Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes), the Andalusian philosopher and physician, completed the bulk of his three-level commentaries on Aristotle during the 1170s–1190s in Córdoba and Marrakesh. These commentaries — the Short, Middle, and Long Commentaries on Aristotle's major works — were translated into Latin in the early thirteenth century and became the primary vehicle through which Aristotelian thought entered medieval European universities. Averroes was also a significant literary critic, composing a commentary on Aristotle's Poetics that introduced the concept of mimesis to Islamic and subsequently European readers.

Averroes's Latin Aristotle was the text that shaped scholastic theology from Aquinas onward, and the intellectual world it created was the world in which Dante, Chaucer, and their contemporaries were educated. His commentary on the Poetics — even in its rather confused transmission, since Averroes had no access to Greek drama — helped introduce systematic literary criticism into medieval intellectual culture. Dante placed Averroes respectfully among the great thinkers in Limbo, calling him 'the great Commentator.'