Il 'De literis libri duo' di Jacob Madsen Aarhus

the aim of this paper is to present the treatise 'De Literis Libri Duo' (Basil, 1586) written by the Danish scholar Jacob Madsen Aarhus, professor of latin, Greek and theology at Coopenhagen University. by recovering the Aristotelian theory concerning the formation of the voice, the author follows Aristotle also in describing the minimal elements of the human speech. Indeed, his approach is based on the analysis of the articulatory features of linguistic sounds, not on the acoustic ones. This work is an important piece of the reconstruction of the paths that, between the 15th and 16th century, led to the assimilation (and then to the overcoming) of the Aristotelian theory concerning the human speech and to an in-depht examination both of the phonation and the linguistic sounds articulation.