Giles Of Rome Research Articles

Durand of Saint-Pourçain’s Refutation of Concurrentism

The Dominican theologian Durand of Saint-Pourçain (ca. 1275–1334), breaking from the wide consensus, made a two-pronged attack on concurrentism (i.e., the theory according to which God does more than conserving creatures in existence and co-causes all their actions). On the one hand, he shows that the concurrentist position leads to the unacceptable consequence that God is the direct cause of man’s evil actions. On the other hand, he attacks the metaphysical foundations of concurrentism, first in the version offered by Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, and then in a more general way. Against Thomas and Giles, he challenges Neoplatonic assumptions about causality and being. More generally, he establishes that God’s action and a creature’s action can be neither identical nor different, and thus cannot both be direct causes of the same effect. Without claiming that Durand’s series of objections are definitely unanswerable, we may at least observe that they have generally been underestimated (which earned him the lowly role of the mere foil of the concurrentist view in the history of philosophy) and are able to do considerable damage to concurrentism.

Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias Hoffmann

Reviewed by: Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias Hoffmann Richard Cross Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy. By Tobias Hoffmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 292. $99.99 (hard). ISBN: 978-1-107-15538-1. This excellent book achieves at least two interrelated goals, both suggested by its title: it gives a thorough account of theories of free will as found in the thirteenth century, continuing as far as Ockham (with backward glances to Anselm, Bernard, and Lombard); and it gives a detailed account of the question of the origin of evil in the morally bad choices of (as Hoffmann’s authors supposed) a being who was initially not subject to intellectual error. Both topics are hard, the second especially so. But Hoffmann is an expert guide, and is able both to cast new light on the more-or-less well-known material that constitutes the first part of his project, and to give a clear and compelling account of the largely novel material that can be found in the second part of it. Hoffmann begins with a discussion of the ways in which Aristotle’s thinking on choice was incorporated into Western discussions, starting with the translation of John of Damascus’s eclectic De fide orthodoxa (which included a great deal of Aristotelian psychology with the addition of the notion of a rational will), and continuing with the direct access to relevant parts of the Nicomachean Ethics. This latter coincided with, and partly contributed to, what Hoffmann labels the “psychological turn” around the 1220s. Earlier medieval accounts of will were fundamentally theological in character. But Hoffmann notes that thinkers of the early thirteenth century suddenly became interested in action theory and moral psychology as objects worthy of study in themselves. (In this he follows, with due acknowledgement, his former student, Jamie Spiering, who has worked on the topic in Philip the Chancellor and others.) And what immediately followed the psychological turn was a largely intellectualist account, according to which free agency is explained (in Hoffmann’s helpful definition) “mainly with reference to the intellect” (5). The story follows a familiar trajectory: intellectualism prevails until it gets condemned (in Paris at least) by Stephen Tempier in 1270, and again with greater force in 1277. Specifically, as Hoffmann notes, the core issue was what he helpfully labels “judgment-volition conformity” (61): that the will automatically wills in accordance with judgment. The worry, of [End Page 671] course, was that judgment-volition conformity entails some kind of determinism. Now, even the most ardent intellectualists generally allow that the judgment of means (to an end) is in some sense contingent: the output, the judgment, is not determined by the input (reasons in favor of this or that means). So, one of the primary problems for the intellectualist lies in determining how the intellectual process of deliberation is contingent. According to Hoffmann, for instance, Aquinas claims that “one wills in proportion to one’s judgment,” and Hoffmann follows by noting that “the fact that this rather than that cognitive judgment actually becomes a judgment of choice depends on an affective commitment” (47). Aquinas is therefore a “moderate intellectualist” (54). But as Hoffmann notes, there is no explanation within Aquinas’s system for the activity of the will here. The year 1277 in fact saw two distinct condemnations, both in March: 219 errors of the arts masters, and 51 propositions from Giles of Rome’s Sentences commentary. In terms of long-term significance, article 24 of this latter list (that “there is no evil in the will unless there is error in reason”) turned out to be particularly important, since in 1285, when Giles appealed to the new pope, the Parisian theology masters conceded the previously condemned proposition—the so-called propositio magistralis. This odd chain of events allowed the initial imposition of some kind of voluntarism to be somewhat tempered. A key figure here is Henry of Ghent, one of the movers behind the first of these 1277 condemnations: the will is a self-mover (else it would be determined ab extra). The remarkable Franciscan Peter Olivi allows, in line with this...

John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner

Reviewed by: John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner Matthew Boyd Goldie Emily Steiner. John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 287. $80.00. John Trevisa, father of English prose? Is that a prosaic father, or can informative writing be beautiful? What contributions to a history of style does [End Page 425] a translator make? What is the relationship between facts and literature? When have there been "information ages"? Emily Steiner's John Trevisa's Information Age asks these questions and offers thoughtful answers in seven carefully researched chapters. Each draws attention to Trevisa's contributions to English, English literature, and English "information culture" (1). The book contends that Trevisa's translations of compendious works helped shape English literary prose style and English literature more broadly by making English a suitable and even eloquent vernacular to communicate historical, scientific, and didactic learning. As most readers know perhaps more implicitly than explicitly, Trevisa translated Ranulph Higden's universal history, the Polychronicon; Bartholomaeus Anglicus's encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum; Giles of Rome's mirror for princes, De regimine principum; and other shorter works. As David Fowler suggested in his 1995 biography, Trevisa was possibly from Cornwall and spent most of his life at Oxford before securing a position as chaplain, canon, and vicar for Thomas de Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is presumed to have died in 1402, so he is an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. His works survive in about thirty manuscripts as well as early prints by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Thomas Berthelet, and Stephen Batman. Steiner concentrates on the Polychronicon and De proprietatibus rerum more than on De regimine principum or other translations, and she also glances sideways into Trevisa's "information age" by considering Piers Plowman, the Concordance to the Wycliffite Bible (c. 1425), and the earlier versified encyclopedia Le livre de Sydrac (c. 1275). Most of the chapters examine Trevisa's divergences from and additions to his sources, the characteristics of his style, and how the large scale of his translations makes the late fourteenth century an age of information in England, following similar projects in France and elsewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One recurring topic in the book concerns form—the compendium versus the monograph and how book history and the canon would look if we considered the compilation as central to manuscript and print publication. After all, if every compilation/compendium/florilegium/collecte/recueil/gathering/miscellany/"litel tretys"/anthology were tallied, they might add up to more copies than the single-text or single-author book, with arguably more cultural influence. Steiner posits that "what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia," with Trevisa translating and glossing, for example, the Poly-chronicon, to form a "megagenre" or "super-compendium" so that he [End Page 426] "provided an intellectual and literary rationale for English prose" (25, 30). Just in terms of the vernacular, although possibly overrepresented in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, Trevisa remains a major source for the lexicon, with 9,553 contributions in 6,279 entries in the OED. Another key topic is the idea of an Information Age in England c. 1400. Steiner proposes that "our attachments to those texts we call literary, and which we invest with richness and complexity, have roots in medieval information culture," describing Trevisa as "the perfect entry point into a literary history of information" (12). She stresses that "Every age is, in its own way, an information age, and the late fourteenth century was no exception. … It was not merely the age before the printing press or the age before the internet, but also the age in which the collection and classification of knowledge was bound up with the production of vernacular literature" (227). In Steiner's reading, Trevisa, who likely knew John Wyclif at Oxford, does not simply translate in a straight manner but has works that "criticize the professional religious and redefine the relationship between clergy and laity" while...

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland

Reviewed by: Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland Shea McCollough Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xv + 432 pp. More than three decades have passed since Rita Copeland first published Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991), a study that has become an indispensable resource for scholars thinking about the development of vernacular texts and interpretative models from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. That first book laid the foundation for a body of scholarly work from Copeland that, while dealing with the variously related topics of classical reception, pedagogy, and representation, is nonetheless bound together by the through-line of rhetoric, her most persistent and pervasive research interest. Her newest book, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, is a delightful expression of that rhetorical preoccupation, demonstrating a sustained interest in the intertwined relationships between rhetoric, emotion, and ethics that developed and redeveloped from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and offering a compelling and comprehensive narrative of the transformations of rhetorical thought and practice over nearly two millennia. Like the good rhetorician that she is, Copeland offers a map of the book's overarching scope in apophatic terms, outlining the contours of the study by simultaneously delineating what it is not: it does not endeavor to offer a comprehensive history of medieval emotions—à la Barbara Rosenwein's Generations of Feeling (2015), or any number of similar studies that Copeland mentions throughout her footnotes—nor is it an attempt to uncover and represent the emotional experiences of medieval readers per se, although readerly experience becomes a secondary interest in the book, particularly in chapter 2. Rather, what Copeland does embark upon is a twofold history of both rhetoric through emotion and emotion through rhetoric in the Middle Ages, a history predicated upon [End Page 240] a belief that rhetoric "represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions" and that is ultimately "concerned more with production than with consumption of emotive content" (1). Copeland builds from these initial claims, describing the "double plot" of her book "as a reception history that commences with the Ciceronian rhetorics of antiquity, that develops on a long course, and that, at a later juncture, incorporates the Aristotelian perspective" (14). Following this robust outline, the rest of the text splits into two halves, emblematized by the figures of Cicero and Aristotle, respectively. Chapter 1 analyzes Cicero's theory of affectio as presented in De inventione, establishing emotion as a valid form of invention (the process of developing an argument), as opposed to an exclusive element of style, even though the stylistic understanding would eventually come to dominate the discourse of medieval rhetoric. Chapter 2 picks up on this thread and demonstrates how early Christian thinkers, primarily Augustine and Cassiodorus, expanded their understanding of style to accommodate an ethical dimension of rhetorical appeal invested in the cultivation of "textual affection" (59), whether for the scriptures or for Virgil. As this instilled love for texts grew commonplace, it became less imperative to explicitly outline the ethical valence of style in rhetorical texts, resulting in the paradoxical effacement of this notion from Christianized rhetorical treatises by the twelfth century. Chapter 3 narrates the rise of style to a place of preeminence in the "pragmatic rhetoric" of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries by close reading pedagogical treatises (112), love letters, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, Petrarch's Seniles, and Chaucer's (again) Clerk's Prologue. Chapter 4 (re)turns to Aristotle's Rhetoric, the second piece of the book's "double plot," in order to "chart the routes through which Aristotelian rhetoric found its place in later medieval thought" (158). Copeland sketches the transmission history of the Rhetoric, arguing that the text effectively disappeared until resuscitated by a group of Arabic scholars—Al-Farabi (ca. 870–950), Avicenna (980–1037), and Averroes (1126–98)—whose commentaries treated the emotions "as both cognitive and moral forces in persuasion" (175). Chapter 5 extends the discussion of the Rhetoric's medieval afterlife by focusing on a shift in thinking about the emotions evident in Giles of Rome...

Augustine's Political Thought ed. by Richard J. Dougherty

Reviewed by: Augustine's Political Thought ed. by Richard J. Dougherty Evan Dutmer Richard J. Dougherty, editor. Augustine's Political Thought. Rochester Studies in Medieval Political Thought 2. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2019. Pp. vi + 281. Cloth, $125.00. "Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford [End Page 330] Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God is decidedly not a work of political philosophy in the traditional sense: it does not reason about the best form of government; it only rarely functions as a mirror for Christian princes; it recommends no real social or political reforms (e.g. the abolition of slavery); even the cities described have fluid, shifting citizenry of indefinite number (the Earthly City, for instance, turns out to be only loosely composed of earthly patriots—the denizens of the City of God walk in their midst). It is rather intensely protreptic, a proselytizing document that calls for the reader to leave the Earthly City (with its characteristic love, amor sui, viz. love of self) for the City of God (with its characteristic love, amor Dei, viz. the love of God). Augustine's Political Thought proceeds from different starting points. Inspired by Ernest Fortin, the contributors to this volume search for a political teaching in the work of Augustine that, at times, is implicit or indirect. The City of God, which casts doubts on the efficacy of political theory as a project worthy of Christian attention, thus could be seen as containing a latent pessimistic political teaching. Further, even works not generally considered to be political in the Augustinian corpus—e.g. the Confessions or the early Cassiciacum dialogues—become candidates for political interpretation (see Michael Foley's chapter on the early dialogues and Douglas Kries's on Augustine's Confessions and Plato's Republic). Inspired by Leo Strauss's esotericism hypothesis—that numerous philosophers in (especially) the Platonic tradition have used an esoteric style of writing—contributors to this volume examine Augustine's point of contact with "classical political philosophy" (see especially Thomas Harmon's "The Few, the Many, and the Universal Way of Salvation: Augustine's Point of Engagement with Platonic Political Thought"). In Peter Busch's "Peace in the Order of Nature: Augustine, Giles, and Dante," interest in the supposedly continuous tradition of classical political philosophy extends to an intriguing medieval debate between Giles of Rome and Dante on the temporal and ecclesial-spiritual powers of the Pope. Strauss's influence is evident in the only clearly explicated methodological commitment of the volume, contained in Dougherty's editorial introduction: "The contributions of this volume all take as a matter of utmost importance the task of understanding St. Augustine on his own terms" (1). Similarly: "The thrust of the essays is not simply putting Augustine into conversation with ancient or modern authors … but rather first coming to know with as much assurance as possible what Augustine thought. … To do so, one must honor Augustine's foundational work as much as one can, following the nuances of his argument and often recognizing the interplay between and among texts" (2). These comments follow Strauss in criticizing the perceived "historicism" of modern-day scholarship, encouraging, rather, close study of the "interplay" between texts in Augustine's corpus—and understanding "Augustine's own argument comprehensively" (2). The appeal of many essays in this volume will depend on how plausible one finds these background interpretive commitments. Some might be skeptical about attempts to "understand Augustine's own argument comprehensively" (2) through "honor[ing] Augustine's foundational work" (2), while others may doubt just how much of Augustine's political thought can be gleaned from works on topics other than political philosophy. Last, those disposed to view Augustine's thought along roughly developmental lines might find it curious to draw from much earlier works in Augustine's...

Giles of Rome on the Intensification of Forms

On the question of the intensio/remissio formarum, Giles, while sharing Thomas Aquinas’s view’s main tenets, develops a very different theory - in fact, a theory that is unique, and deeply “aegidia...

Did Giles of Rome Change His Mind Concerning Will and Intellect? An Inquiry into his interpretation of Moral Responsibility

In Giles of Rome, moral responsibility and human freedom are articulated taking into account the relation of will and intellect. For Giles, this topic appears to be particularly crucial and often r...

‘Logica hominis in via’ : anthropologie, philosophie et pratiques de la logique chez Gilles de Rome

The paper wishes to investigate the way Giles of Rome thought about logic: as a discipline, as a method, through an examination of the powers of logic, but also as a teaching subject. It tries to i...

Épistémologie déflationniste et théologie universitaire selon Gilles de Rome

This paper addresses the conception of theology developed by Giles of Rome from the Reportatio of his lecture on the second book of the Sentences (1271) to his fifth Quodlibet (1290). It demonstrat...

Giles of Rome on Sense Perception

Giles of Rome maintains that the senses are passive powers and more specifically receptive powers, that is, powers to receive something from sensible objects. The items that the senses receive from...

Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Reception of Forms without the Matter

AbstractIn a passage of De Anima II, chapter 12 (424a17-24), Aristotle makes a general claim about the senses, which is condensed in the formula that the senses are receptive of the sensible forms without the matter. While it is clear that this formula must play an important theoretical role in Aristotle’s account, it is far from clear what it exactly means. Its interpretation is still a focus of controversy among contemporary scholars. In this article the author presents the exegeses of this formula proposed by the two most authoritative commentators on De anima from the second half of the thirteenth century, namely, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome. Both commentators assume that with this formula and in particular with the qualification “without the matter” Aristotle intends to characterize an “intentional” reception of a form, and to contrast it with a “natural” reception, but they give different accounts of intentionality.

Faith and Rhetoric in Giles of Rome

AbstractGiles of Rome’s view of faith in the reportatio of his questions on book III of the Sentences (q. 38, d. 23) is founded on a likening of faith to rhetoric. The firm intellectual assent that characterizes them both is caused by the will, motivated by emotion, or affective bias. This paper argues that this is made possible by Giles’ move away from Aquinas’ position on the assent produced by rhetorical discourse, which Aquinas thought to be of little certainty, while Giles affirms that, based on the will’s natural control over the intellect, it can be as certain as faithful assent, and that the psychological process that produces it can serve as a model for that which produces faithful assent. The new function Giles gives to rhetoric underlines the evolution of thirteenth-century views on faith, as shown through a comparison of Giles’ view with two other doctrines of faith that use examples similar to the one Giles employs: those of Philip the Chancellor and Peter John Olivi. For the former, faith founded on affective bias is a typical example of non-virtuous faith, while for the latter, just as for Giles, it is the very model of virtuous faith.

Qualia bona in coniuge sunt quaerenda.... Zalecenia na temat wyboru żony w świetle średniowiecznych traktatów o wychowaniu (na przykładzie De regimine principum Idziego Rzymianina)

The paper is concerned with the advice regarding choosing a wife presented in the thir-teenthcentury educational treatise De regimine principum by Giles of Rome. It was the most popular “mirror of prince” in the later Middle Ages. In defining the criteria one should pay attention to Giles distinguishes three kinds of “goods” (bona) that an appro-priate wife-to-be should possess. These are the so-called external (exterior) goods and internal (interior) ones, the latter being in turn divided into the bodily goods (bona cor-poris) and the spiritual goods (bona animae). The first kind includes such goods as noble descent (nobilitas generis), multitude of friends (pluralitas amicorum) and abundance of wealth (multitudo divitiarum); the second – beauty (pulchritudo) and size (magnitudo); the third – self control (temperantia) and liking for work (amor operositatis). These three kinds of goods, as well as particular examples of them, are drawn by Giles from Aristotle’s Rhetorica. Yet, when compared to those enumerated by medieval theologians and canon lawyers in their discussons of reasons for marrying, they do not considerably differ from them. What matters is that Giles sees and accepts all of them as relatively equally important as criteria used for choosing a wife. This is because they are all neces-sary for setting up a successful marriage that will bring happiness to a man.

Das Maßlose Begreifen. Gott als Gegenstand der Theologie bei vier scholastischen Autoren (13./14. Jahrhundert)

AbstractThis article examines four medieval views on the subject of theology. Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, John Duns Scotus, and Peter Auriol were all confronted with an idea based on Aristotle’s theory of knowledge according to which any scientific discipline is unified by its proper subject. In defining this subject of theology, however, the theologians had to confront one thorny problem: God, whom they considered to be the subject of theology, cannot be grasped by any concept accessible to the human mind. In their respective discussions, two distinct strategies to solving this puzzle emerged. Aquinas and Giles, on the one hand, argued for a concept proportionate to human cognition. This concept or ratio functioned as a placeholder for the quidditative concept of God. Scotus and Auriol, on the other hand, elaborated on a concept which they believed grasped God’s quiddity, albeit in a somewhat approximative way. Their theories, therefore, figure as attempts to find a concept, that is, the concept of being, that in itself was as boundless as to grasp God’s immensity.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts of the University of Notre Dame and St Mary's College by David T. Gura

Reviewed by: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts of the University of Notre Dame and St Mary's College by David T. Gura John O. Ward Gura, David T., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts of the University of Notre Dame and St Mary's College, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2016; cloth; pp. xxxiv, 716; 8 colour plates; R.R.P. US $150.00; ISBN 9780268100605. 'This catalogue describes the 288 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts (69 codices and 219 fragments from 86 parent manuscripts) held by repositories in Notre Dame, Indiana' (p. 1). Those repositories are the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library (containing the majority of items), the University of Notre Dame Snite Museum of Art, and the Cushwa-Leighton Library at St Mary's College. 'Bound manuscripts, individual leaves, cuttings, and extracted binding fragments written in Western historical Latin scripts are included (and a single twelfth-century leaf in Greek). Charters and other documentary materials, letters, and fragments still in book bindings are excluded' (p. 1). The idea is to update the 1978 catalogue of James A. Corbett. The majority of manuscripts are liturgical (Books of Hours, Psalters, Missals, Graduals, Breviaries, Pontificals, Evangeliaries, Prayer-books, Antiphonaries, sermon collections, and Bibles), but there are also works by Peter Comestor, Cyprian, Boethius, Buridan, Pope Boniface VIII, Catherine of Siena, Isidore of Seville, Giles of Rome, Peter Lombard, and others. Two fragments are from the eleventh century, but the bulk of the items come from the fifteenth century. Italy and England provide the largest number of items; most are in Latin but a few are in Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, or Italian. There is a list of abbreviations and eight (colour) plates; a fifty-page introduction covering 'Formation of the Collection and Fonds in Use', 'Overview of the Collection', 'Utility of the Collection', 'Method of Citation', 'Format of Entries', 'Arrangement of Entries'. The catalogues of the various institutions themselves follow, and at the end we find Appendix 1 on 'Former and Permanent Hesburgh Library Shelfmarks', Appendix 2 on 'North American Manuscripts by State or Province', and Appendix 3 with 'Tables of Distribution of Watermarks'. [End Page 219] There is a bibliography, an 'Index of Manuscripts Cited', an 'Index of Incipits' and a 'General Index'. David T. Gura is the Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts in the Hesburgh Library, and concurrent assistant professor in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. In the opinion of the present reviewer, the Catalogue is comprehensive, professional, and utterly reliable. The remarks on the uses to which the collection can be put (pp. 41–42) will interest teachers and lecturers at tertiary academies. John O. Ward The University of Sydney Copyright © 2018 John O. Ward

Giles of Rome, Proclus, and the Liber de causis

This article examines pivotal aspects of the reception of Proclus' Elementatio theologica in the commentary on the Liber de causis written by Giles of Rome at the end of the 13th century. The article examines Giles's understanding of Proclus’s philosophy in relation to the Neoplatonic framework of the Liber de causis, and shows how this understanding accounts for the theoretical divergences of Giles's and Thomas Aquinas's interpretations.

POTENTIA DEI: DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO A HOBBES

<p>La intención del presente trabajo es analizar las consecuencias filosófico-teológicopolíticas que la distinción entre potentia dei absoluta y potentia dei ordinata, surgida en el medioevo, generará en el pensamiento político moderno, particularmente en el de Thomas Hobbes. Se parte de la consideración del tema que hace Pedro Damián.<br />Luego se analiza en Tomás de Aquino la noción de potencia divina, el tratamiento<br />que el Aquinate da a la omnipotencia y, finalmente, el valor secundario que Tomás<br />asigna a la distinctio. Se continúa con el análisis de las versiones ofrecidas por Duns Scoto y Ockham. Se examina también la elaboración que de la omnipotencia divina hicieran Bonifacio VIII y Egidio Romano tal que permitiera explicar la relación del poder papal (plenitudo potestatis) con las leyes eclesiásticas y con el poder temporal.<br />Se concluye con el tratamiento de la cuestión en la teología política de Thomas<br />Hobbes, quien anula la distinctio en favor del poder absoluto.</p>

Эгидий Римский о границах метафизики как науки

Эгидий Римский о границах метафизики как науки

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge by Rodney M. Thomson

Reviewed by: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge by Rodney M. Thomson Constant J. Mews Thomson, Rodney M., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Cambridge, Brewer, 2016; hardback; pp. xliv, 250; 130 colour illustrations; R.R.P. £95.00; ISBN 9781843844419. The manuscript catalogues of Oxford and Cambridge colleges produced by Rodney Thomson have the same stature as those produced by Montague Rhodes James, but consistently introduce a level of analytic accuracy demanded by the passage of time. This is particularly true of this volume on the manuscripts of Peterhouse, the oldest of the Cambridge colleges, which James described in 1899, but which have now been freshly described by Thomson. The labour that goes into such a volume often passes in silence, as so many minor details will be relevant only to the rare scholar who needs to know about the content of a particular manuscript. In this case, the antiquity of Peterhouse makes its manuscript collection potentially valuable for the insights it might give into intellectual life in the early centuries of the University at Cambridge. In fact, as Thomson warns, we know little for certain about its library before its earliest library catalogue from 1418. As with most such college libraries, its collection was formed from donations by individual scholars over the centuries, sometimes long after the foundation of Peterhouse by Hugh of Balsam, bishop of Ely, in 1284. Nonetheless, enough interesting books survive for us to gain some insights into Cambridge intellectual life (often overshadowed by that of Oxford) in the earliest centuries of the university. Even when the early history of a manuscript is uncertain, there are still items that demand attention. Thomson's analysis, following in the tradition of James and R. A. B. Mynors (whose annotations on the James 1899 catalogue assisted Thomson in this task) focuses more on the historical than intellectual significance of the texts preserved in the library. Nonetheless, there are many treasures at Peterhouse worthy of note. Occasionally the significance of the date of a particular manuscript is passed over. For example, Thomson describes MS 150, containing parts of the Conflatus of Francis of Meyronnes, in the introduction as pre-dating the College's foundation (p. xviii), but more accurately describes it as early fourteenth-century in the Catalogue itself (p. 90). It might have been helpful to add that this must be an exceptionally early MS of the work, as Meyronnes (c. 1288–1328), a French Franciscan, an independently minded follower of Scotus, only lectured on the sentences in 1320–21. He does observe, however, that, like two other MSS (109 containing Odo of Cheriton's sermons; and 178, a fourteenth-century copy of many medical texts, including some by Ricardus Anglicus), it has annotations in English as well as Latin, a revealing insight into the developing use of English within a scholastic context. Similarly, Thomson notes that MS 82 is a late thirteenth-century manuscript containing Giles of Rome on De bona fortuna and Aristotle's Rhetorica, and [End Page 261] Aquinas with the continuation by Peter of Auvergne on Aristotle's Politics. Given that Moerbeke only translated De bona fortuna (derived from Aristotle's Ethica and the Magna moralia) in 1270, and that Peter of Auvergne (d. 1304) completed the Aquinas commentary on the Politics sometime before the 1290s, the extraordinary intellectual importance of this manuscript deserves to be signalled. There are many other treasures in this collection, whose early history is not known, including late eleventh-century copies of the Collectio canonum Lanfranci (MS 40), annotated before 1130 by Symeon of Durham, and of a glossed Boethius De arithmetica and Cicero on rhetoric (MS 248). Among later scholastic manuscripts, the reviewer observes that there are late thirteenth-or early fourteenth-century copies from England, not just of Aquinas (MSS 47, 48, 76) but also (MS 152) of Siger of Brabant and Albert the Great. For understanding the diversity of intellectual perspectives within England in a period which generated both Scotus and Ockham, this is of great importance. Only by browsing this catalogue, magnificently supplemented by over a hundred images, can the significance...

Political argumentation of Boniface VIII and Giles of Rome on the essence of power

Political argumentation of Boniface VIII and Giles of Rome on the essence of power