of the late ancient notion of separate essays on the same subject within the same volume.

The notion of a philosophical treatise with which we are nowadays familiar through, for example, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922), was not the sole form that Renaissance philosophical treatises assumed. On the contrary, there were a wealth of forms and formats and different ways of presenting arguments and collecting of evidence, all connected under the headings “philosophy” and tractatus. Authors in this period were highly experimental, trying out new forms for reasoning and explaining.