Introduction: Three Avenues for Studying the Tradition of the Sentences

Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

Volume 3

Edited by

Philipp W. Rosemann

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This is a digital offfprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

Contents

List of Figures viiAbbreviations ix

Introduction: Three Avenues for Studying the Tradition of the Sentences 1

Philipp W. Rosemann

1 Filiae Magistri: Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Medieval Theological Education “On the Ground” 26

Franklin T. Harkins

2 Les listes des opiniones Magistri Sententiarum quae communiter non tenentur: forme et usage dans la lectio des Sentences 79

Claire Angotti

3 Henry of Gorkum’s Conclusiones Super IV Libros Sententiarum: Studying the Lombard in the First Decades of the Fifteenth Century 145

John T. Slotemaker

4 The Past, Present, and Future of Late Medieval Theology: The Commentary on the Sentences by Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, Vienna, ca. 1400 174

Monica Brinzei and Chris Schabel

5 Easy-Going Scholars Lecturing Secundum Alium? Notes on Some French Franciscan Sentences Commentaries of the Fifteenth Century 267

Ueli Zahnd

6 The Concept of Beatifĳic Enjoyment (Fruitio Beatifĳica) in the Sentences Commentaries of Some Pre-Reformation Erfurt Theologians 315

Severin V. Kitanov


vi Contents

7 John Major’s (Mair’s) Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: Scholastic Philosophy and Theology in the Early Sixteenth Century 369

Severin V. Kitanov, John T. Slotemaker, and Jefffrey C. Witt

8 The Sentences in Sixteenth-Century Iberian Scholasticism 416Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste

9 Texts, Media, and Re-Mediation: The Digital Future of the Sentences Commentary Tradition 504

Jefffrey C. Witt

Bibliography 517 Figures 533 Index of Manuscripts 546 Index of Names 552


© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283046_002


Introduction: Three Avenues for Studying the Tradition of the Sentences

Philipp W. Rosemann

It is in three major ways that this volume adds both substance and nuance to our knowledge of the tradition of the Sentences. First, several of the chap-ters published here enrich the contemporary debate, lively amongst medieval-ists as well as intellectual historians more generally, concerning the meaning of authority and authorship. The question, “What is an author?” is answered diffferently in diffferent cultures, and the rise of scholasticism was one of the points in intellectual history when the function of the author underwent sig-nifĳicant change. Secondly, the volume sheds much light on what one of its contributors calls theological education “on the ground,” especially during the later Middle Ages—the kind of teaching that was dispensed by the average master and received by his average student, and not just the content of the few most “original” masterpieces by the most celebrated doctores. Finally, the con-tributors to this third volume of Mediaeval Commentaries on the “Sentences” of

Peter Lombard paint a picture of the reception of the Book of Sentences which suggests that Peter Lombard’s great textbook played a much more dynamic role in later medieval theology than hitherto assumed. Far from being mar-ginalized and superseded after the flourishing of the great commentaries of the thirteenth century, the work remained a force to be reckoned with until at least the sixteenth century. The following pages will elaborate on each of these points, thus highlighting the major themes that hold the chapters of this volume together.

1 Authorship, Modern and Scholastic

Even today, the concept of authorship remains problematic and, in fact, para-doxical. We live in an age in which the idea of the author implies notions of both original creativity and property rights. An author, according to this under-standing, is a person who creates value by originating words and ideas that are novel, innovative, unheard-of—in short, “original.” At the opposite pole of the author, thus conceived as the fount of value and innovation, we have the pla-giarist, who steals the author’s creations, enriching him- or herself illicitly by infringing on the author’s right to be recognized and rewarded.

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The logic that drives the contemporary notion of the author is thrown into sharp relief in the concept of self-plagiarism. In relation to the world of art, self-plagiarism has been defĳined as occurring “when the artist takes from the aesthetically signifĳicant features of his/her previous work, and presents them under the false assumption that they are creatively original and that aesthetic progress has been made. . . .”1 Here, originality is conceived of in terms of prog-ress in relation not only to the work of others, but even to one’s own produc-tions. Let us note, in passing, how modern the emphasis on progress is as a criterion of an aesthetically signifĳicant work. One wonders how this criterion would apply to, say, a Byzantine icon.

The trademarking of common phrases is another consequence brought about by the contemporary notion of the author. Originality and creativity are so valuable that not only entire works need to be protected (through copy-right laws), but individual symbols and phrases as well. Thus, for example, the phrases “play and fun for everyone,” “black history makers of tomorrow,” and even “hey, it could happen” are trademarks of the McDonald’s corporation, which has used them in a variety of advertisements and promotions.2 In this context, what the law protects are less the claims of an author to be recognized for his or her original creations, than the economic interests of a corporation that wants to be associated with certain vernacular terms so as to insinuate itself more deeply into the thought processes of its customers. The conse-quence which such pervasive trademarking produces is that more and more words and phrases of the language of a particular culture come to be absorbed into the domain of property. The vernacular thus takes on the characteristics of a commodity from which its users feel increasingly alienated.3

The fĳinal step in this development is that not only language, but nature itself is commodifĳied. In the United States, which has often been at the lead-ing edge of modern social and technological developments, living matter was not patentable until 1980. The situation changed when the Supreme Court ruled, in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, that a certain bacterium which the biochem-ist Ananda M. Chakrabarty had developed to digest oil spills could indeed be

1 David Goldblatt, “Self-Plagiarism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 71–7, at 71.

2 See David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (Hoboken, n.j., 2005), 112.

3 I have discussed these developments in two previous publications: “ ‘Where America Takes It’s PicturesTM’: Only Theology Saves Language,” in Pragmata: Festschrift für Klaus Oehler

zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Kai-Michael Hingst and Maria Liatsi (Tübingen, 2008), 170–7, and “Vernacularity and Alienation,” Existentia 23 (2013): 139–54.

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protected by a patent.4 This decision paved the way for commercial bioengi-neering. Henceforth, human beings—and corporations, in particular5—have been able to claim legally, and enforce the claim, that they have invented, cre-ated, authored parts of nature.

But we were talking about the paradoxical nature of the contemporary notion of authorship. On the one hand, the way in which the author’s original-ity contributes to human progress—not least economic progress—is valued so highly that it is protected by rigorous copyrights, trademarks, and patents, as well as the taboo of plagiarism. Yet at the same time, authorship appears to be dissipating in a digital culture in which there is a boundless proliferation of author-less meaning (texts, images, sounds) on websites, in blogs, and in tweets. Material is posted, often under a screen name, then copied, modifĳied, and reposted in a manner that subverts the conventional notions of author-ship, originality, and property. The Wikipedia is only one example of a web-site that relies on the collaboration of a multitude of authors who contribute their expertise, efffort, and time in the full knowledge that there will be neither acknowledgment nor pay.

Some decades before the popular availability of the Internet, Michel Foucault already spoke of the death of the author in the context of contem-porary literature. He meant the fact that literary fĳigures of the modern avant-garde—the likes of Beckett, Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka—no longer regarded writing as the expression of their deepest interiority, pursued with the goal to ward offf death through an act of literary immortalization. On the contrary, Foucault argued, for these modern authors writing became a sacrifĳice of self.6 Indeed, Foucault himself practiced writing as a method of self-efffacement. The idea irritated him profoundly that what he called the “author function” could dominate the interpretation of his work, reducing the multiplicity of meaning in his books to a predictable set of “Foucauldian positions.”7

4 See Daniel V. Kevles, “Ananda Chakrabarty Wins A Patent: Biotechnology, Law, and Society, 1972–1980,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25 (1994): 111–35, and idem, “Diamond v. Chaskrabarty and Beyond: The Political Economy of Patenting Life,” in Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences, ed. Arnold Thackray (Philadelphia, 1998), 65–79.

5 Chakrabarty himself was an employee of the General Electric Research Center in Schenectady, New York, when he engineered the oil-eating Pseudomonas bacterium.

6 See Michael Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault 2 (New York, 1998), 205–22.

7 I have explored this theme in my essay, “What Is an Author? Bonaventure and Foucault on the Meaning of Authorship,” Fealsúnacht: A Journal of the Dialectical Tradition 2 (2001–02): 22–45.

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Foucault claimed that, due to the tensions inherent in the contemporary notion of authorship, the author has in fact become an ideological construct, that is to say, a notion which is defĳined in a way that veils its actual function. We say that our laws must protect the rights of the author, who “is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infĳinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of signifĳications.”8 In reality, however, the flourishing of signifĳication is precisely what the legally sanctioned understanding of author-ship prevents; for the author “is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fĳiction.”9

In a discussion of medieval authorship, it is good to remember, with Foucault, that “[t]he author function does not afffect all discourses in a univer-sal and constant way.”10 While it is not possible, therefore, to defĳine the author in a unifĳied way across the diffferent centuries, regions, disciplines, and genres of medieval culture, it is clear that the medieval notion of authorship, unlike the modern one, did not constitute itself at the intersection of concepts of originality, progress, and property. There is also evidence that the author func-tion underwent a signifĳicant reconfĳiguration precisely in conjunction with the rise of the new scholastic genre of the Sentences commentary—the subject matter of this volume.

In a well-known passage of the prologue to his Sentences commentary, Bonaventure asks the question, certainly puzzling from the modern point of view, Quae sit causa efffĳiciens sive auctor huius libri?, “what is the efffĳicient cause or author of this book?”11 The modern answer would be, “Look at the name on the cover!” But, of course, the medieval book was constructed difffer-ently: to begin with, there was no cover or title page to look at. In his answer, Bonaventure develops a fourfold distinction among the scriptor (who merely copies the words of someone else), the compilator (who copies the words of someone else, or of others, but adds to them), the commentator (who adds words of his own to clarify a copied text), and fĳinally the auctor (who combines

8 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 221.9 Ibid.10 Ibid., 212.11 Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libris Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi, vol. 1:

In primum librum Sententiarum, prooemium, qu. iv, in Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, ed. PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), 1: 14. For commentary, see A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, England, 1988), as well as Rosemann, “What Is an Author?”

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text both by himself and by others, but provides the leading voice). “Such was the Master,” Bonaventure concludes, “who posits his own sententiae and con-fĳirms them through the sententiae of the Fathers. This is why he must truly be called the author of this book.”12

Bonaventure further elucidates his conception of authorship in response to an objection: does Peter Lombard himself not admit that he composed his Book of Sentences from the “examples and teachings of our forefathers,” and that his own voice is hardly ever heard?13 Yes, Bonaventure concedes, this may be true, but “the fact that there are many citations from others here, that does not do away with the auctoritas of the Master, but rather confĳirms his auctoritas and commends his humility.”14 Since this is the fĳinal sentence in Bonaventure’s response to the question, Quae sit causa efffĳiciens sive auctor huius libri?, it is likely that the term auctoritas should be rendered as “authorship” here. Yet of course it also means “authority.” The auctor is credited with auctoritas,

12 Bonaventure, In i Sent., prooem, qu. iv, resp. (1: 14–15): “Respondeo: Ad intelligentiam dictorum notandum, quod quadruplex est modus faciendi librum. Aliquis enim scribit aliena, nihil addendo vel mutando; et iste mere dicitur scriptor. Aliquis scribit aliena, addendo, sed non de suo; et iste compilator dicitur. Aliquis scribit et aliena et sua, ed aliena tamquam principalia, et sua tamquam annexa ad evidentiam; et iste dicitur com-

mentator, non auctor. Aliquis scribit et sua et aliena, sed sua tamquam principalia, aliena tamquam annexa ad confĳirmationem; et talis debet dici auctor. Talis fuit Magister, qui sententias suas ponit et Patrum sententiis confĳirmat. Unde vere debet dici auctor huius libri.”

13 Ibid., videtur 2 (1:14): “. . . sed Magister hoc opus composuit ex aliena doctrina, sicut ipse dicit in littera, quod ‘in hoc opere maiorum exempla doctrinamque reperies’; ergo non debet dici auctor. Si tu dicis, quod non tantum hoc est doctrina Sanctorum, sed etiam sua, ratione cuius debet dici auctor; contra: ‘A maiori et digniori debet fĳieri denominatio’; sed Magister dicit, quod ‘paulisper vox sua insonuit, et tunc a paternis limitibus non disces-sit’; ergo non deberet iste liber dici esse Magistri.” Note that Bonaventure has altered the second quotation, which in the Sentences reads: “Sicubi vero parum vox nostra insonuit, non a paternis discessit limitibus” (Peter Lombard, Sentences, prologue, no. 4 [1: 4]). This sentence translates as: “But wherever our voice has made itself heard too little, it has [at least] not deviated from the bounds of the fathers.” Peter Lombard appears to be apolo-gizing for sometimes being too hesitant in advancing positions of his own. Giulio Silano’s translation misses this point: “And if in some places our voice has rung out a little loudly, it has not transgressed the bounds of our forefathers” (The Sentences, Book i: The Mystery

of the Trinity, trans. Giulio Silano [Toronto, 2007], 4). Parum does not mean “too loudly,” but rather “too little,” “not enough.”

14 Bonaventure, In i Sent., prooem, qu. iv, ad 2 (1: 15): “Et quod sunt ibi multa dicta aliorum, hoc non tollit Magistro auctoritatem, sed potius eius auctoritatem confĳirmat et humilita-tem commendat.”

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authorship, but he is also someone who enjoys authority: the two seem to be inextricably connected in Bonaventure’s mind. Another term that appears in our sentence is “humility.” Peter Lombard’s humility bolsters his auctoritas: the latter does not require bold claims to originality, as one might expect in a modern context, but rather the humble building of doctrina—teaching—out of material inherited from the maiores, the elders.

In a recent study devoted to the genesis of magisterial authority in the school of Anselm of Laon, Cédric Giraud has impressively shown that humil-ity was an essential ingredient in the construction of the notion of authority in the schools on the twelfth century: “The nature of magisterial authority,” Giraud writes in the fĳinal pages of his book, is such that it “manifests itself but in a hidden manner, as though obliquely, with a kind of reserve that is its distinctive characteristic.”15 A master’s authority in his school depended on his perceived humility and moderation in handling the tradition, and was amplifĳied, not reduced, by the fact that his students often did not acknowl-edge his authorship in compiling manuals based on his teachings: “The mas-ter acquires the status of reference only at the conclusion of an operation in which his name is silenced, to better incorporate his sententia into a scholarly vernacular.”16 Giraud’s research raises the intriguing possibility that, although authorship may have required authority at a certain point in the development of the scholastic discourse of the Middle Ages, authority may in turn have led to the elision of authorship.

Bonaventure’s position according to which Peter Lombard was indeed the author of the Book of Sentences was by no means undisputed. Lecturing on the Sentences at Oxford only a few years (1241–45) before Bonaventure was baccalaureus sententiarius in Paris (1250–52), Richard Fishacre, in the prologue to his commentary on the Sentences, asks the same question regarding the authorship of the work: Sed quis potest esse auctor huius Scripturae vel sapi-

entiae? Yet he provides a very diffferent answer: Ergo Deus huius est auctor.17 However, perhaps Fishacre’s answer is diffferent because the question he asks is, in fact, not the same as Bonaventure’s. Note that, curiously, Fishacre refers to the Book of Sentences as “this Scripture or wisdom.” There is no confusion here: in Fishacre’s mind, Peter Lombard’s work possesses no literary identity of

15 Cédric Giraud, Per verba magistri. Anselme de Laon et son école au xiie siècle (Turnhout, 2010), 499. I have reviewed this book in Speculum 88 (2013): 520–1.

16 Giraud, Per verba magistri, 436.17 R. James Long, “The Science of Theology according to Richard Fishacre: Edition of

the Prologue to his Commentary on the Sentences,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 71–98. The quotations are on pp. 87 and 88, respectively.

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its own, for it represents nothing more than a set of excerpts from Scripture. Writing about the two parts of the science of theology—faith and morals—Fishacre explains:

I acknowledge that both of these parts are contained in the canon of Sacred Scripture, albeit indistinctly. Nevertheless, only one of these parts—namely, the one concerned with the instruction of morals—is taught by the modern masters when they read the holy books. The other, regarded as more difffĳicult, is reserved for disputation. Now it is this more difffĳicult part, extracted from the canon of the Sacred Scriptures, which has been placed in this book that is called “of the sentences.” For this rea-son, reading [or lecturing] and disputing do not difffer here.18

It is easy to see, then, why Fishacre does not consider Peter Lombard to be an author: he did not compose any book of his own, but prepared only a compila-tion of extracts from God’s work. There is no authorship of the Book of Sentences because the sententiae contained in the book all come from Scripture.

The latter claim glosses over the fact that, while there are certainly a lot of scriptural quotations in the Sentences, the bulk of the work is derived not from the Bible, but from the writings of the Church Fathers and other authorities—above all, Augustine. In Fishacre’s mind, however, all these dif-ferent authors appear to be absorbed into the one Author, of whom they are nothing but mouthpieces. Fishacre himself does not articulate this idea in so many words, but one of his successors at Oxford, Robert Kilwardby, does. In his Sentences commentary, composed around the year 1255, Kilwardby con-curs with Fishacre that, “although one can say that the Master compiled this book or promulgated it, nonetheless God must be called its author.”19 In elabo-rating on this thesis, Kilwardby posits a remarkable continuity among types of voices whom we would nowadays take care to distinguish. When it comes to delivering God’s Word, there does not seem to be much diffference among

18 Ibid., 97: “Utraque fateor harum partium in sacro Scripturae sacrae canone—sed indis-tincte—continetur. Verumtamen tantum altera pars, scilicet de moribus instruendis, a magistris modernis cum leguntur sancti libri docetur. Alia tamquam difffĳicilior disputa-tioni reservatur. Haec autem pars difffĳicilior de canone sacrarum Scripturarum excerpta in isto libro qui Sententiarum dicitur ponitur. Unde non difffert hic legere et disputare.”

19 Robert Kilwardby, Quaestiones in primum librum Sententiarum, ed. Johannes Schneider (Munich, 1986), qu. 1, p. 3: “Licet igitur huius libri possit Magister dici compilator vel pro-mulgator, auctor tamen esse debet dici Deus.”

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angels, prophets, apostles, evangelists, “and others inspired by God.” The latter category, Kilwardby suggests, includes Peter Lombard:

Now, angels and human beings are those who promulgate, or write, or even compile this teaching, like the Master of the Sentences, [or] angels like those on Mount Sinai and elsewhere in the Old Testament. About which the Epistle to the Hebrews, 2[:2], [declares]: “For if the word, spo-ken by angels, became steadfast,” etc. The Gloss: “To Moses and others like the law.” [I mean] human beings like the patriarchs, prophets, apos-tles, and evangelists, as well as others who are inspired by God.20

The point here is: God’s overarching authorship leaves no room for other efffĳi-cient causes in the realm that concerns his own Word: whether we are talking about angelic messengers or about masters of theology in the universities, we are dealing only with instrumental causes.

Or are we? At the very end of the ninth question of his commentary on the prologue—the question that is devoted to the efffĳicient causality or authorship of the Sentences—Kilwardby makes a remark as though in passing: nota quo-

que, he writes,

note, too, that, although God is the author of the truth handed down in the Sentences, nonetheless the Master is rightly and truly called the efffĳi-cient cause of the compilation, or its author insofar as it is a compilation. It is to be noted, therefore, that he is the principal efffĳicient cause. But a double charity motivates him toward this, like a disposition that assists him (as the prologue of the book testifĳies), that is to say: He himself is the efffĳicient cause insofar as he is motivated and pushed toward this, out of a twofold charity.21

20 Ibid., qu. 9, p. 22: “Angeli autem et homines sunt huius doctrinae promulgatores vel scrip-tores vet etiam compilatores, ut Magister Sententiarum, angeli ut in Monte Sina et Veteri Testamento alibi. De quo Hebr. 2: ‘Si enim qui per angelos factus est sermo, factus est fĳir-mus etc.’ Glossa: ‘Ad Moysem et ceteros ut lex.’ Homines ut patriarchae, prophetae, apos-toli et evangelistae et alii a Deo inspirati.”

21 Ibid., p. 23: “Nota quoque quod licet veritatis traditae in Sententiis Deus auctor sit, com-pilationis tamen efffĳiciens vel auctor secundum quod compilatio est bene et vere dici-tur Magister. Ubi notandum quod ipse est efffĳiciens principalis. Sed gemina caritas eum movet ad hoc tamquam dispositio iuvans, sicut Prologus libri testatur, hoc est dictu: Ipse est efffciens secundum quod motus et promotus ad hoc ex gemina caritate.”

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In this passage, Kilwardby nuances his position signifĳicantly. At fĳirst, he writes carefully, as though eager to avoid a direct contradiction with the position that he just defended in the immediately preceding text; but then he asserts, with-out further hedging: ipse est efffĳiciens principalis.

Various (speculative) explanations are possible for this surprising nota at the end of question 9. One is that Kilwardby added the note to his text at a later point, when his previous position had become untenable—for remember that Bonaventure, in Paris, was already teaching that Peter Lombard was the author and efffĳicient cause of the Book of Sentences, not just the instrumental conduit of God’s Word. Alternatively, it is possible that, in the main part of the question, Kilwardby simply reports what he takes to be the opinion pre-vailing at Oxford, and then chooses to register his dissent in the fĳinal note.22 Whatever the case may be, in Kilwardby’s note we witness something rather dramatic: the emergence of the notion of human authorship in scholastic theology.

It would be interesting to pursue further this investigation of the scholas-tic author in statu nascendi, in particular by exploring the roots of this notion of authorship in the Christian metaphysics of the book as one sees it in Fishacre and, in particular, Bonaventure. But such an investigation would go beyond the scope and purposes of this introduction, whose goal is, more narrowly, to provide a context for the chapters published in the present volume.

Several of these chapters throw light on the problem of authorship as I have sketched it here. Franklin Harkins provides a fĳirst, fascinating example of the complex characteristics of scholastic authorship in his contribution on the Filia Magistri, the “Daughter of the Master.” The title under which the work circulated already indicates its nature as a “mere” compilation23 or abbrevia-tion of the Book of Sentences itself. There is no claim to originality here; on the contrary, the title emphasizes fĳiliation, dependence, and service to an (authoritative) tradition. The “Daughter” fĳirst surfaced in the 1240s in the circle of Hugh of Saint-Cher in Paris; rather than being attributable to any particu-lar individual, its production appears to have occurred in a team.24 Indeed,

22 Alain Boureau (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) suggested the second explanation in a discussion following a lecture that I delivered at the ehess in June, 2013.

23 On the medieval practice of compilation, one may read the now classic piece by Neil Hathaway, “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 19–44.

24 Alain Boureau has spoken of auteur collectif or atelier scolastique as one of the ways in which texts were produced in the scholastic milieu of the high Middle Ages; see “Peut-on parler d’auteurs scolastiques?,” in Auctor & auctoritas. Invention et conformisme dans

l’écriture médiévale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris, 2001), 267–79, at 273.

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it is misleading to characterize the Filia as “a” work or “one” work, because it continued to evolve until the fĳifteenth century. We fĳind quite diffferent Filiae witnessed in the manuscripts, as the Book of Sentences was abridged according to the needs of various academic communities across the centuries.

Monica Brinzei and Chris Schabel present a similar case in their chapter on the Sentences commentary by the Viennese master Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, whose work was “among the most widely copied Sentences commentar-ies in history.”25 In terms of influence, it ranks only after the commentaries of Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Scotus. But who was Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl? He was a master who lectured on the Sentences at the University of Vienna at the turn of the fourteenth and fĳifteenth centuries. His method of commenting consisted largely in compiling and abbreviating the commentaries of others. Brinzei and Schabel demonstrate, for example, that the prologue to Nicholas’s commentary is nothing more than an abridgment of Gregory of Rimini’s own prologue. Indeed, the entire commentary constantly rearranges and recycles elements from the work of Nicholas’s predecessors—although not in an unin-telligent, merely mechanical manner. Rather, Nicholas’s choice of sources reflects his theological preferences, as is clear from a comparative study of the sources that he employs in the diffferent books of his commentary. In Book i, he mostly follows the teachings of Henry of Langenstein and Henry Totting of Oyta, two masters from Paris under whom Nicholas studied in Vienna. Thus, Brinzei and Schabel write, “his goal might have been to make the recent Parisian theological tradition more accessible and easier to follow.”26 In the later books, however, Brinzei and Schabel note a shift “to earlier, safer doctors.”27 This tendency was common in the fĳifteenth century.28 Indeed, when he taught at the Benedictine abbey of Melk later in life, Dinkelsbühl thoroughly revised his commentary on Book iv in order to emphasize the communis opinio of the great doctors, especially Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus. The point now was no longer to provide material for scholastic disputation, but to facilitate monastic contemplation of the mystery of the sacraments as elucidated by sound doctrine.

25 Monica Brinzei and Chris Schabel, “The Past, Present, and Future of Late Medieval Theology: The Commentary on the Sentences by Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, Vienna, Ca. 1400,” 261.

26 Ibid., 230.27 Ibid., 192.28 See Rosemann, Great Medieval Book, chap. 4: “The Long Fifteenth Century: Back to the

Sources.”

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But the story of Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl does not end here. Nicholas’s fĳirst commentary on the Sentences, which is preserved in the ms. Vienna, Schot-

tenstift, 269, spawned a whole maze of revisions. Brinzei and Schabel term this group of works derived from Schotten 269 the “Vienna Group commentary.” These works cannot be attributed to particular authors, but rather represent a team efffort, a “communis creatio”29 that occurred at the University of Vienna in the fĳirst half of the fĳifteenth century. This, then, is how the theological tradi-tion developed—at least at this particular point in this history of Sentences commentaries: one author, who functioned more like a compiler or abbrevia-tor, creatively rearranged materials handed down to him by his teachers. His creativity consisted less in the production of the kind of deep synthesis of cur-rents of thought or even diffferent traditions that we see in thinkers like Augus-tine or Thomas Aquinas, than in the selection, abridgment, and combination of excerpts. This compilation subsequently served as the starting point for a large number of similar texts—fĳiliae, one could say—which continued to use the same core sources, but rearranged them while adding a certain number of new elements.

Brinzei and Schabel are vigorous in their defense of the value of Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl’s work, as well as that of his followers in the Vienna Group. It is important not to impose a univocal, modern standard of originality on these texts. To borrow a metaphor from Alain Boureau, even if the building blocks that an architect or mason employs remain the same, the edifĳice result-ing from their combination depends on how they are fĳitted together, and on the kind of cement that is used to join them.30 Reliance on a relatively stable patrimony of texts therefore does not preclude that genuine insight can arise from a reconsideration and rearrangement of essentially identical elements.31 And while such creative reuse may at fĳirst appear less “deep” than the syn-theses of the most “original” scholastic authors, not every reproduction of a text is the same. Reuse is not plagiarism; neither is it the same as citation.32

29 Brinzei/Schabel, “The Past, Present, and Future of Late Medieval Theology,” 220.30 Boureau employs this metaphor in a contribution to a volume that contains several chap-

ters on medieval architecture; see Alain Boureau, “Le remploi scolastique,” in Remploi,

citation, plagiat. Conduites et pratiques médiévales (xe–xiie siècle), ed. Pierre Toubert and Pierre Moret (Madrid, 2009), 43–52.

31 As Jaroslav Pelikan writes, “insight has often come through the recitation and rearrange-ments of materials from tradition” (The Vindication of Tradition [New Haven and London, 1984], 73).

32 A useful distinction that Boureau makes in “Le remploi scolastique” (see above, note 30). Boureau defĳines a citation through its emphasis on the “distance between a text and its use” (52), while claiming that “the intellectual (and not calligraphic) invention of

12 Rosemann


Furthermore, reuse may involve what Jaroslav Pelikan has termed the “recital” of texts, which he characterizes as “a way of identifying what had not been said, but had been assumed, in the sources—or of what had not been said, but had been implied.”33 Such recital brings to the surface foundations of a tradi-tion that have up to that point remained implicit and un-thought. However, we cannot undertake a typology of textual borrowing here. It has become suf-fĳiciently clear that the adequate study of scholastic texts requires a nuanced conceptual framework to capture the development of the scholastic concepts of authorship and authority, as well as the variety of scholastic strategies of composition.

2 Theological Education “on the Ground”

Historians of scholasticism have expended signifĳicant efffort on the task of reconstructing the infrastructure of medieval education. The fĳirst edition of Hastings Rashdall’s The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages appeared in 1895,34 simultaneously with the fĳirst (and only) volume of Heinrich Denifle’s Die Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400.35 These books inaugurated the mod-ern scholarly study of the medieval university system, which has in our own day borne fruit in the work of scholars such as Olga Weijers and her circle of collaborators.36 This research has affforded medievalists the opportunity of approaching intellectual history not, as is often done in philosophy and the-ology departments, as though ideas existed in some abstract space of pure intellectuality, but rather with proper attention paid to the material forms that

quotation marks” occurred at the turn of the fourteenth century: “The scholastic reuse had had its day” (52). The work contained in the present volume suggests that scholastic texts were “reused” until at least the fĳifteenth century.

33 Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, 75.34 See Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1895); a revised edition, by F.M. Powicke and E.B. Emden, appeared in 1936, in three volumes.

35 See Heinrich Denifle, Die Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400, vol. 1: Die Entstehung der

Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1895). The fĳirst volume remained the only one Father Denifle completed.

36 For a synthesis of her research, one may consult Olga Weijers, Le maniement du savoir.

Pratiques intellectuelles à l’époque des premières universités (xiiie–xive siècles) (Turnhout, 1996). A Festschrift dedicated to Dr. Weijers was recently published under the title, Portraits de maîtres offferts à Olga Weijers, ed. Claire Angotti, Monica Calma, and Mariken Teeuwen (Turnhout, 2013).

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contribute to the shape of human discourse. Such emphasis on the incarnate nature of medieval intellectual life has also allowed medievalists to appreci-ate the deep roots of the great and most “original” authors of the period in the cultural and institutional conditions of their time, rather than viewing them as isolated monuments.37 In this manner, the distance between think-ers considered canonical and others regarded as minor is reduced as well, as it becomes clear that even the intellectual creations of the most revered thinkers frequently fĳind expression in well-established genres, as well as being replete with reuse, citation, and recital of traditional material.

The present volume of Mediaeval Commentaries on the “Sentences” of Peter

Lombard offfers several studies that provide insight into the way in which teaching the Sentences shaped scholastic discourse from the ground up, as it were. In connection with the question of authorship, we have already touched on the set of abridgments of the Sentences that circulated under the title Filia

Magistri. The Filia Magistri is equally interesting, however, in the light that it sheds on practices of theological education. As Franklin Harkins points out in his chapter, the Filia Magistri was not intended to function as a university textbook: “the manuscript evidence suggests that the Filia was not used for the professional training of the theological high-flyers at the medieval universities, but rather for the more basic education and pastoral formation of friars, can-ons, and monks ‘on the ground’ in various religious houses and schools across Europe.”38 It is worth noting, moreover, that the type of “low” or “everyday” theology that the Filia exemplifĳies was by no means static or simplistic. The masters who compiled the text made sure to bring it up to date by incorpo-rating more recent theological concepts and developments. Neither was the Filia a simplifĳied work, or set of works, lacking theological nuance and sophis-tication. In studying how one version of the Filia deals with a famously dif-fĳicult passage in the Book of Sentences—namely, Peter Lombard’s summary

37 Two classic works exemplifying this approach are M.-D. Chenu, O.P., Introduction à

l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Montreal/Paris, 1950), and Jacques Guy Bougerol, O.F.M., Introduction à saint Bonaventure (Paris, 1988). The concept of a “monumental” history is, of course, Nietzschean; see Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,” trans. R.J. Hollingdale, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge, England, 1997), 57–123, at 68: “That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millen-nia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great—that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which fĳinds expression in the demand for a monumental history.”

38 Franklin T. Harkins, “Filiae Magistri: Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Medieval Theological Education ‘On the Ground,’ ” 34–5.

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and discussion of three sententiae regarding the union of God and man in the Incarnation39—Harkins concludes that this authorless compilation conveys the Lombard’s position with more attention to detail than Thomas Aquinas does in the Summa! Perhaps, then, Harkins suggests, the distance between “high” and “low” theology was far less in the scholastic period than it is tempt-ing to assume: “Our comparative analysis suggests that Filiae and formal com-mentaries or other synthetic works are separated by a much smaller theological distance than scholars have previously imagined.”40

Other contributors to this volume make similar points about the value of research into the reception of the Book of Sentences in everyday theolo-gical practice. Studying the multiple revisions of Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl’s Sentences commentary by the Vienna Group helps us understand the way in which theology was practiced and taught at the University of Vienna in the fĳirst half of the fĳifteenth century. Even if none of the theologians working in the Vienna Group were mountain peaks in the landscape of intellectual his-tory, the simple acts of citing or not citing a text in a compilation, or of rear-ranging the order of familiar material, may produce signifĳicant efffects. Brinzei and Schabel argue that this is precisely what happened in the foregrounding of Gregory of Rimini’s doctrine of double predestination in the Viennese com-mentaries: these commentaries paved the way for a conception of predesti-nation that was to come to full fruition in the Reformation.41 On the other hand, even explicit theological restraint—the efffort to limit oneself to quod

recitant communiter doctores—can be a powerful intellectual agenda, as it is in Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl’s Lectura Mellicensis, the version of his commen-tary on Book iv that he prepared for instruction of the Benedictine monks at Melk.42 This derivative, conservative, and irenic work, which prefers inofffen-sive consensus to theological innovation and progress, “was among the most widely copied Sentences commentaries in history, perhaps even the most pop-ular commentary on any one book,”43 thus exerting inestimable influence on the tradition as a whole.

Not all fĳifteenth-century Sentences commentators employed a method of compilation to compose their commentaries. In his chapter on three of the most influential Franciscan commentators who were active in Paris in

39 See Peter Lombard, Sentences, iii, dist. 6 and 7 (2: 49–66).40 Harkins, “Filiae Magistri,” 78.41 See Brinzei and Schabel, “The Past, Present, and Future of Late Medieval Theology,” esp.

175 and 263.42 See ibid., section 9: “Stage Three: The Lectura Mellicensis,” 250–62.43 Ibid., 261.

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the fĳifteenth century—namely, William of Vaurouillon, Nicholas of Orbellis, and Stephen Brulefer—Ueli Zahnd demonstrates that these authors did not practice the type of lectura secundum alium or bricolage textuel that Brinzei/Schabel found in their Viennese colleagues.44 The Paris commentators did share with the Viennese ones an emphasis on the need to create pedagogi-cally useful works, after the fourteenth century had seen the rise of increas-ingly technical and complex, but at the same time incomplete commentaries.45 The Parisian Franciscans were not willing to sacrifĳice theological accessibility, reliability, and comprehensiveness to the undisciplined focus on a few issues, judged to be most interesting by a master who devotes enormous space to their discussion while neglecting other topics. This more didactic approach, in turn, entailed the recovery of older and doctrinally less controversial sources. In a way, then, we are dealing with a return to the original intent of the Book of

Sentences itself, which was not meant to present breathtakingly novel theo-logical insights, but to transmit traditional truths in an accessible manner. But were the fourteenth-century commentaries not also products of teaching in an academic environment? Zahnd explains: “there is an undeniable difffer-ence between these fĳifteenth-century commentaries and the commentaries preceding them: although in those earlier commentaries the authors were theologizing in the context of a university or a studium, the fĳifteenth-century authors aimed not so much to theologize in a pedagogical environment, as to prepare theological content pedagogically.”46 In other words, the fĳifteenth cen-tury emphasized the needs of theological education “on the ground” over the possible fruitfulness of advancing the understanding of controversial issues.

John Slotemaker provides an instructive example of the interaction of “high” and “low” theology in his examination of Henry of Gorkum’s Conclusiones in iv

libros Sententiarum. These “conclusions,”47 which Henry composed in the early fĳifteenth century at the University of Cologne, fall into the literary genre of the many study aids that were created throughout the centuries to help students grasp the basic content of the Book of Sentences. This late scholastic precur-sor of our modern-day SparkNotes presents each distinction in a brief text of

44 For the origins of these terms, see Ueli Zahnd, “Easy-Going Scholars Lecturing Secundum

Alium? Notes on Some French Franciscan Sentences Commentaries of the Fifteenth Century,” 268–9.

45 See Rosemann, Great Medieval Book, chap. 3: “The Fourteenth Century: The Movement away from the Sentences.”

46 Zahnd, “Easy-Going Scholars Lecturing Secundum Alium?,” 312–13.47 For the late scholastic use of the word conclusio, see Rosemann, Great Medieval Book,

index s.v. “conclusion.”

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600 to 900 words. These overviews invariably have the same structure, leading the student from a fĳirst, general summary through two sets of three proposi-tions (which Slotemaker calls propositiones generales and propositiones specia-

les) to a more detailed understanding of Peter Lombard’s meaning. Slotemaker notes that, although Henry of Gorkum was a Thomist and hence defender of the via antiqua, he is careful not to project contemporary theological disputes into the Sentences.

Henry’s Conclusiones proved to be a popular text, frequently appear-ing alongside the Sentences themselves in printings of the late fĳifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Many contemporary readers of the Sentences thus approached the work through Henry of Gorkum’s summaries, with their struc-ture of two times three propositiones. Most of these readers have left no trace of their impressions, of the way in which their reading of the great textbook was shaped by Henry’s humble abridgment. One user of the Conclusiones, however, is well known: when the future Reformer Martin Luther lectured on the Sentences at Erfurt, in the years between 1509 and 1511, he based himself on an edition that left Nicholas Keßler’s Basel printing-house in 1489—and this edition presented the Sentences accompanied by Henry of Gorkum’s study tool.48 As Slotemaker points out, there are no explicit references to Henry of Gorkum in Luther’s marginal comments on Peter Lombard; yet this does not mean that Luther did not consult and profĳit from the Conclusiones. For, Luther has a curious habit of summarizing distinctions always in three parts. Closer analysis shows the provenance of these tripartite divisions:

What is interesting for the present argument is that Luther did not merely divide the individual distinctions into three propositions, but often adopted Gorkum’s textual divisions of the individual distinctions as developed in the propositiones generales. Thus, while Luther did not explicitly engage with the theological statements in the Conclusiones, the work exerted a strong influence on how Luther understood the Sentences themselves.49

Right here, in the influence of a simple study tool upon the young Luther’s early intellectual career, we can see the interplay of “high” and “low” theology—of epoch-making theological insight and basic pedagogical practices— impressively exemplifĳied.

48 See Rosemann, Great Medieval Book, 171–83.49 John Slotemaker, “Henry of Gorkum’s Conclusiones in iv libros Sententiarum,” 172–3.

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Claire Angotti’s chapter is devoted to another aspect of the study of the Book of Sentences “on the ground”: namely, the function that criticism and censure exercised in the reading of Peter Lombard. Many modern students of the tradition of the Sentences are familiar with the list of eight propositions that Bonaventure cites in Book ii of his commentary as being “not commonly held” (communiter non tenentur).50 According to Angotti, Bonaventure’s list—or rather, lists, as a second one appears at the very end of Book ii—inspired other effforts to indicate, in manuscripts of the Sentences, which aspects of Peter Lombard’s teaching were not in accordance with the communis opinio of the masters. Angotti closely analyzes one coherent corpus of manuscripts which feature such indications, namely, the copies of the Book of Sentences that were owned by the lending library of the Sorbonne. Among the forty cop-ies that have survived, nine contain lists of propositions “not commonly held.”

As Angotti explains, these lists by no means enjoyed the status of offfĳicial con-demnations. The consensus of the masters regarding the problematic nature of some of Peter Lombard’s teachings rendered the latter minus probabiles, but this judgment remained subject to criticism and further examination.51 One of the lists preserved in the Sorbonne library introduces a distinction which highlights the tentative character of the masters’ judgment: it is a distinction between propositions of the Master that are contrary to the communis opinio, and others that are “difffĳicult to explain.” Furthermore, the most controversial of teachings attributed to Peter Lombard, and the only one that was, in fact, offfĳi-cially censured, does not even fĳigure in the lists, which give no hint that Pope Alexander iii twice condemned the so-called “Christological nihilianism.”52 What, then, was the function of these lists? Angotti writes:

It seems possible to me to say that the point, for the masters, was to update the Lombard’s text and to lead the reader of the Sentences to remain attentive to the Master’s words—to sift through the latter with the help of more recent texts. The lists thus cause their users to read the Sentences in an active, dynamic way.53

50 For a brief discussion, see Rosemann, Great Medieval Book, 70–2.51 See Claire Angotti, “Les listes des opiniones Magistri Sententiarum quae communiter non

tenentur: forme et usage dans la lectio des Sentences,” 92.52 On the question of Christological nihilianism, and whether Peter Lombard even held this

position, see Rosemann, Peter Lombard, chap. 6.53 Angotti, “Les listes des opiniones Magistri Sententiarum quae communiter non tenentur,”

109.

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What Angotti suggests, then, is that the lists of propositions did not suppress critical discourse, as one might expect, but rather incited it. The strange dia-lectic of prohibition and transgression is well known; St. Paul talks about it in Romans 7, just as Foucault does when he describes the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” in the History of Sexuality.54 It appears that Angotti’s lists may well have given rise to such a dialectic: the fact that a proposition was marked as non tenetur caused readers not only to study the passage in ques-tion particularly carefully, but to engage in a chase for other occurrences of the same position judged problematic.55

3 The Dynamic Role of the Sentences in Later Medieval Theology

Many of the chapters published in this book contribute to a better understand-ing of the role that the Book of Sentences and the Sentences commentary played in later medieval theology, in particular in the fĳifteenth century and beyond. When I wrote the concluding summary for the preceding volume of Mediaeval

Commentaries on the “Sentences” of Peter Lombard, I had to state with regret that this volume did “not contain a single chapter on this fascinating period of ‘harvest’ and ‘waning.’ ”56 We are beginning to see this major lacuna being fĳilled. I am not going to return to the contributions by Brinzei/Schabel, Slotemaker, and Zahnd, the principal fĳindings of which we have already had an opportu-nity to consider in the previous sections. They, too, of course constitute major steps in writing the story of the Book of Sentences in the fĳifteenth century. Let us here focus on three chapters that are devoted, respectively, to the tradition of the Sentences at pre-Reformation Erfurt, to John Mair’s early sixteenth- century Sentences commentary, and to the reception of the Sentences in sixteenth- century Spain and Portugal.

Studying a series of Sentences commentaries composed at Erfurt in the fĳif-teenth century, Severin Kitanov fĳinds that these authors have in common a deliberate return to Peter Lombard’s text. This movement toward a recovery of the Master’s voice fĳinds expression in a composite form of commentary which begins with a literal exposition of each of the Lombard’s distinctions before moving on to a quaestio disputata. Behind the attention affforded to

54 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 45.

55 See Angotti, “Les listes des opiniones Magistri Sententiarum quae communiter non tenen-

tur,” 120.56 Philipp W. Rosemann, “Conclusion: The Tradition of the Sentences,” in Mediaeval

Commentaries, vol. 2, 495–523, at 519.

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the Sentences themselves, Kitanov sees “a sense of nostalgia for the past of a systematic theology saturated by the living word of Scripture and the Church Fathers”—an almost Reformation-like desire to recover a more authentic core of the Christian tradition,57 free of the doctrinal disputes of later scholasticism.

The Erfurt commentaries implement their shared goals through an astonish-ing variety of approaches, a diversity that testifĳies to the vitality of the genre. In the one commentary that has come down to us by a member of Luther’s order of Augustinian Hermits, Angelus Dobelinus, Kitanov fĳinds a wide-ranging treatment of the “test question” he examines, namely, the problem of beatifĳic enjoyment and Augustine’s famous distinction between uti and frui; indeed, Kitanov speaks of the “breathtaking scope” of Dobelinus’s treatment.58 The positions that Dobelinus embraces are largely those of Hugolino of Orvieto, whose Sentences commentary Dobelinus tends to follow closely. Hugolino, then, appears to have functioned as an important conduit of Augustinian theology to the new University of Erfurt (whose fĳirst theology professor Dobelinus was).

The largest number of Sentences commentaries at Erfurt were the work of Franciscan authors. Kitanov acquaints us with four of them: John of Erfurt, Matthew Döring, John Bremer, and Nicholas Lakmann. He fĳinds that Döring’s commentary is written from a largely Scotist point of view, which is not to say that he copied the Subtle Doctor in a slavish and unoriginal manner. On the contrary, “[w]e are dealing with lectures that are not characterized by expository lassitude and scholarly detachment, but which have a mode of expo-sition that is dramatic and sufffused with the unique qualities of the author’s temperament.”59 Bremer’s and Lakmann’s approaches are diffferent: rather than aligning themselves with a particular thinker and offfering a spirited defense of his position, they endeavor to bring out the unity of the Franciscan tradi-tion, with Bonaventure occupying a privileged position in their commentaries, in addition to Scotus and other representatives of the Franciscan school. In Bremer’s commentary, in particular, Kitanov detects a certain weariness with regard to doctrinal disputes, together with a didactic orientation which—he surmises—may well be due to the fact that Bremer presented his explanation to an audience of Franciscan confrères at the order’s studium, rather than to theologically more sophisticated and demanding university students.

Kitanov fĳinds this reluctance regarding doctrinal dispute even more clearly evidenced in the Sentences commentary by one of Erfurt’s secular priests, John

57 Severin V. Kitanov, “The Concept of Beatifĳic Enjoyment (Fruitio Beatifĳica) in the Sentences Commentaries of Some Pre-Reformation Erfurt Theologians,” 367.

58 Ibid., 337.59 Ibid., 347.

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of Wesel. Wesel’s conciliatory attitude is so strongly developed that it becomes difffĳicult to determine where his doctrinal allegiances lie at all! And yet, we are not dealing with a tired, wishy-washy approach to theology: indeed, Kitanov marvels at Wesel’s “magnifĳicent stylistic elegance” and “didactic brilliance.”60 This author belongs to a period of “harvest,” not decay and decline.61

A contemporary of Erasmus and Martin Luther, John Mair wrote at a time of religious and social upheaval—and at the time of the transition from the manuscript to the printed page. (His Sentences commentary, the fĳinal redac-tion of which he published in Paris in 1530, is no longer extant in manuscript form.) As Severin Kitanov, John Slotemaker, and Jefffrey Witt demonstrate in their contribution on this early sixteenth-century Scottish thinker, amidst the uncertainties of his age, Mair fĳinds a foothold in the tradition, just as his fĳifteenth-century predecessors did. However, unlike many of the Sentences commentators of the fĳifteenth century, Mair does not regard the thirteenth century as the golden age of scholasticism; the renaissance that he promotes vigorously, both in Paris and in his native Scotland, involves a dialogue with the likes of Gregory of Rimini, Ockham, Pierre d’Ailly, Adam Wodeham, and the Scotistae. Mair’s commentary, then, “is a testimony to the fruitfulness and vital-ity of fourteenth-century scholasticism.”62 Kitanov/Slotemaker/Witt note that Mair does not identify within the body of the text the authors whom he cites most frequently (although he adds marginal notes with their names in the fĳirst redaction of Book I—very helpful in identifying his most important sources, at least in a provisional manner). Mair chooses this literary device in order to suggest that these authorities remain subject to evaluation and discussion: a dialogue is what he is interested in, not facile copying. Mair acknowledges by name only authorities from a more distant past, that is to say, thinkers such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Averroës.

Part of Kitanov/Slotemaker/Witt’s chapter is devoted to the task of distin-guishing the numerous redactions and printings that appeared, during their author’s lifetime, of Mair’s commentaries on the four books of the Sentences. Book ii, for example, was printed fĳirst in 1510, then republished in an expanded edition in 1519, and again appeared in another redaction (closer to the fĳirst one) in 1530. Mair, then, kept reworking his Sentences commentaries over a period of twenty years during which he taught variously in Paris, Glasgow, and at St. Andrews. The genre, then, was far from exhausted, remaining a viable

60 Ibid., 359.61 Ibid., 366.62 Severin Kitanov, John Slotemaker, and Jefffrey Witt, “John Major’s (Mair’s) Commentary

on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: Scholastic Philosophy and Theology in the Early Sixteenth Century,” 370.

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means of theological expression even during the Reformation. When Mair realized, for example, that his “students were much more interested in the practical questions of Book iv than in the speculative questions of Book i,”63 he added lengthy discussions on questions of contemporary relevance, such as a treatment of property rights in distinction 15.

In 1530, Mair noted with regret that after Luther’s “heresy,” students of theol-ogy tended to abandon the study of the great theologians of the past, focusing instead on the Bible. He was aware, as well, of humanist criticisms of the scho-lastic method and language—criticisms that he did not share, but to which he found it difffĳicult to respond. In sum, Kitanov/Slotemaker/Witt character-ize Mair “as a transitional fĳigure in the history of Western philosophical theol-ogy: Mair is a theologian who identifĳied very strongly with the great tradition of Latin scholasticism, realized that times were changing, but did not fully embrace or share the spirit of novelty.”64

Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste’s chapter on “The Sentences in Sixteenth-Century Iberian Scholasticism” takes us into the largely uncharted territory of the post-Reformation period in the Lombard’s Wirkungsgeschichte. In a verita-ble tour de force, Lanza and Toste introduce us to some of the most signifĳicant theologians at the major universities in Spain and in Portugal, while sketch-ing an outline of the pedagogical and institutional structures that governed theological teaching at these universities. For instance, we learn of the exis-tence of “major” and “minor” chairs of theology, which were devoted to specifĳic authors—which does not mean that the holders of the chairs always respected these designations. It was not uncommon for a theologian holding one chair (say, the Scotus chair) to be lecturing on another author, such as Durand of Saint-Pourçain.

The general picture that emerges from Lanza and Toste’s groundbreaking study of dozens of theologians at numerous Iberian universities is this:

from being the standard text which was read and commented on in the faculties of theology, the Sentences disappeared from the major chairs (being superseded by the Summa) and in the minor chairs were replaced by medieval commentaries (by Gabriel Biel, John Duns Scotus, and Durand of Saint-Pourçain). The classes were no longer devoted to reading the Sentences, but to lecturing on a Sentences commentary.65

63 Ibid., 383.64 Ibid., 415.65 Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste, “The Sentences in Sixteenth-Century Iberian Scholasticism,”

434.

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Lanza and Toste speak of “supercommentaries” to designate the latter phe-nomenon. As the Book of Sentences was felt to have fallen out of date, yet the centuries-old tradition of lecturing on Peter Lombard was still deeply rooted in the theology faculties, the logical solution was to move from studying the Lombard himself to expounding his more recent commentators. Moreover, lectures in the form of supercommentaries allowed instructors to remain within the doctrinal parameters of their preferred schools. Thus, for example, a Franciscan could lecture on Bonaventure’s or Scotus’s Sentences commentary. Interestingly, as Lanza and Toste note, Dominicans appointed to the Durand chair often opted to read Aquinas instead, due to the greater prestige that the Angelic Doctor’s theology enjoyed.

The adherence that university statutes still required to lecturing on the Sentences or at least on a commentary on the Sentences, combined with the ever-increasing status of Aquinas’s Summa as the principal basis for theo-logical instruction, gave rise to some interesting hybrid literary genres, such as commentaries on the Summa presented according to the order of the Book

of Sentences, or commentaries on the Summa containing sections devoted to Peter Lombard. As a general rule, however, Lanza and Toste’s research has found that neither the commentaries on the Sentences nor the supercom-mentaries offfer literal explorations of the doctrines contained in their base texts; rather, following the order of these base texts, the commentaries develop questions on the subjects suggested by them. Toward the end of the period under investigation, however, even the supercommentaries begin to fall out of favor. Thus, for example, Francisco Carreiro, a theology master teaching at Coimbra at the turn of the seventeenth century, “uses Scotus’s and Biel’s com-mentaries to construct short treatises of his own which are not based on their commentaries.”66

The movement away from the tradition of Sentences commentaries appears to be an undeniable fact, then, but it was slow. Toward the end of their chapter, Lanza and Toste point to the case of the newly founded colonial university of Mexico City, which in its statutes from 1668 still stipulated that the Sentences serve as the text for the theology examinations. Moreover, in the Prime and Vespers chairs the professors were expected to teach the Sentences, albeit according to the order of the Summa, which in practice meant lecturing on the Summa but presenting Peter Lombard’s theses at the beginning of each question—together with the manner “in which they are commonly held to be certain or uncertain (en que se tienen comúnmente por ciertas ò inciertas).”67

66 Ibid., 485.67 Ibid., 494 n. 275.

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The latter phrase is remarkable in that it echoes, over several centuries, the Parisian lists of opiniones Magistri Sententiarum quae communiter non tenen-

tur, the subject matter of Claire Angotti’s piece in this volume.A fĳinal remark on the fading of the tradition of the Sentences: it seems worth

pointing out that the supersession of the Book of Sentences, and of commen-taries on the latter, by the Summa theologiae is not tantamount to the replace-ment of one genre of theological writing with another completely unrelated one. The Summa is Thomas Aquinas’s revision of his own commentary on the Book of Sentences—a thorough revision, doubtless, but a revision nonethe-less.68 Thus, even though references to the Magister are few and far between in the Summa, Aquinas’s magnum opus still largely follows the structure of Peter Lombard’s work, from the consideration of the nature of the theological enter-prise in the fĳirst pages of Book i (corresponding to the Prima Pars) to the study of the sacraments and Last Things in Book iv (corresponding to the second half of Aquinas’s Tertia Pars). Not surprisingly, therefore, it was relatively easy for Thomas’s disciples to complete the Summa, left unfĳinished after question 90 of the Tertia Pars, by means of relevant sections from the Angelic Doctor’s Sentences commentary. The precise relationship between Thomas’s Sentences commentary and the Summa has not yet been fully explored, despite the flour-ishing of Thomistic scholarship in the past 150 years, and would be a worth-while topic for further research.

…Reflection on the Book of Sentences began when Peter Lombard taught the mate-rial it contains at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris in the middle of the twelfth century. The tradition that thus started, some 850 years ago, on the Île de la Cité has continued until the present day. Was it ever truly interrupted, in the sense that the Sentences no longer influenced theological teaching and reflection at all? This is a question for further research. What this volume has shown is that commentaries on the Book of Sentences, as well as commen-taries on these commentaries, were written well into the age of the printing press. But how is the tradition of the Sentences going to fare in the digital age? This question Jefffrey Witt appropriately addresses in the fĳinal contribution to this volume.

68 An important step between Aquinas’s Sentences commentary and the Summa is the revi-sion of the former that he undertook while teaching in Rome in 1265–1266; on this so-called Lectura romana, see John F. Boyle, “Thomas Aquinas and His Lectura romana in

primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi,” in Mediaeval Commentaries, vol. 2, 149–73.

24 Rosemann


Witt draws on the experience he has gained in the ongoing project of realizing an online edition of Peter of Plaoul’s Sentences commentary (http://petrusplaoul.org). Unlike some recent critics of digital publication, such as Nicholas Carr, who argues that it encourages “shallow” reading, Witt believes that the digital edition of medieval texts holds valuable opportunities.69 To begin with, in an age in which the audience for medieval Sentences commen-taries is limited, online publication makes it possible to bring to light texts whose edition most traditional publishing houses would be unwilling to take on. The principle of publishing material “early and often,” whose virtues Witt strongly emphasizes, encourages extensive collaboration from the earliest stages of a project to its completion—although a digital edition may never be truly complete ( just as medieval readers never stopped annotating the manu-scripts that they studied, or as modern-day library books keep being “defaced” by users with their pencils, pens, and highlighters). Again, there is a crucial diffference between the shift from the manuscript to the printed page, and from the printed page to the screen: whereas the printing press simply sup-planted the manuscript culture that preceded it, the digital medium

allows for the preservation of previous media and—even more power-fully—the interweaving of these old forms of media within the larger framework. Thus, one can present not only the text, but also the history of its mediation: both its original mediation and its historical re-mediations, even as the digital medium re-mediates the text anew. Thus, instead of exchanging the new for the old, this new digital medium simultaneously gives us increased, though not total, access to the old.70

Witt envisages the creation of digital editions in which simple mouse clicks reveal multiple layers of mediation for any given passage, from images of man-uscript witnesses to modern transcriptions. Cross-references will no longer require the reader to flip pages or even consult a diffferent book (from a dif-ferent library, in a diffferent city!), as the relevant texts can be linked directly to particular words or phrases. In this manner, Witt believes, “deep” reading will be encouraged, due to the greater ease with which it will be possible to compare texts.

69 See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York, 2010).70 Jefffrey C. Witt, “Texts, Media, and Re-Mediation: The Digital Future of the Sentences

Commentary Tradition,” 505–06.

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The considerable promise that digital editions hold does, however, require more than the mechanical scanning that forms the basis for so many online projects—Google Books, for example. Witt writes:

I cannot stress enough the importance of semantic encoding. It is the backbone of an efffective digital edition. It is what makes possible difffer-ent visualizations of the same text, efffortless construction of indices, and robust text searches. Perhaps more important than any of this is that it allows for the text to be used in ways that were not envisioned at the time of its creation: analysis of large corpus sets, aggregated from several edi-tions, is one such example.71

Semantic encoding means that every signifĳicant word of a digitally edited text must be accompanied by metadata which allow it to be linked to other words, passages, or—more generally—digital resources. A reference to a pas-sage from the Book of Sentences in a later commentary will appear at a click of the mouse only if the relevant word or phrase in that commentary has pre-viously been linked, through semantic encoding, to the referenced text. The biographical data of a cited authority will be accessible immediately only if the name of that authority was properly encoded. And so forth—in other words, digital editions, for all their novelty and promise, require precisely the type of scholarly work that learned and curious readers of Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences have been practicing for many centuries.

71 Ibid., 511.

Documents

Introduction: Three Avenues for Studying the Tradition of the Sentences