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Th. I.29.2 ad 1). By considering the modus loquendi, he argued that in particular passages Dionysius and Augustine used particular words because they were following the practice of the Platonist. In Sic et Non, Abelard argued that one should mistrust an allegedly authentic text where words are used with unusual meanings, and that textual corruption can be a sign of forgery. But practice fluctuated, at least until Petrarch and the protohumanists.
The first example of philological analysis of the form of expression is provided in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo Valla (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, xiii) when he shows that the use of certain linguistic expressions was absolutely implausible at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. Likewise, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Isaac Casaubon (De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XIV) proved that the Corpus Hermeticum was not a Greek translation of an ancient Egyptian text because it does not bear any trace of Egyptian idioms. Modern philologists demonstrate that the Hermetic Asclepius was not translated, as assumed before, by Marius Victorinus because Victorinus in all his texts consistently put etenim at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the Asclepius this word appears in the second position in twenty-one cases out of twenty-five.
Today we resort to many paleographic, grammatical, iconographic, and stylistic criteria based upon a vast knowledge of our cultural heritage. A typical example of modern technique for attributing paintings was that of Morelli (see Ginzburg 1983), based on the most marginal features, such as the way of representing fingernails or the ear lobe. These criteria are not irrefutable but represent a satisfactory basis for philological inferences.
6.3. Proof through Content
For such proofs it is necessary to determine whether the conceptual categories, taxonomies, modes of argumentation, iconological schemes, and so on, are coherent with the semantic structure (the form of the content) of the cultural milieu of the alleged authorsas well as with the personal conceptual style of these authors (extrapolated from their other works).
Abelard tried to establish when the meaning of words varies with particular authors and recommendedas had Augustine in De Doctrina Christinathe use of contextual analysis. But this principle is restricted by the parallel recommendation to give preference to the more important authority in cases of doubt.
When Aquinas questioned the false ascription of De Causis to Aris

 
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