Republicanism and Papalism: The Political Thought of Jacopo da Varagine (1228‐98)

MLR, .,   Spain. Chapters  and  are, in my opinion, the most interesting as they focus on the writers’ public personas and responses to the issue of women’s writing. ese chapters chronicle the development of female authors, from a cautious Matute to an ambivalent Montero, and finally to the explicitly feminist Etxebarría. Oaknín’s examination of women’s writing and its publication leads to questions concerning marketing and critical reception. ese issues are addressed with the input of the critics Christine Henseler and Laura Freixas. Both Henseler and Freixas criticize the influence of the publishing industry on female writers who, it is argued, have faced gender-specific obstacles while attempting to represent themselves publicly. Oaknín provides strong evidence of gender bias in the promotion and reception of women’s writing in Spain and examines how such bias affects the construction of their public personas. In relation to discriminatory marketing strategies, she argues convincingly that ‘although there is a widespread perception that Western women writers are now living in a post-feminist era of unprecedented opportunities, the traditional sexist stereotypes not only persist, but recur’ (p. ). Oaknín’s study is further characterized by a valuable contextualization of discourses around the legitimacy of the idea of ‘women’s writing’ in present times, when the concepts of women/men and sex/gender are being renegotiated. However, the matrilinear writing that the author projects seems to overlook a fundamental time in the literary history of Spanish women writers, a time that can be considered a starting point. I refer to the writers of the first feminist movement, the ‘liceómanas’. e identities of these writers were concealed behind the names of their male partners (this happened with María Lejárraga, for example), forgotten by the patrilinear literary canon, and/or exiled by the hegemonic patriarchal view of literary production (as was the case with Elena Fortún and others). e liceómanas were the mothers of Matute’s generation of female authors and serve as a stark reminder of the risks taken by non-conforming women in Spain and beyond. us, exploration of the origins of Spanish women’s writings would have shed light on Matute’s cautiousness, Montero’s ambivalence, and Etxebarria’s explicitness. Oaknín’s study might also have benefited from additional exploration of Spain’s most prolific contemporary women writers, who symbolize the prevalence of feminist voices nationally and internationally in the wake of the ‘Me Too’ movement. It would be enriching if future research were to expand on Oaknín’s study by analysing the question of women’s writing through the lens of the social media and their use by contemporary writers. Overall, however, this is a valuable contribution to the field which should be of interest to students and scholars alike. M U M C A Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction –. By K B. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. In anglophone academia, contemporary Venezuelan literature is almost entirely invisible . is is not due to a lack of literary quality or prolific production, but rather  Reviews to the particular national landscape created by the Venezuelan petrostate’s political and cultural apparatus. Katie Brown’s monograph explores the intrinsic aesthetic value of literature; how it can be instrumentalized to serve political purposes; and the impact that said instrumentalization has on literary production, access to markets, as well as the creative autonomy and artistic integrity of Venezuelan writers. Brown outlines how, during the Puntofijo period (–), the state-funded professionalization of writing (p. ), literary publishing houses, and promotion ‘gave writers the economic freedom to be creative’ (p. ), producing experimental literature that did not need to cater to international markets (pp. –). Brown asserts that this partially explains the absence of Venezuelan writers from the Latin American Boom (pp. , ). e election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in  inaugurated a new era for culture in Venezuela (p. ): the state’s cultural institutions were put at the service of the Bolivarian Revolution’s ideological project, with a vision of literature grounded in ‘nationalism, socialism, democratisation of literature, and writing as a way of documenting and transferring information rather...

To summarize the scientific revolution in one phrase: it was the time when a new way of studying the natural, physical world became widely accepted by a small “community of scholars,” although not necessarily by nonscientists. But the specific status of that “new way” is hotly disputed and the precise historical steps involved in that development are extremely complex. Standard histories are those by Dampier (1966) and Cohen (2001). Cohen stresses the stages involved from initial creative insight to dissemination (orally or in letters, later on in print) and then widespread acceptance. For example, Descartes’ theory of inertia of 1633 was held back when the Inquisition condemned Galileo's theological interpretations and Descartes decided it was not a good time to publish. In the seventeenth century there was a significant qualitative transformation in the approach to the study of natural philosophy and that major change is now often called the “scientific revolution,” but it is clear that small‐scale “revolutions” took place before and have happened since. It was at that time that the transition from undifferentiated “astronomy/astrology” and “alchemy/chemistry” first really got under way. Moreover, great advances were made in mathematics. The story of the rise of modern science begins even earlier, however, with the Arab contacts with Greek science, and modern science eventually led to Enlightenment philosophy (Hellemans & Bunch 1988: 58–188). Different natural philosophies changed at different rates and in different ways. For example, empirical and theoretical progress in astronomy and physics was different from progress in other physical sciences like chemistry (Goodman & Russell 1991: 387–414). However, it was between circa 1500 and1800 that the distinction between true science and proto‐science or pseudo‐science (Shermer 2001: 22–65) became somewhat clearer. Many thinkers have seen the essence of the intellectual revolution as a leap beyond the tradition inherited from Aristotelianism and rationalism. But the notion that simple inductive empiricism, often identified with Francis Bacon's New “Organon” ( Novum organum ) of 1620, is the basis of the scientific method has been rejected. It should be remembered that the introduction of Aristotle's Organon concerning “categories” and “interpretation,” and his physics, astronomy, and biology transferred into Roman Catholic theology by Thomas Aquinas, was considered a radical step and indeed did open a window to the study of the actual order of nature and the universe (Funkenstein 1986). The idea of the importance of nuances of general theoretical assumptions concerning ontology and epistemology has been widely shared ever since the early 1960s, when Kuhn's (1970) history of paradigmatic changes in physical science became widely accepted. Indeed, the social sciences now also regularly use Kuhn's general theory of an oscillation between “normal science” and “paradigmatic revolutions.” The link between Kuhn's theories and earlier views concerning a dialectic of reason – views primarily associated with Hegel's critique of Cartesian dualism (Russon 1991) – should be noted. However, the seventeenth‐century paradigmatic revolution associated with Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, von Helmont, and many others was extremely important, since it laid the foundation for what was considered to be true science for the next four centuries. Newton's laws of gravitational attraction, motion, and force (i.e., inverse square law) in the Principia Mathematica (1687 manuscript) led to British Newtonianism, which was widely exported throughout Europe (e.g., the Low Countries), but Cartesianism in France was a rival for many years (Russell 1991). In the eighteenth century botany and zoology became more systematic with the use of binomial nomenclature, although Linnaeus's theories of nature and of society were deeply flawed (Koerner 1999). It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that a series of new ideas constituting a general change in worldviews made a radical shift in scientific thinking possible. Einstein's theory of relativity did not reject Newtonian mechanics, but did make it clear that Newton's assumptions about space and time were too limited and that a true explanation of gravity required postulating “space‐time.” Similarly, discoveries in mathematics and statistics, particularly the invention of non‐Euclidean geometry, revolutionized science in the twentieth century in somewhat the same way they had in earlier times (Newman 1956). The same can be said for Boolean and Fregean mathematical and symbolic logic (Bartley in Dodgson 1986: 3–42). Comte (1957) wrote that scientific thinking moves only gradually, but inevitably, from the study of distant objects, such as stars, to that which is closest to human life – society itself. His positivism had a profound impact on logical positivism and the quest for “consilience,” a unified general science of all of the natural world (Wilson 1998). In English the distinction between science and social science is more rigid than in many other languages. In German the term Wissenschaft encompasses not only physical and natural sciences, but also social sciences and other disciplines such as history and jurisprudence.

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. By Robert E. Brown. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xxi, 292. $35.00.) Jonathan Edwards's star has been rising among scholars. Recognized widely as America's greatest theologian, he is also cited as America's premier philosopher before the turn of the twentieth century. His Religious Affections (1746) is arguably the most discriminating treatise on spiritual discernment in Christian thought; Perry Miller called it the greatest work of religious psychology ever penned on American soil. Readers of this journal may be interested to know that a recent monograph by Anri Morimoto argues that Edwards's soteriology has more in common with Thomas Aquinas than with Martin Luther (Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation, Penn State University Press). Not to mention his influence on such diverse fields as aesthetics, literary theory, history of religions, and of course homiletics. Amazingly, among the scores of books and hundreds of articles that have appeared in the last century, next to nothing has been done on Edwards's use of the Bible-despite the fact that the Bible was as central to Edwards's vision and literary production as it was to Augustine's or Luther's. Robert Brown's book now helps fill this strange lacuna. But contrary to what the title suggests, this is not about the impact of the Bible on Edwards's thought or spiritual life; nor is it concerned with his use of Scripture in his sermons or even theology. Instead it focuses on Edwards's encounter with nascent biblical criticism, and the result of that encounter for Edwards's understanding of both Scripture and the history of salvation. Brown explains that the deists sought to discredit the Bible by using early historical criticism to insist that true knowledge is a priori and infallible, as in mathematics. Edwards's response was twofold. First, he charged that the deist definition of rationality was too narrow, excluding the experiential and the spiritual. He claimed that Scripture conveys to the mind not only information but also its beauty, which can be seen only by the spiritually enlightened. Second, he argued that the full truth of Christian faith is known only through historical accounts in the biblical drama of salvation. This understanding then becomes the key to discerning God's activity outside the Bible-hence an eighteenth-century version of what we have lately called narrative theology. …

Author(s): Di Franza, Concetta | Abstract: Scholastic Schemes in Boccaccio's Neapolitan WorksThe aim of this article is to investigate the consistency and meaning of the logical-dialectical processes emerging in the wider context of rhetorical means in the works written by Boccaccio in Naples and immediately after his return to Florence. In these works, dialectical schemes sometimes take the more complex structure of quaestio disputata. By using the disputatio form, a good number of medieval authors show how the disputatio leaves the narrow university milieu, and reaches the literary context. A possible reason for the reception of the quaestio disputata within the literary context can be identified in the rediscovery of the similarities of late medieval dialectic and rhetoric, since both are “sciences of the probable,” and therefore aim at persuading rather than at demonstrating. A second reason can be found in the dramatic nature of philosophical disputatio, a veritable tournament fought with the weapons of the mind. In Boccaccio's works, scholastic language and mental processes are widely diffused, a phenomenon that can be explained by the intermingling of philosophical and literary models. Nevertheless, it should also be noticed that the disputatio adopted by Boccaccio is reinforced by his return to its scholastic sources. Those texts were not unknown to a writer who was in touch with the scholars of the court of King Robert the Wise in Naples, studied canon law, read and loved Dante’s works, and was acquainted with Aristotle, Boethius, the Platonic Tradition, and Thomas Aquinas. The presence of scholastic language and techniques leads us to evaluate their narrative role in Boccaccio’s literary production, their nature of prospective tools allowing the game of viewpoints. In Boccaccio’s writings, sometimes a quaestio opposing two possible positions has the task of seeking the “truth.” Boccaccian use of disputatio hides a subtle literary strategy that both seems to give the reader the option of choice, and/or the author to take his position and direct the reading, and deserves to be analyzed more deeply.

¿Cuál es el sentido de publicar revistas indexadas? Este interrogante se ha hecho más contundente y crítico en Colombia, teniendo en cuenta la política establecida por Colciencias,1 por medio de Publindex,2 organismo encargado de establecer los criterios y políticas del sistema nacional de indexación de revistas científicas, desde donde se centra la preocupación por la visibilidad y el impacto de las publicaciones, dando prioridad a los índices de citación que han recibido las revistas, así como a los académicos e investigadores que intervienen en el proceso editorial, bien sea como autores, evaluadores, o miembros de los comités editorial o científico. Las “nuevas” exigencias para que una revista científica sea indexada en Colombia son una muestra más del aletargamiento de los procesos editoriales científicos en nuestra nación, llevados a cabo por más de 20 años. Publicar hoy trae consigo una serie de exigencias que van desde lo artesanal hasta lo más tecnológico, pero en Colombia nos hemos quedado en lo artesanal, en la era de la imprenta de Gütemberg. A pesar de la prolífica producción literaria científica, existente en nuestro país en los últimos 20 años, se nos presentan tres problemas: uno referente a la calidad científica de lo publicado; dos, el aporte a la realidad social, y tres, el sentido ético de la publicación científica

Many of the largest and furthest-reaching media franchises today, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), opt not to represent a range of queer identities and relationships but instead perpetuate heteronormativity. Alternatively, an extensive site of queer historical recovery can be found in the fanfiction that is written in response to these popular media franchises. This article explores how fanfiction set in museums challenges the version of history presented in the MCU’s Captain America films by re-introducing queerness into historical narratives. I argue that while popular media franchises often continue to replicate a narrow definition of sexuality, we can turn to other sites of prolific literary production for more optimistic and pluralistic queer imaginaries. However, fanfiction is not immune to the systemic biases that occur in contemporary culture and, while these texts are successful at re-inscribing queer narratives, they reveal the complexities of attending to intersections of identities, especially in terms of according the same recuperative attention to race.

Lise Deharme (1898–1980) has almost been forgotten, except for being a Surrealist muse and impossible mad love of André Breton. While she may also be remembered (or derided) for her literary salon in the 1950s, her prolific and diverse literary production has been neglected. This article focuses on one particular aspect of her work and investigates the fate of Deharme's forgotten Surrealist review, the ephemeral Phare de Neuilly of 1933. Firstly, this analysis introduces the participants and contributions to the review and retraces the links with the earlier, dissident Surrealist reviews, Documents (1929–30) and Bifur (1929–31). The second section discusses aesthetics and politics, underlining how the technique of collage is applied to mix and (mis)match varied pictures with a wide range of articles. What is highlighted is the subversive and courageous way this ‘phare’ blends ethical and aesthetic issues to address the socio‐political troubles of the early 1930s, in particular the threat of Fascism. Bearing in mind the ambivalence and selective nature of memory and anthologies, the conclusion examines attacks on Le Phare de Neuilly to reassess the reputation and the relevance of this original review and its editor.

Reviewed by: Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self by Sergio R. Franco Francisco Brignole (bio) Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self Sergio R. Franco, translated by Andrew Ascherl Cambria Press, 2017, xx + 286 pp. ISBN 978-1604979794, $114.99 hardcover. Sergio R. Franco's erudite monograph on autobiographical writing in Latin America represents a significant contribution to the field of lifewriting studies. To date, most critical works in the region have been of limited scope, analyzing the autobiographies of one or two authors at a time. Silvia Molloy's At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991) is the exception, but her study focuses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, only. Franco's comprehensive volume complements and extends this work, situating Latin American autobiographical texts written after 1950 within long-standing Western and regional traditions on writings of the self. Composed at different points in time, and adeptly and seamlessly translated by Andrew Ascherl, the introduction and four essays that make up Franco's book examine influential autobiographical works by José Donoso, Reinaldo Arenas, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Monsiváis, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro, among others. In the critical introduction to the book, Franco defines the autobiographical as a zone of expression that includes a whole gamut of modalities: "not only autobiography in the strict sense but also causeries, diaries, memoirs and reminiscences of various kinds" (xi). Following George Gusdorf's work on autobiography, Franco situates the emergence of this tradition in the Copernican revolution, when human beings first become aware of their singularity and individuality. In outlining the main characteristics of autobiography, the author posits that this type of expression does not restore a preexisting historical subject or reality; it configures, rather, what he terms a "subject of autobiography" (xiii). He compellingly argues that what emerges out of recollections, memories, and reinterpretations of the past is thus an [End Page 400] ambiguous, unstable textual subject, a doubling of the "I," whose connection to referential truth is, at the very least, problematic. In the remaining part of this introduction, Franco sets out to compare the characteristics of the different modes of autobiographical expression. He writes that while autobiography typically recounts the life experiences of an individual in a sequential manner, memoirs are more essayistic in nature, normally focusing in "an era or a section of a life rather than in its totality" (xvi). Lastly, Franco notes that in the diary the time elapsed between experience and inscription is much shorter, so that imperfect, distorted, or resignified recollections of the past are less likely to occur than in strict autobiography. In chapter 1, "The Emergence of Autobiographical Discourse in Latin America," Franco traces the development of autobiographical writing in the region, citing as early examples colonial texts like Comentarios Reales (1609) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691). The author reminds us that this nascent tradition had continuity during the nation-building and modernist periods, with Recuerdos de Provincia (1850) and La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo (1913), the autobiographies of Sarmiento and Darío, respectively. Franco highlights that autobiographical writing in Latin America intensified during the first half of the twentieth century, as notable works by Ciro Alegría, Margo Glantz, Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo, José Vasconcelos, and others, were published. Despite this increase, Franco rightly observes that the number of works remained quite meager, at least when compared to more mature Anglophone or Francophone literary traditions. This would start changing at the end of the twentieth century, when autobiographical writing and memoirs became a substantial part of Latin American literary production, especially after the publication of Reinaldo Arenas's influential Antes que anochezca in 1992. After discussing the prolific autobiographical production of the nineties and beyond (citing the likes of Vargas Llosa, Allende, Monterroso, and Donoso), Franco strives to identify and explain the reasons behind this new trend. He first suggests that "the reemergence of bourgeois individualism" may have played a role, adding that capitalism and a variety of forms of oppression have resulted in alienated subjects who often seek to negotiate meaning...

Cultural Responses to Urban Violence in 21st Century Brazil:New Writers Speak from the Margins Leonora Paula Discussions concerning contemporary Latin America often focus on old and new forms of organizing and controlling marginalized groups in the massive urban spaces continuously spreading across the territory. The fear of violence, the emergence of middle and upper-class essentially self-sufficient fortified citadels, the expansion of violent criminality, and the continuous infringement of citizenship rights – ironically within a context of recent re-democratization – all contribute to the representation of an experience of the city as inherently violent. While the dominant discourse of violence and fear of violence is outlined by the reinforcement of excessive use of force against socially and racially marginalized populations, its superimposition on the social cartography of the city does not suppress the existence of forms of mobilization that resist such segregationist program. Amidst the many manifestations that embody this contesting attitude in contemporary Latin American urban culture, a number of literary productions partake in the critical intervention of portraying the urban experience by representing the particularities of socio-cultural realities and problematizing the ways in which urban violence is represented. In that regard, these new cultural productions offer provocative discussions that complicate the debate about violence and representation. In this essay, I discuss how the works produced by authors identified with the twenty-first century literary movement known as Literatura Periférica respond to and intervene in the representation and reproduction of urban violence in Brazil by putting forward a new imaginary for the symbolic and material space occupied by a socially excluded and racialized marginality. Having lived in these spaces themselves, these authors have been writing about life on the margins while centering their works on traditionally excluded groups such as the urban poor. Different from works that celebrate an oversimplified culture of violence, such as the notorious [End Page 67] film phenomenon Cidade de Deus (2002), periphery literature renders visible a different frame of reference regarding Brazil's most impoverished spaces, one that is concerned with representing the dire experiences of racial discrimination, social inequality, and spatial segregation associated with being poor in contemporary urban Brazil. This is because Literatura Periférica promotes a social vision of the world from within in which the periphery is understood and represented not as an inherently crime-ridden and culturally impoverished space, but as a legitimate site of enunciation for representing lived experiences. While the almost ubiquitous presence of everyday violence is by no means excluded from these works, the dominant discourse of violence that equates peripheries to spaces of crime is challenged for its overtly discriminatory bias. Conversely, Literatura Periférica's most powerful critique of violence lies in disrupting a model of cultural production that has historically excluded the marginalized by intervening with their own production of culture and affirming the periphery as a dynamic cultural space. As a cultural response to different forms of violence, Literatura Periférica reveals that, even though not recognized by society as a cultural product typical of the periphery, the literature produced in that space is a legitimate form of cultural expression that generates discursive and material spaces for negotiating between Brazil's social realities and its representations. My research and analysis are carried out against the backdrop of the cultural landscape of São Paulo, whose vast peripheries bear the largest, most prolific, and most visible production of Literatura Periférica. In the context of Brazilian cities, especially São Paulo, periferia (periphery) is a term used to identify vast areas of habitation and settlement outside the central zones of the city, which have been historically occupied by low-income and non-white populations. Formed in the late 19th century, the first settlements were home to freed slaves and low-income workers with no land ownership, and with only meager job opportunities. In the early decades of the 20th century, while Brazil promoted massive European immigration to whiten the nation and to fulfill the demands of its incipient industrial development, São Paulo grew rapidly without a matched commensurate urban planning. By mid-century, rural migrants attracted by the city's wealth settled in the peripheries...

Without a doubt, Vargas Llosa’s prolific literary production has run a very different course than Jose Maria Arguedas’s. The themes that seem to concern him most persistently, linked in a more or less oblique way to the problem of truth (which in Arguedas’s work takes on dramatic overtones), refer to the opposite of this latter concept in Vargas Llosa’s narrative and essayistic production.

BOOK REVIEWS703 Finally, one wonders if Lang's attribution ofthe Lord's Prayer toJohn the Baptist and his movement (pp. 78-80) is more provocation than history. He seems correct in underlining the political nature of this prayer, but offers no convincing evidence that it should have come from the circle of the Baptist rather than from Jesus. This history of Christian worship contains a number of other features that are often lacking in standard liturgical histories. By providing essays on sermon and ecstasy the author draws a fuller picture of the experience of worship than can normally be found in such standard studies. In doing so Lang has written a book that will have to be dealt with by historians for a long time to come. John F. Baldovin, SJ. Jesuit School ofTheology Berkeley, California The Death Penalty. An Historical and Theological Survey. By James T. Megivern. (Mahwah, NewJersey: Paulist Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 641. $29-95.) Capital punishment, like slavery, was one of those institutions of Roman law that the early Christians accepted as an ordinary mechanism of civil society. Occasionally , Christians (e.g., Lactantius) taught that all killing was wrong. More often,bishops (e.g.,Ambrose and Augustine) rebuked the official authors ofparticular public executions or recommended mercy in particular cases. No established , coherent, fundamental opposition to the institution developed. At the beginning of the fifth century, Innocent I could say, "On this point nothing has been handed down to us."The Christian emperors (Theodosius,Justinian), codifying the law, freely incorporated the death penalty. The Gospel texts on forgiveness and love ofneighbor had not been made a barrier against such law, nor had the example of enormous official error in the execution ofJesus provided a deterrent. The Old Testament, with at least thirteen capital crimes including blasphemy, stood as a ready repository of authority affording divine approbation of the practice. The medieval Church got more deeply into its support as death became the punishment for heretics.Ad abolendam,X.5.7.9, of Lucius III in 1 184 provided that the unrepentant or lapsed heretic was to be "left to the judgment of the secular power to be punished by punishment of death." R. H. Helmholz, The Spirit of Classical Law, says," [N]o one doubted that the punishment being referred to was death" (p. 362). Megivern, relying on Edward Peters' Inquisition, sees the decisive step as Gregory LX's constitution of 1231,Excommunicamus. By this point the fiction that priests did not shed blood in turning heretics over to the secular power had been accepted without cavil by the canonists.Writing against this legal background, Thomas Aquinas's defense of capital punishment in general and of turning the lapsed over to the state to be killed sealed the official position with the prestige of a great theologian. 704BOOK REVIEWS The course was set for centuries. Spectacular examples of error—Jan Hus, Joan ofArc, Girolamo Savonarola—did not shake confidence in this way of fortifying the faith. The outbreak of revolt against the papacy in the sixteenth century only enlarged the number of executions. In the bull Exsurge Domine, Leo X condemned proposition 35 of Martin Luther,"It is against the will of the Spirit to burn heretics."The Roman Catechism and the great Counter-Reformation theologians endorsed the practice. Suarez in Defide Theologica, Disputation 23, asked,"Can the Church justly punish the heretics with the punishment of death?" and confidently answered affirmatively. There was now not even a fiction : it was the Church that punished capitally. In the Papal States, the death penalty was an ordinary part of criminal law enforcement, used against brigands and heretics alike. I draw the foregoing from Megivern's book. The author's method is a judicious use of secondary sources such as Peters supplemented by his own reading of texts such as Bellarmine's. He writes as an avowed critic of the death penalty today. His credentials include a doctorate in theology from the University of Fribourg and a licentiate's degree in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He currently teaches in the Department ofPhilosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina. He sets out the horrors...

New Books across the Disciplines

19 critical essays on topics and figures central to medieval and Renaissance thought Organised around topics, concepts and problems distinctive to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Pays attention to the relations between canonical philosophers as well as those not usually treated in standard histories Challenges the traditional periodisation of philosophy, showing that the thought of these periods is understood in new ways when they are treated as one Opens a dialogue between philosophers of different periods Written by a team of leading international scholars, this crucial period of philosophy is examined from the novel perspective of themes and lines of thought which cut across authors, disciplines and national boundaries. This fresh approach will open up new ways for specialists and students to conceptualise the history of medieval and Renaissance thought within philosophy, politics, religious studies and literature. The essays cover concepts and topics that have become central in the continental tradition. They also bring major philosophers – Thomas Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides and Duns Scotus – into conversation with those not usually considered canonical – Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilius of Padua, Gersonides and Moses Almosnino. Medieval and Renaissance thought is approached with contemporary continental philosophy in view, highlighting the continued richness and relevance of the work from this period.

The Thomist 66 (2002): 607-27 THE SCOTIST BACKGROUND IN HERVAEUS NATALIS'S INTERPRETATION OF THOMISM ISABEL IRIBARREN Linacre College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom UNDERLYING HERVAEUS NATALIS'S work is an intelligent development of Thomistic theses that, while not altogether deviating from Thomas Aquinas, prepares the ground for an elaboration of Thomism along the lines ofJohn Duns Scotus's theological insights.1 This is already apparent in Hervaeus's Sentences commentary, and becomes explicit in his quodlibetal questions. Thus, as Thomistic enthusiasm develops within the Dominican order, Hervaeusgraduallyincorporates (and endorses) elements alien to Aquinas's theology-an aspect of Hervaeus's thought worth remarking as it stands in contrast to a meeker image of the Dominican as the "champion of Thomism." As a leading Dominican, Hervaeus2 serves as a good example of the type ofinterpretation ofAquinas's thought undertaken by secondgeneration Thomists. An examination of Hervaeus's work will therefore shed some light on our understanding of the evolution 1 Hester G. Gelber is, to my knowledge, the first to point out this development in Hervaeus's interpretation of Thomism. See her Logic and the Trinity: A Clash ofValues in Scholastic Thought, 1300-1335 (Ph.D. diss., University ofWisconsin, 1974), especially 11026 . 2 Hervaeus Natalis (d. 1323) became provincial of France in 1309 and General Master in 1318. For a biographical study of Hervaeus, see B. Haureau, "Herve Nedelec, general des Frl!res Prl!cheurs," in Histoire litteraire de la France 34 (1915): 308-51; A. De Guimares, "Herve Noel (m.1323): Etude biographique," inArchivum Fratrum Praedicatornm 8 (1938): see esp. 5-77 607 608 ISABEL IRIBARREN of Thomism as a theological authority within the Dominican order.3 Hervaeus's view of relations in Trinitarian theology proves to be a good vantage point from which to appreciate his elaboration of Aquinas's teaching, since it reveals his willingness to borrow from sources alien to Thomism if only to update the material according to the subtleties of the day. In what follows, I shall first give a brief account of Aquinas's view of relations as the main sounding board for Hervaeus's own elaboration of this view; second, I shall present Scotus's notion of 'formality' and the connected notion of 'formal distinction'; third, I shall give an account of Hervaeus's Scotist development of the Thomistic theses in his Sentences commentary and, fourth and finally, in his quodlibetal questions. The question at hand concerns the type of distinction between relation and its foundation, especially in its repercussions on the issue of the distinction between the divine processions. L THOMAS AQUINAS ON RELATIONS With respect to categorical relations,4 Aquinas holds that for each of the nine accidental categories there is a distinction between the accidental being common to all categories and the 3 By 1286 there was already clear evidence that the Dominican order had begun to recognize itself in the figure and teaching of Thomas Aquinas. In that year, the General . Chapter in Paris commanded its friars to teach and defend according to Aquinas, thus actively promoting the Thomistic doctrine within the order. The doctrinal allegiance to Aquinas was repeatedly emphasizedin subsequentDominican legislations, notably in Saragossa in 1309 and in Metz in 1313. See B. M. Reichert, Acta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum I (Rome, 1889), 235. For a standard history of the order and the significance of Thomism for the shaping of the order's identity, see W. A. Hinnebusch, The History ofthe Dominican Order in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (NewYork: Alba House, 1966), especially 154ff. See also M. Mulchahey, "First the Bow Is Bent in Study ...": Do-minican E.ducation before 1350, Studies and Texts 132 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998); M. Grabmann, "Die Kanonisation des hi. Thomas von Aquin in ihrer Bedeutung for die Ausbreitung und Verteidigung seiner Lehre im 14. Jahrhundert," in Divus Thomas, 1 (Freiburg, 1923), 233-49. 4 For a comprehensive study of Aquinas's theory of relations, see A. Krempel, La doctrine de la relation chez saint Thomas (Paris, 1952). See also M. Henninger, Relations: Medieval Theories 1250-1325 (Oxford, 1989), 13-39. HERVAEUS'S INTERPRETATION OF THOMISM 609 ratio that defines each particular category.5 The...

In this chapter we are concerned with the movement known, in its initial phase, as the “School of Salamanca” after the university initially at its center, and subsequently more broadly as the “second scholastic” in recognition of its spread beyond the University of Salamanca to cover the entirety of Counter-Reformation Europe and the new universities of the Spanish dominions in the New World. Chronologically, it extends from the second decade of the sixteenth century to about the third quarter of the seventeenth. The term “second” refers to the perceived re-foundation of scholastic theology in the wake of the Reformation, a “renewal” based on the works of Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1226–1274) after the prevalence, in the later medieval period, of nominalist and Scotist approaches that followed the work of William of Ockham (1280–1347) and Johannes Duns Scotus (1274–1347), respectively. These traditional historiographical characterizations are not entirely apt, though. More recent scholarship shows how much continuity there was between pre- and post-Reformation scholasticism, and questions the trope of the “decadence” of late-medieval nominalism which dominates the literature on these thinkers from the first half of the twentieth century as well as the degree of their allegiance to the teachings of Aquinas. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, in self-understanding and literary production, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholastic theologians differed from their predecessors, and that the adoption of Aquinas’s works—especially, the Summa Theologiae—as the central point of reference was a key aspect of this difference. This of itself pushed the question of law into the foreground, given Aquinas’s extensive treatment of law in the Prima Secundae of the Summa, but there are also contextual factors explaining both the turn to Aquinas and the interest in the subject of law.