A Newly Discovered Witness of Fishacre's Sentences-Commentary: University of Chicago MS 156

Abstract

A manuscript in the collection of the University of Chicago, which is labeled in the catalogue as Promptuarium homileticum, has turned out on closer inspection to be a partial copy of Richard Fishacre's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the first such commentary composed at Oxford. Bearing the eighteenth-century bookplate of Edward Browne and the 1792 bookplate of the executors of the estate of Thomas Eyre, the manuscript, now catalogued as University of Chicago MS 156, was purchased from Percy Dobell and Son by Shirley Farr, class of 1904, and donated to the university in 1926. The source of the title Promptuarium homileticum can be traced back at least as far as the dealer's listing, which was subsequently tipped into the manuscript and copied uncritically by Seymour De Ricci in his 1935 Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada.