Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought by Annabel S. Brett

Wat van plekke, rolle en ampte? Want die reg gaan oor meer as individuele regte What about places, roles and offices? Because the law is about more than individual rights

It has long been clear to scholars that the study of philosophy and theology at Oxford declined in the later fourteenth century. The evidence for this is varied but considerable. Fewer commentaries on the Sentences were being written and those that were written were treating fewer questions, while other types of specialist literature were also becoming less common. Works on logic tended to be more introductory and elementary. Scholars and libraries of this period seem to have shown less interest in collecting the works of contemporaries. By the late fourteenth century, the ratio of theology students to law students was dropping, particularly among students in the secular colleges. Among members of secular colleges, the percentage of students studying theology dropped from 57% in the fourteenth century to 44% in the fifteenth century, while the percentage of students studying law rose from 39% to 52% during that same period. Apart from John Wyclif, Oxford in this period produced no thinkers to rival Parisian luminaries such as Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson, or to rival earlier Oxford scholars like William of Ockham, Walter Chatton, Adam Wodeham, and others. By the fifteenth century, theological innovation had given way to a more conservative approach to theology that emphasized the perpetuation of established theological ideas and gave particular weight to preaching and pastoral instruction.

Students of economic thought have long associated with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the spread of attitudes in Europe more tolerant of market processes. New economic attitudes appear in a variety of literary forms during the fifteenth century (McGovern 1970). As compared to the pronouncements of a number of Patristic figures, relatively greater tolerance of commerce is expressed by medieval theologians. In fact, recent scholarly efforts suggest that by the late thirteenth century, suspicions of economic activity remained, but Scholastic thinkers increasingly recognized the importance of an impersonal market process in everyday life and sought to find ways to understand it in light of their concern with natural order (Kaye 1998a). While condemning avarice, Scholastic writers such as San Antonino of Florence and San Bernadino of Sienna explicitly endorsed trade as legitimate when practiced for the common good and when associated with modest profit (Origo 1962; De Roover 1967). Recognition of this movement in thought, especially as it applied the concerns of economic justice to trade in commodities, is explicit in the literature of preclassical economics. But until recently, less attention has been paid to more specific developments in scholastic thinking on justice in the labor market.

Since the seventeenth century, concern in the Western world for the welfare of the individual has been articulated philosophically most often as a concern for his rights. The modern conception of individual rights resulted from abandonment of ancient, value-laced ideas of nature and their replacement by the modern, mathematically transparent idea of nature that has room only for individuals, often in conflict. In A Philosophical History of Rights, Gary B. Herbert traces the historical evolution of the concept and the transformation of the problems through which the concept is defined. The volume examines the early history of rights as they existed in ancient Greece, and locates the first philosophical inquiry into the nature of rights in Platonic and Aristotelian accounts. He traces Roman jurisprudence to the advent of Christianity, to the divine right of kings. Herbert follows the historical evolution of modern subjective rights, the attempts by Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel to mediate rights, to make them sociable. He then turns to nineteenth-century condemnation of rights in the theories of the historical school of law, Benthamite utilitarianism, and Marxist socialism. Following World War II, a newly revived language of rights had to be constructed, to express universal moral outrage over what came to be called crimes against humanity. The contemporary Western concern for rights is today a concern for the individual and a recognition of the limits beyond which a society must not go in sacrificing the individual's welfare for its own conception of the common good. In his conclusion, Herbert addresses the postmodern critique of rights as a form of moral imperialism legitimizing relations of dominance and subjection. In addition to his historical analysis of the evolution of theories of rights, Herbert exposes the philosophical confusions that arise when we exchange one concept of rights for another and continue to cite historical antecedents for contemporary attitudes that are in fact their philosophical antithesis. A Philosophical History of Rights will be of interest to philosophers, historians, and political scientists.

Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

Acknowledgements for Illustrations, Introduction, 1. The fifth and sixth centuries - Reorganisation among the ruins, 2. The later sixth and seventh centuries - Christianity and commerce, 3. The later seventh and eight centuries - Princes and power, 4. The ninth and early tenth centuries - Holding out against the heathens, 5. The tenth century - Towns and trade, 6. The eleventh century - Social stress, 7. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries - Community and constraint, 8. The later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - Luxury in a cold climate, 9. The later fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries - Into a new age?, Notes, Index.

The discussion on the legal power of documents generated by the researchers exploring the written culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invites for a more detailed analysis of the usage of a written document in the legal process, the chronology of its legal regulation, the document’s place in the system of evidence as well as its meaning in the legal consciousness of the nobles. The legal proceedings and rulings recorded in the judicial affairs books incorporated into the Lithuanian Metrica reveal the process when, with the development of the written culture and the increase of the demand for documents in the state’s internal affairs, the written document evolved into an independent and sound legal evidence in the judicial process. In the civil cases, primarily concerning the land ownership, the legal power of a written document was recognized already in the middle of the fifteenth century (although there was no peremptory requirement to present written documents in the judicial process), and approved by the extended edition of the First Statute of Lithuania. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the long-lived “colorful robes of justice” (the oath, the gesture, the placing of one’s cap) were replaced in the system of legal evidence by written documents which, from then on, were considered as more reliable evidence than a personal oath, and, in some cases, even a testimony. Eventually, this view found its place in the consciousness of the nobles who documented their transactions and used documents to solve legal conflicts. Moreover, in Lithuania, unlike in the Kingdom of Poland, the judges considered not only the public, but also the legitimate private documents as legal evidence of equal importance. Although, the hierarchy of legal evidence, that prioritized the documents was embedded only in the Second Statute of Lithuania (chapter IV article 52, entitled “On evidence and defense” (O dovodech i otvodech), the analysis of sources allows to decisively affirm that the main source of the aforementioned article was the practice of the courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Mendicants, Military Orders, and Regionalism

THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCISCANS AND THEIR CRITICS I. The Order's Growth and Character Historians of the Franciscan Order have written about the period between the mid-fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries as an adjunct to two peripheral themes: the rise of the Observants and the Great Schism. Conscious of the parallel development of the Observants , some have seen in Conventual history little beyond the decadence and decline that inevitably precede a reform movement.1 Those who have studied the Franciscan involvement in the schism, on the other hand, have either overlooked the Order's internal history entirely or have subordinated it to the broader subject of Minorite participation in church history.2 Writing on Conventual history after 1350, J. R. H. Moorman, David Knowles, A. G. Little and 1 Riccardo Pratesi, for example, in "Francesco Micheli del Padovano, di Firenze, teólogo ed umanista francescano del sec. XV," Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 47 and 48 (1954 and 1955), refers to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as an era of "slackness" and "decadence" in the Order, and points to the insubordination, strife and violence of the friars, along with their ambition for offices, as evidence of this. 2 In a pair of complementary articles, "Die avignonesische Obedienz der Mendikanterorden zur Zeit des grossen Schismas," in Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte, I and II, and "Die avignonesische Obedienz im Franziskanerorden zur Zeit des grossen abendländischen Schismas," in Franziskanische Studien, I (1914), 165-192, 312-327 and 479-490, Konrad Eubel edited and commented on documents illustrating the history of the Clementine friars during the schism. Otto Hüttebräuker, Der Minoritenorden zur Zeit des Grossen Schismas (Berlin, 1893), is limited to an appreciation of structural changes in the Order and a survey of benefits conferred on the Minorites by the Urbanist and Clementine popes. However, he does recognize in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries "the most important and far-reaching period in the Order's history after the early thirteenth century," and concludes that, because of the even closer ties with the papacy created during the schism, the Franciscan Order consciously underwent a tremendous revitalization and advance, which assured its predominant position in the fifteenth century. ??8CAROLLY ERICKSON others gave an important emphasis to the anti-mendicant literature of the period. And, although they make allowances for exaggeration in degree in the works of the friars' critics, they largely accept their allegations in kind. Too often the abundant anti-mendicant literature of these years has been used to prove flagrant laxness among the Conventuals by historians who have then argued that this corruption itself accounts for the copious writings against the friars. Moorman repeats the accusations in the critical treatises largely without comment, despite his acquaintance with much of the documentary evidence from within the Order.3 Knowles points to the "spirit of the age" as one cause of the fourteenth-century criticism of the mendicants, and notes that historians' dark view of the period after 1350 has been influenced by their estimates of the psychological and demographic effects of the plague of 1348-49.4 The assumption of an inevitable link between falling population and spiritual decline has distorted the interpretation of fourteenth-century history. In Studies in English Franciscan History, A. G. Little was ambivalent in his use of the satirical and polemical literature against the friars, now acknowledging its validity, now adopting a skeptical attitude toward it.5 In an important article on the mendicant-clerical disputes of the fourteenth century, Père Hugolin Lippens shed new light on anti-mendicant criticism. Stressing the clergy's reliance on custom and that of the mendicants on written law, he showed that jurisdictional clashes and written polemic between the two groups were all but inevitable.6 By contrast, G. M. Trevelyan, who wrote a good deal about the friars in his England in the Age of Wyclif, was only too happy to use the claims of Wyclif and other opponents of the friars to make a case against them, and freely admitted his reliance on the critical literature: In the attempt that I have made in this chapter to give some representation...

Enunciating authority: exonarrative inscriptions on or near miniatures of the Divine Comedy

The essays in this volume, presented in honour of John O. Ward, explore the role of rhetoric in promoting reform and renewal in the Latin West from Peter Abelard (1079-1142) to Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). Ward, who has taught for many years at the University of Sydney, has been an influential and creative force in medieval and renaissance studies both in Australia and internationally. This volume opens with a personal memoir and bibliography of Ward’s publications, as well as an overview of the study of medieval rhetoric. The first of the three sections, ‘Abelard and Rhetoric’, relates Abelard’s rhetoric to his logic, his theology, and his relationship to Heloise. A second section, ‘Voices of Reform’, considers various writers (William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, Richard FitzNigel, and William of Ockham) who bring rhetorical techniques to bear upon analysis of social conditions. A third section, ‘Rhetoric in Transition’, deals with the evolution of rhetorical theory between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The volume will be of interest not just to specialists in rhetoric, but to all concerned with issues of reform and renewal in European culture during the period 1100-1540.

210 Reviews Tbe sources have been thoroughly analysed for tbe light they shed on thereligioushistory of medieval Verona. MUler describes three computer databases she constructed, containing details of charters, information on ecclesiastical institutions, and place names. But the study is far from being a dry statistical analysis. With a deft and sure touch, she pieces together a most interesting account of the Veronese church, looking in turn at the secular clergy, religious life, diocesan organizational structures, and the bishops. Tbe writing is clear and graceful throughout, and the use of sources is careful and judicious. This is more than a study of Verona, however. In the course of the book, Miller tackles fundamental questions about tbe nature of the Church in this period, and persuades us torethinksome of our assumptions about it. She treats spiritual, political and institutional matters as a unified whole, most notably in an excellent discussion of the role and work of the bishops of Verona. Her underlying thesis is that it is not fruitful to speak of a 'Gregorian reform' imposed on the dioceses by the Pope. Rather, this was a time of great innovation and creativity, a 'quickening' brought about by rapid demographic growth, economic development, and social change. The creative ferment which resulted in a new, different Church began before the time of Gregory VII and was just as evident in dioceses under imperial rather than papal control. Verona was one of these, and it offers, in Miller's careful but wide-ranging analysis, a persuasive example of the mixture of spiritual, institutional, and political change which characterized the Church in this period. As well as the skill and sophistication of its argument, this book is well-produced, with a large typeface, plenty of space in the layout, and nice decorative embellishments. All in all, it is an important work which is essential for students of the medieval Church. Toby Burrows University Library University of Western Australia Molho, Anthony, Marriage alliance in late medieval Florence, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1994; cloth; pp. xx, 458; 37 tables, 6 figures; R.R.P. US$59.00. The role of marriage alliances as an index and contributory factor to social status in Renaissance Florence has been of interest to social historians of Reviews 211 this city and period at least since it was discussed by Laura Martines in The social world of the Florentine humanists (1963). Professor Molho has made an important addition to the continuing discussion of this subject with this substantial new work, which is also a significant contribution to the history of Florentine government policy during the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century since it begins with a detailed examination of the founding of the Monte delle Doti and the way in which the fund and its operation were continually affected by the changing financial circumstances of the Florentine state. Molho begins by observing that despite the ups and down of life in the fourteenth,fifteenth,and sixteenth centuries, particularly the high mortality rates of these centuries, a number of Florentine lineages survived, generally speaking, unscathed throughout this period. A more sceptical observer might simply put this down to the law of averages, but Molho uses this observation as a peg on which to hang his inquiry into the most important considerations governing the choice of a husband or wife for the Florentine ruling class, and thereby ensuring; the continuance of the family. The conclusion which he reaches, neafry 350 pages later, is that lineages within the ruling class, and perhaps other families as well, sought marriage partners for then young men and w o m e n not spectacularly far up the social hierarchy from the position they themselves ocupied, nor very far down it, if that could be avoided, but more or less the same level,resultingin what the author refers to as ruling class 'homogamy'. The Monte delle Doti is clearly a rich source, and Molho makes very effective use of it. For example, the chapter entitled 'Investors and beneficiaries', which examines the social classes whose daughters were enrolled in the fund, throws light one the vertical ties of patronage and charity which in some cases led to the establishment...

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

The intellectual history of Cologne in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has largely been studied from the standpoint of Thomism, Albertism, and the dominance of the via antiqua. Two of the leading historians of fourteenth-century Cologne, Gabriel Lohr and Martin Grabmann, concentrated their attention on the Dominicans and the strength of Thomism at Cologne in the post-Eckhart period. The first item representing the other side of Cologne's intellectual life is an abbreviation or Extractio of the Lectura Oxoniensis of Adam Wodeham, Ockham's closest but often independent disciple and fellow Franciscan. In addition to the Cologne redaction of Wodeham's Sentences commentary a number of other works by fourteenth-century English authors found their way into the scholarly community at Cologne. Dominican interest in modern English theologians was not unusual. Almost all German manuscripts of the English Franciscan, Robert of Halifax, belonged to Dominican convents.Keywords: Adam Wodeham; Cologne; Dominican; William of Ockham

After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford, which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy, the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of severe crisis and decline, which lasted throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Schmitt has stated that ‘the picture that emerges from a consideration of the philosophical and scientific culture of England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of a steady decline from the position held during the fourteenth century’, while Ashworth has concluded that ‘the intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century was somewhat sluggish … there seems to be no record of any original writing on logical subjects until the mid-sixteenth century’.