Archbishop Pecham and an Annotated Fragment of Peter Lombard’s Commentarius in Psalmos Davidicos at Tulane University

Abstract

In 2015, the Special Collections Department of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University acquired from Bernard Quaritch a parchment bifolium, formerly used as a pastedown, from a thirteenth-century copy of Peter Lombard’s Commentarius in Psalmos Davidicos, written c.1148. The bifolium contains three annotations that shed new light on a momentous event in medieval Oxford—the 1286 condemnation by Archbishop John Pecham of several heresies, as he called them, related to the teaching of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Pecham’s condemnation restated an earlier one by his predecessor, Robert Kilwardby, in 1277. His rhetoric, however, was much stronger than Kilwardby’s and contributed to the hardening of opposition to Aquinas’s philosophy in England. Most of the documents associated with the condemnation have been known and published for some time: Pecham’s own register at Lambeth Palace; the annals of Oseney Abbey, where the archbishop convened a meeting with Oxford’s masters of theology before issuing his condemnation; and the annals of Dunstable Priory, which record the condemnation and its unfortunate sequel, the death by suicide of one of Pecham’s opponents. The Tulane bifolium is a new contribution to the archive that illustrates how an unprepossessing fragment can alter our knowledge of a major event in late medieval intellectual history. This article describes the bifolium, correcting significant errors in the Quaritch catalogue description, provides editions of the annotations, traces their sources, and discusses their wider intellectual context.