Medieval Themes Research Articles

European naval and maritime history 300-1500 (review)

Short Notices lfig Lewis, Archibald R. and Timothy J. Runyan, European naval and maritime history 300-1500, rpt, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990; paper; pp. xvi, 192; 53 illustrations, 9 maps; R R P US$9.95. The reissue of this general survey of the history of the sea in the Middle Ages suggests that there is considerable demand for a succinct and clearly iUustrated text on a critical period of ship design. The relationship between ship design, the utilisation of sea routes, and the growth of sea power is obviously highly significant both for the history of the time and subsequent world history. This attempt to marry the different parts is inevitably hampered by constraints of length which leave as bald assertionstopicswhich cry out for a more detailed analysis. In particular, the integration of underwater archaeological work on intermittentiy surviving and recoverable wrecks, whose interpretation can often be debatable, into a narrative account presents difficulties. The periodisation and the accounts of military developments are therefore mainly based on documentary evidence and are fairly conventional. The arguments presented are sometimes questionable. The chronological relationships suggested for the development of the Hansa trade empire may be doubted as it depends as much on the moment at which certain records appear as anything else. If this work stimulates historians to further investigation and to a fuller treatment however, it will have served a very useful purpose. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Loyn, H. R., ed., The Middle Ages: a concise encyclopedia, rpt, London, Thames and Hudson, 1991; paper; pp. 352; 250 illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$49.95. This volume is a reissue in paperback of the 1989 hardback edition. See the full critical review by J. O. Ward in Parergon 8.2, December 1990. The present volume is more reasonably priced, though the production quality remains at the very high standard of the hardback. The soft-binding is also strong enough to stand up to the frequent use which will be made of such a work. It remains to note again some of the good features of this encyclopaedia. The early medieval speciatist is moved to praise the extent of the coverage of early medieval topics. The choice of illustrations is also particularly excellent. While the specialist will find little that is new in this work, it is an admirable reference work and especially so for the undergraduate who is searching for concise definitions of ...

A Late Medieval Theme with an Evangelical Slant: Holbein the Younger's Allegory of the Old and New Testaments and the Problem of Its Patron

Article A Late Medieval Theme with an Evangelical Slant: Holbein the Younger's Allegory of the Old and New Testaments and the Problem of Its Patron was published on December 1, 1985 in the journal Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History (volume 76, issue jg).

Institutio Logica (review)

432 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY although this volume is apparently intended for an English-reading public, the only work cited in English is MacClintock's 1956 monograph on Jandun. The book's value would have been increased if a short bibliography had been added, one containing at least references to some of Armand Maurer's publications, to Weisheipl's book on Thomas, and perhaps also to MacClintock's 1954/55 article. Such a bibliography should also have included references to some of the writings of the late Bruno Nardi and Harry A. Wolfson, neither of whom is ever mentioned in this volume? On the other hand, it must be underscored that the translation is clear and fluid, the author 's prose arresting. The volume has been meticulously edited by Professer Wippel. A special debt of gratitude is owed to him and to his two colleagues for making available to a wider audience Canon Van Steenberghen's interpretation of the course of late-thirteenth-century philosophy. EDWARD P. MAHONEY Duke University There also appears to be no reference to Nardi in Van Steenberghen's The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century (Belfast, 1955). Pierre Gassendi. Institutio Logica. Critical edition with translation and introduction by Howard Jones. Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., x981. Pp. Ixvii + 172. Gassendi's Institutio Logzca is valuable for the insight it offers us about the history of logic and, in general, of the transition in philosophy from the Scholastics to the moderns. As more research is done on the seventeenth century, it is becoming clear that Leibniz was not the only modern admirer and follower of Scholastic logic and philosophy, but that others, like Hobbes, in his Computatio (recently translated by A. P. Martinich), also found the Schoolmen's work of interest, although needing emendations. Howard Jones has now made generally accessible a text of Gassendi where it is clear that, despite his rhetorical flourishes, Gassendi is seriously indebted to Scholastic logic and philosophy. In the lengthy introduction, Professor Jones takes pains to show how the Institutio Logica fits into Gassendi's philosophical career and, more particularly, how it related to his other, earlier logical works. Jones also gives a critical Latin text, and a fairly literal, yet smooth, English translation. His work would be more useful if the text and translation were displayed on opposing pages. I have one major puzzle about this book. If I had read the text without having read the introduction, I would have supposed that Gassendi was writing a logic text, like Sherwood's lntroductio or Peter of Spain's Tractatus, in which he was presenting standard doctrines of traditional logic while including material from Renaissance and modern scientific perspectives. That is, the lnstitutio reads like a standard (medieval Scholastic) logic text, with insertions about seventeenth-century scientific meth- BOOK REVIEWS 433 ods, and with others having to do with etymology and the authors dear to Renaissance humanism. So the Institutio can be viewed as an updated logic text. The puzzle is whether the lnstitutio should be taken this way, given what Jones says in his introduction. There he points out that Gassendi in his Exercitationes is engaged in a polemic against Aristotelians. Gassendi contemptuously dismisses Aristotle's theory of the categories, his syllogistic, and his theory of definition (pp. xx-xxii). Moreover, Gassendi is a follower of Epicurus, who also rejected Aristotle's logic (p. xxx). It is peculiar, then, that in the Institutio Gassendi presents Aristotelian categories, syllogisms , definitions, and even topica, or commonplaces (pp. 33ff.). To be sure, Gassendi has judiciously edited the material: many medieval topics, like the exponibilia, are omitted, and the syllogistic is presented in new figures that Gassendi claims are simpler, although, as Professor Jones rightly remarks (p. lxiii), Gassendi's reduction is quite cumbersome (pp. 42ff.). Again, in his treatments of the imagination and method, Gassendi has much Epicurean material, but there is also, for example, a discussion of finding the middle term, in the style of the Posterior Analytics. Jones is aware of this incongruity between Gassendi's earlier logical writings and the ln~titutio; he suggests that the Exercitationes was deliberately onesided, whereas the lnstitutio positively contributes to logic by shaping traditional logic to...

Ockham, Descartes, and Hume (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 97 Julius R. Weinberg. Ockham, Descartes,and Hume. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Pp. x + 179. $15.oo. This volume consists of fourteen papers by the late Julius Weinberg, most of them not previously published. Assembled and edited after his death, in 197t, by his colleagues W. J. Courtenay, W. H. Hay, and K. E. Yandell, these papers deal with Weinberg's main concerns. The first five are about medieval themes and their relation to current issues in analytic philosophy. The next group, of six papers, treats issues in the theories of Descartes and Hume. The last three papers discuss some contemporary issues. The volume closes with a complete bibliography of Weinberg's published works. Weinberg had amazingly broad interests in the history of philosophy and in intellectual history generally. The chief foci of his concerns were medieval nominalistic thought, especially that of William of Ockham and of Nicolaus of Autrecourt, the medieval Hume; the naturalistic empiricism of the eighteenth century Hume; and modern-day logical positivism and its sequels. Weinberg's doctoral dissertation, An Examination of Logical Positivism (1936), is the first detailed account of this philosophical view. His next book was Nicolaus of Autrecourt: A Study in Fourteenth-CentryThought (1948). He always saw Hume as the key figure in modern thought, and he presented much of his evaluation and admiration of Hume in his presidential address to the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, "The Novelty of Hume's Philosophy," republished in this collection. Weinberg was concerned to relate historical materials to issues of importance in his own systematic philosophy. He saw in the views of the Christian medieval nominalists , and of some of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers who preceded them, formulations of positions that are central to twentieth-century empiricism. In Descartes he saw statements of epistemological and metaphysical positions that were overthrown by Hume's analyses. Although Weinberg often considered the fourteenth -century nominalistic position as better stated than Hume's, he saw that it is the latter view that has effected the present form of empiricism. In two of the essays Weinberg fought back against two contemporary thinkers, G. E. M. Anscombe and Anthony Kenny, who have claimed to find basic errors in Hume's often sloppy formulations and outdated psychologizing. One cannot help being impressed by the ease with which Weinberg traced issues back and forth from the ancient to the medieval to the early modern to the contemporary scene. He did this with great erudition, and with careful and precise delineation of philosophical issues. However, he structured his historical apperfus in terms of the issues in philosophy that interested him, and in terms of the periods of the history of philosophy in which he felt most at home. His presentations are always stimulating and informative. However, one does feel that other issues and other aspects of the history of thought are ignored or suppressed. In the key essay, "The Novelty of Hume's Philosophy," Weinberg mainly compared Hume's views on causality and causation with those of Al-Ghazzali and Nico- 98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY laus of Autrecourt. He made no effort to trace how Islamic occasionalism was known and discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and how it was presented in editions of Maimonides in Latin, and in discussions throughout Bayle's Dictionary. Bayle is not mentioned as a source although current scholarship indicates that he was the major source of Hume's views about previous metaphysical theories and the major inspiration of his skepticism. The critique of induction stated by Francisco Sanches and by Pierre Gassendi is ignored while various medieval ones are compared with Hume's. The development of a view like Hume's on causality worked out by the Occasionalists is alluded to, but not actually discussed. To assess Hume's novelty vis-~t-vis his immediate predecessors, one would have to go into much detail about various seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century authors. If one wished to assess his novelty compared with only the Islamic occasionalists and the medieval Christian nominalists, one could skip the developments in early modern thought. Weinberg seemed to want his most interesting comparison of Hume's analyses...

Ethics as a Key to Aquinas’s Theology: The Significance of Specification by Object

ETIIlCS AS A KEY TO AQUINAS'S THEOLOGY THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPECIFICATION BY OBJECT v.ARIOUS OBSTACLES BLOCK an easy access to " the most coherent work on moral theology in the ntire history of Christianity ",1 i.e., the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. Most prominent among these obstacles are, on the one hand, the multitude of questions and articles relating to medieval topics and controversies, and, on the other, Thomas's method of" interpretation." Often the p:resentday reader, unfamiliar with that historical environment, can hardly make more sense out of a translation than out of the Latin text. He can easily be led to believe that certain formulas or a certain configuration of elements represent Thomas' opinion whereas in fact they merely reflect the state of the question in the 13th century, i.e., the stage preceding his interpretation. One of the most famous examples of this state of affairs is to be found in Thomas' analysis of good and evil. Every single manual or treatise, mainly in the Catholic tradition , contains a reference to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 18, aa. 2-4 in order to support the contention that good and evil are determined by object, circumstances, and intent. While this may be suggested by the titles of the articles, it is quite another question exactly how Thomas proceeds to " interpret" this configuration of elements that he happens to find in the theologies of the 13th century. Only an extensive historical commentary of the Prima Secundae, particularly of qq. 6-21, will make it possible to understand the real meaning of Thomas's fundamental ethics 1 The qualification was formulated by James M. Gustafson in a paper at the annual meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics in Washington, D. C., in January 1976. The paper will be part of a forthcoming book. 535 536 WILLIAM VANDERMARCK and of the theological questions involved in it. The present article is the introduction to such a commentary. It is a tentative first chapter concerning the introductory questions of the Secunda Parsi I-II, qq. 1-5, "On Ultimate End and Beatitude." It is also the first installment towards a long overdue debt to those who have expressed both appreciation and curiosity about many statements in my book on Christian ethics.2 1. Perspective of the treatise. When Thomas decided to open the second part of his Summa Theologiae with a treatise on ultimate end and beatitude, he introduced a new element into the study of Christian ethics. Although such a move had a precedent in the first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and although a certain systematic treatment of beatitude had been developed by some of Thomas's predecessors, no comparable approach existed in the work of medieval theologians.8 The impact of this innovation has been rather limited. Until well into the 16th century Peter Lombard's Sentences remained dominant in the study of theology. The renewal of the Counterreformation, strongly influenced by Jesuit authors, led to the development of a " moral theology " greatly indebted to Thomas, in which, however , " speculative" and " theoretical" questions were eliminated . The first victim of this process was the treatise on ultimate end and beatitude. It failed to appear in the pacesetting manuals of the early 17th century, and the subsequent tradition faithfully followed the same path.4 Thomas's intro- •Toward A Christian Ethic: A Rene.wal in Moral Theology. New York: Newman Press, 1967. •The best recent study of Thomas's introductory treatise in its historical context is by Roger Guindon, Beatitude et Theologie morale chez saint Thomas d'Aquin. Origines-lnterpretations. Ottawa: Editions de l'Universite d'Ottawa, 1956. See also the classic study of Thomas's ethic, which continues to be valuable especially because of its historical data, by Michael Wittmann, Die Ethik des hl. Thomas von Aquin in ihrem systematischen Aufbau dargestellt und in ihren geschichtlichen, besonders in den antiken Quellen erforscht. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1933. • A comprehensive study of this development, mainly concerning the 16th and 17th centuries, has been published by Johann Theiner, Die Entwicklung der Mmas' Theological Summa, Ia Ilae, qq. 1-54. Transl. by Patrick Cummins. St. Louis, London: Herder...

Investment in Medieval Agriculture

The current controversies about production and yields of medieval agriculture may give an outsider the impression that on this subject historians are more at variance than they actually are. Some historians may still cling to the Victorian belief that things economic were perpetually on the rise; historians thus minded are inclined to take it for granted that both the aggregate product of agriculture and agricultural output per head improved all through the Middle Ages. Other students, for example, Beveridge or Bennett, derived from the imperfectly selected data of the Bishop of Winchester's manors the impression that output per acre, and probably also per unit of seed, stayed put all through the Middle Ages. More recently other historians, including myself, have argued that output per acre tended to slump in the earlier, that is, pre-Black Death period, and may have picked up somewhat in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The concert of historians may therefore strike the ear as being even more cacophonous on this theme than on most other medieval themes.