The ‘Sentences’-Commentary of Stukle: A New Source for Oxford Theology in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

The recovery of the work of an author previously known only through citations and references in other manuscripts is always an exciting event. Although rare in any area of medieval studies, such finds broaden our knowledge of the intellectual development and open up new aspects for study. It was through a fortuitous paralleling of citations in Gregory of Rimini with an anonymous Sentences-commentary at the Franciscan convent in Fribourg that Damasus Trapp, a ground-breaker in fourteenth-century scholastic studies, discovered the Sentences-commentary of an English Benedictine still known only as Monachus Niger. More recently Jan Pinborg has connected the fourteenth-century citations to the Magister Abstractionum with a work otherwise known as the Sophismata of Richardus Sophista. The following discovery, although not at present of the same importance to the field, shares one thing in common with Trapp's discovery. It provides us with yet another text from the same period of Oxford thought and may in fact also be by a Benedictine, a group that was numerically strong at Oxford but from which we have had almost no extant work to study.