1317 is not a date normally found in books about intellectual history, nor even in accounts of the medieval universities. But it was on 7 July 1317 that Edward II issued the writ that established the Kingâs Scholars, twelve teenagers (pueri) from the chapel royal who were sent to be educated in the University of Cambridge; twenty years later, Edward III would establish a proper college for them, Kingâs Hall.1 Then, just over two centuries later in 1546, Henry VIII amalgamated Kingâs Hall with another medieval college, Michaelhouse, and handsomely endowed his new creation, Trinity College, which has remained the largest of Cambridgeâs colleges. Henry VIIIâs grand and menacing portrait now dominates Trinityâs dining hall, and his act of reestablishment has all but obliterated memory of the collegeâs medieval origins. Yet they should not be forgotten, since they put the collegeâs later history into a new light. It was originally founded not by the renaissance-prince-turned-tyrant, Henry VIII, but by the unfortunate Edward II, deposed ten years later and probably murdered shortly afterwards. The home of the great protagonists of modernity, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, it has deep roots in the Middle Ages; and renowned for its Nobel prize winning scientists, its philosophers and poets, it began as an institution which, though soon large and rich, as it is today, was practically-orientated, filled with students of law who would often go on to become important royal or Church officials, the medieval equivalent of the Harvard Business School or ÃNA.2
This book is designed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the establishment of the Kingâs Scholars, but its focus is not on the parochial field of college history. Rather, it asks what was the early fourteenth-century University of Cambridge, in which the Kingâs Scholars, and then Kingâs Hall, were established. And what, more widely, characterized the intellectual life of the universities in England, France and Italy in this period? These questions give the opportunity to open up two new perspectives in intellectual history.
The first opportunity is not particular to this enquiry about Cambridge: it is open to all who write about the history of universities, but it is rarely taken. The opportunity is to explore ideas, their formation, development and transformation within a social, institutional context. University historians tend to be strong on contexts, but, with some important exceptions, are less concerned with the substance of what was taught or thought.3 Their studies concentrate on the structure of courses, institutional organization and economics, and relations with government and society at large. Curricula and methods are indeed discussed, but from the outside, without looking at the ideas and arguments, the substance of the teaching and thinking that were the universitiesâ purpose. Such enquiries are handed over to historians of philosophy, medicine and law, many of whom â especially among the historians of philosophy â treat the thinkers and their works with only scant reference to the institutions that sustained them. This collection aims to bring together these two approaches. Most of its contributions are devoted to the different disciplines taught in the early fourteenth-century universities, each of which is treated by an expert in the field with a focus on its intellectual content. But the authors have been asked to think about the institutional setting, and the collection as a whole situates these studies within it.
The second opportunity is provided by taking Cambridge as a point of departure. This might, at first, seem to be rather a drawback. It is possible to write an institutional, social and political type of history about the medieval University of Cambridge, based on the surviving documents, and valuable histories of this sort have been written.4 But the sorting and study of the Cambridge sources has not yet reached the stage to allow for the writing of a rounded history of the teaching and thinking that took place there.5 This collection accordingly takes the early fourteenth-century universities of all Europe as its field, but it sees them from a novel perspective. Historians are usually guided in their approach by the size and reputation of the different universities. Paris, therefore, is the starting point in this period; then Oxford, outstanding in logic and theology in these years; and then a look at the Italian universities, especially for their work in Law and Medicine. Cambridge will be mentioned, if at all, in passing. Here, by contrast, the direction of travel is reversed. With the establishment of the Kingâs Scholars in 1317 and then of Kingâs Hall as the point of departure, the focus widens quickly to the University of Cambridge and England more broadly, followed by two papers which put the English contribution within a Europe-wide context and, finally, a discussion of the relationship between thinking at Oxford and Cambridge and the intellectual world outside the universities.
The next section will sketch this journey, explaining briefly what each of the chapters discusses. The following two sections are designed to help situate readers at the focus of these studies chronologically and geographically. Although there is a degree of latitude, most of the contributors discuss the period around 1317 â the early fourteenth century. Section 2 considers how this period (c.1300âc.1350) fits into the longer history of medieval universities, and who were its outstanding thinkers. Section 3 looks at the University of Cambridge (and the place of Kingâs Hall within it) from the 1260s to the 1360s, the century, and it makes a somewhat bolder claim about its possible intellectual importance than the experts have so far been willing to advance.
1Â The Contributions
The opening paper, by William Courtenay, establishes the point of departure. It examines Kingâs Hall and Michaelhouse in the context of early fourteenth-century Cambridge. Courtenay begins from the concrete details of everyday university life â where the students and masters lived and worked â and goes on to explain the distinction between halls and colleges. Halls were private lodging houses for students, whereas colleges, although sometimes called âhallsâ, were established by a founder with an endowment, and one of their main purposes was to offer masses for their founderâs and their other benefactorsâ souls. Courtenay then looks at the exceptional nature of Kingâs Hall. It was a royal foundation, and the students sent there from the Chapel Royal were probably of noble birth. Previous colleges in Oxford and Cambridge had been for graduates. Kingâs Hall was the first college for undergraduate students, in the Arts Faculty, though it became, through internal development rather than design, a mixed college, as some students remained there as they studied and became Masters in Law, one of the higher faculties, often entered after training in the Arts. Courtenay goes on to look at the religious orders and their houses in Cambridge: it was there, he explains, that philosophy and theology flourished especially.
Richard Helmholzâs contribution on law is, like Courtenayâs, concentrated on Cambridge, and Kingâs Hall in particular. Kingâs Hall specialized strongly in law, and Helmholz shows how law was studied there, from its foundation (in 1337 â twenty years after the establishment of the Kingâs Scholars) until 1400. As well as explaining what the law students studied, the records enable him to show how they used this legal education, which, although not a training in the common law used in England, was valuable for posts in Church and royal administration. Helmholz takes this Cambridge material as a point of departure for establishing a point that has relevance to legal education throughout medieval Europe. Predominantly, Helmholz shows, students studied private law, and it is wrong to think that their study of Roman Law or Canon Law â the subjects they studied at university â led to their adoption of any particular political opinions. Even Magna Carta was, to contemporary eyes, a repository of private law, not a statement of political theory.
One of the richest sources for information about the intellectual life of medieval Cambridge are the books that survive from it. Only recently has the work begun, by Rodney Thomson, of identifying which surviving manuscripts were owned by colleges and when.6 His chapter on the fourteenth-century University of Cambridge and its books brings together his findings, as well as explaining how the colleges and university acquired, stored and used their manuscripts. Although tracking down the survivors from the fourteenth century is often frustrating or impossible (notably in the case of Kingâs Hall), Thomsonâs study yields some remarkable conclusions about the Arts curriculum at the time.7
One of the two best-preserved medieval Cambridge libraries, that of Gonville and Caius College, provides the point of departure for Sten Ebbesenâs chapter on logic in England at the start of the fourteenth century. Ebbesen observes that most of the manuscripts and texts are Oxford products. He goes on to examine the contents of the manuscripts and explain their significance. Alongside commentary on Aristotelian texts, new branches of logic (logica modernorum) were being developed. Moreover, the writings of the turn of the century are harbingers of the changes that would occur from the 1320s, when a radical nominalism was developed as an alternative to the realist theories of universals preeminent in the thirteenth century.
The two contributions that follow concentrate on English theology in the fourteenth century. Especially in England the theologians were in this period the intellectual leaders in the universities, even in areas such as metaphysics, which were also treated by Arts Masters. Richard Cross looks at the Dominican theologian Robert Holcot, who certainly taught at Oxford, but may possibly have taught in Cambridge too.8 A central problem for any Christian theologian is how the Persons of the Trinity can be at once distinct (the Father is not, for instance, the Son) and yet all be one essence, God. At the end of the thirteenth century, Duns Scotus had argued that the divine Persons, though not really distinct â it is impossible that they could be separate one from the other â are formally distinct: not all that is true of one Person is true of the other two. William of Ockham accepted this idea, but, unlike Scotus, restricted formal distinctions to God and, in consequence, as Cross shows, developed a very different theory. Holcot went even further. He rejected the notion of formal distinctions even with regard to God, arguing instead that special rules have to be added to logic when it is applied to the Trinity.
In her chapter, Antonia Fitzpatrick concentrates on treatments of a different theological problem that was also rich in philosophical implications. The doctrine of the Resurrection (of Christ, in particular, but the same issues apply to all other humans) requires that the resurrected body is the same as that of the living person. But how can this identity persist across death, when, according to the Aristotelian doctrine all the theologians accepted, the corpse has a different substantial form from the living body, that is to say, it is an entirely different sort of thing from the living body it was? And is the view, held by Aquinas and the Dominicans, that a human being has just one substantial form, better able to provide an answer to the problem than the position held by the Franciscans and most other medieval Aristotelians, that the human body has its own substantial form? Fitzpatrickâs analysis not only shows how this, like many other seemingly recondite theological problems, forced medieval thinkers to develop their views on central questions of metaphysics. She also makes it clear both that the sharp distinction in views lay, here at least, not between Paris-based and Oxford-based theologians, but between Dominicans and Franciscans, and that even here, although the line of conflict remained clear, the lines of influence crossed: later Dominicans tended to develop not Aquinasâs own views, but his positions as understood and attacked by their Franciscan antagonists.
Iacopo Costaâs contribution widens the focus, looking at Aristotelian science at Paris as well as in England (at Oxford). Although logic dominated the early years of the curriculum in the Faculty of Arts, by 1300 it also provided students who stayed for the whole Arts course a training in the complete range of Aristotelian sciences, including physics, the study of living things, perception and the mind, ethics and metaphysics. Costa begins from the manuscripts, tracking how they journeyed from France to England and analysing the composition of some that collect commentaries on Aristotleâs non-logical works. Costa then goes on to look at the relations between how Arts Masters used Aristotleâs texts and how theologians used them, and the interplay between English masters and French ones.
As Danielle Jacquart explains at the beginning of her contribution, an account of medicine in Cambridge in the early fourteenth century cannot be written. The Faculty of Medicine was certainly established there by the end of the thirteenth century, but there is no documentary evidence for the names of graduates or masters in the early fourteenth century, and no medical writers who can be associated with Cambridge in this period. Indeed, there is only one important English medical author from the time, John of Gaddesden, educated at Oxford (Merton College) from 1305. But, as Jacquart goes on to show, the period is one of great importance for medicine in European universities generally, for it was at this time that medical training became settled there and university-trained doctors began to be found widely both in large cities and in royal and papal courts. Jacquart accordingly surveys the work of the outstanding medical writers of this time, working particularly at Montpellier, in the north Italian universities and at Paris, including Arnald of Villanova and Pietro dâAbano.
The final chapter, by Philip Knox, on âThinking Inside and Outside the Universityâ, moves back to England, and in some cases Cambridge â the students in Chaucerâs Reeveâs Tale, which Knox discusses, are at Cambridge, perhaps Kingâs Hall. But Knox also looks outward, culturally, rather than geographically. His purpose, as his title indicates, is to relate Cambridge and other fourteenth-century universities to the world beyond them, not socially, politically or economically (as is often done by university historians) but intellectually. How far, he asks, did those who did not benefit from a university training â a group that included all women, as well as many of the men, such as Chaucer and Dante, who are now thought of as the greatest writers of the time â learn about the ideas developed there? Knox suggests that they may have known a good deal. More importantly, he shows that they were not merely passive assimilators of university learning. They and the university men belonged to a shared culture, and intellectual developments outside the university affected the thinking that went on there.
2Â 1317 and the History of the Universities
The focal date for this collection is 1317, the date of the establishment of the Kingâs Scholars. Contributors have ranged in their discussions from the decades preceding 1317 to those after it: how does this period fit into the broader history of the medieval universities?
Both Paris and Oxford began as universities (studia generalia9) around 1200, and Cambridge just a few years later. In the decades that followed, Arts Masters, theologians and the Church authorities came to terms remarkably rapidly with the vast and rich stock of philosophical writing that had become available â centrally, almost all of the Aristotelian corpus (previously only the logic had been known) along with Avicennaâs and Averroesâs interpretations of it. The Church had at first attempted to prohibit much of this new material, at least in the Paris Arts Faculty, but by the middle of the century the Arts Faculties there and at Oxford made Aristotleâs texts their textbooks, and provided a training in Aristotelian science. Some, such as Bonaventure, treated the new material, though they studied it carefully, with suspicion. Others, most notably Aquinas and many of the Arts Masters, thought it unproblematic to be both thoroughgoing Aristotelians and Christians. By the last two decades of the thirteenth century, such optimism began to seem simplistic.
At once a sign of, and a stimulus for, this new attitude was the Bishop of Paris, Ãtienne Tempierâs prohibitions of 217 propositions in 1277. Although the positions condemned are heterogeneous, and some are purely theological errors, many of them correspond to, exaggerate or caricature views taken by Aristotleâs Arabic interpreters or by some of the Paris Arts Masters, and sometimes by both.10 At least in Paris, Arts Masters from then on had to be more circumspect, and theologians, too, more cautious. The direct effect of the condemnations outside Paris is disputed. Although a set of prohibitions applying to Oxford University were issued in the same year by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, they do not seem to have been made in order to extend Tempierâs rulings to England; rather, they reflect Kilwardbyâs own Augustinian leanings, and many historians see them as an attacks on Aquinas, but some disagree.11 Even leaving aside the question of what effects the prohibitions had, they can be taken as signs that the heroic first age of Aristotelianism in the universities was over.
The outstanding Paris theologian of the 1280s and 1290s, Henry of Ghent, who had served on the commission that drew up the 217 propositions, stressed the inadequacy of humans to reach true knowledge without divine assistance. Duns Scotus, who taught at Oxford and Paris in the 1290s and early 1300s, made a sharp distinction, followed by most fourteenth-century Arts Masters and theologians, between the knowledge based on revealed premises sought by theologians and the purely natural knowledge open to Aristotle himself and within the Aristotelian sciences.12
A glance at how the same questions are treated by Aquinas, on the one hand, and Scotus, on the other, shows immediately the most striking of all the characteristics of work in the Arts and Theology Faculties in the decades beginning around 1300: its extreme complexity, compared with thirteenth-century discussions. On every issue, there was a multitude of different, subtly distinguished positions, and any contribution had to take account of them, explaining their failings and how it avoided them. Although this change is especially evident in theology, it can be seen in Aristotelian exegesis too: compare, for example, the commentaries on the Ethics by Giraldus Odonis (probably 1320s) and Buridan (c.1350) with those written by Arts Masters in the 1280s and 1290s.
The early fourteenth century was also the one time when the University of Oxford (and perhaps â see below â England more widely) outshone the medieval University of Paris as an intellectual centre. Scotus, a product of Oxford, changed the way in which almost every central question in theology and philosophy was discussed, even for those who rejected his solutions.13 Scotus himself went on to teach in Paris, following a traditional pattern for Oxford Masters, but from the 1320s few of the most important Oxford Arts Masters and theologians studied or taught there. William Courtenay describes the phenomenon as âthe Anglicizing of English educationâ: he points to the Franciscans as instigators of the trend to send their best English students to Oxford, rather than Paris, and observes that the change took place well before the start of the Hundred Yearsâ War in 1337, which would make academic travel to France almost impossible.14
England owed its special intellectual distinction in the early fourteenth century (especially c.1320â50) to works of logic and natural science (disciplines of the Arts Faculty, but in some cases written by theologians), and to theology. Among the important logicians were, besides William of Ockham, Walter Burley, an Arts Master in Oxford (c.1296â1305), who then studied theology in Paris before returning to England; and Richard Kilvington, William Heytesbury and Richard Billingham, who were each Oxford Arts masters in the 1320s, 1330s and 1340s respectively, before becoming theologians (also at Oxford). Except for Burley, they all specialized in the logica modernorum, the branches of logic newly developed in the Middle Ages, which were centrally concerned with sentences and how words in them refer in different ways, so producing ambiguities and, often, opening the way to sophistical arguments. Their work would be highly influential all over Europe from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. All of these men except for Kilvington were fellows of Merton College, which was the setting for a remarkable development in physics, closely linked to logic. As well as Heytesbury and Kilvington, its proponents included the Mertonians Thomas Bradwardine in the 1320s, John Dumbleton in the late 1330s/early 1340s, and Richard Swineshead (author of the Liber calculationum, c.1350, which applies mathematics to physics).
The best-known theologian in England, and indeed in all Europe, in the period following Scotus is William of Ockham, a Franciscan who studied and taught in Oxford and at the Franciscan studium in London, writing on both theology and logic between 1317 and 1324.15 Ockham is usually characterized as a nominalist, the originator of later medieval nominalism. Nominalism is the position that real things are all particulars (this man, that horse) and the universals (Man, Horse) are merely signs in spoken or mental language. Ockham certainly held this view, and he attacked the arguments of Scotus and others, who attributed some sort of real existence to universals. But to see him primarily as a nominalist risks placing him within the anachronistic framework set up by nineteenth-century historians of philosophy (partly inspired by the late medieval Wegestreit), who made the Problem of Universals central to, and often almost identical with, medieval philosophy itself. It is more revealing to see Ockham, on the one hand, as an early and leading representative of a more general shift in approach. One effect of the increasing complexity of theological issues from the late thirteenth century onwards, seen strikingly in Scotus, was to increase the ways in which things could be distinguished and so add new types of entity to the ontological inventory. Ockham kept this complexity, but he moved it to the world of mental and spoken language, leaving a radically stripped-down world of things. On the other hand, Ockham and his contemporaries should also be seen as continuers of the type of theology developed by Scotus, with its emphasis on the contingency of the acts of the will, both human and divine, and its consequent extension of theological questioning to what God might in principle do, given his omnipotence.
The crowd of distinguished English theologians in the 1320sâ1340s â including the Dominican Robert Holcot (writing in the 1330s and 40s), the Franciscans Walter Chatton (writing in the 1320s) and Adam Wodeham, Robert of Halifax, Roger Rosetus (1330s), the Benedictine Robert Graystones (or Graystanes; 1320s) and the secular Richard of Kilvington (1330s for his theology) â used to be considered primarily as followers of Ockham. Recent research has shown that they should be regarded as independent thinkers, with complex connections to Ockham and varying reservations about most of his characteristic views.16 They are all, however, exponents of a new and distinctive style of theology, which, like Ockhamâs, made extensive use of the logical techniques developed in England at the time and where current intellectual concerns, rather than the traditional theological syllabus as set out by Peter the Lombardâs Sentences, increasingly dictated the shape of discussions. Indeed, Ockham himself and Kilvington also wrote outstanding works on logic, and Thomas Bradwardine, who excelled in logic as well as natural philosophy in the 1320s, went on to become a theologian in the 1330s, author in the 1340s of a vast, brilliant and idiosyncratic treatise on predestination, De causa Dei and, shortly before his death in 1349, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Although many of the great innovations in logic and theology in this period came from across the Channel, the University of Paris remained a great centre. Durandus of St Pourçain, Master of Theology there from 1312â13, struggled against the Thomist orthodoxy imposed by his Dominican order, whilst the Franciscan Peter Aureol, Master of Theology there from 1318â20, was a bold and original thinker. In the 1340s, the Augustinian Hermit Gregory of Rimini absorbed the influence of English logic and theology in his work, which would be widely read over the following decades and centuries.17 Meanwhile, from the 1320s until the late 1350s, John Buridan â probably the finest Latin fourteenth-century philosopher of all, and the greatest medieval logician along with Avicenna and Abelard â taught in the Arts Faculty, commenting in depth on the whole range of Aristotleâs works as well as developing the logica modernorum in ways that parallel the English developments and may owe something to them.18
The early fourteenth century was an important time for developments in medicine (as Danielle Jacquartâs chapter here explains), with famous theoreticians such as Arnald of Villanova, at the beginning of the century, working at the University of Montpellier, with his strong enthusiasm for Galen, and in Paris and Padua, Pietro dâAbano, author of the Conciliator (1310), which aims to reconcile medicine and (natural) philosophy. Despite the existence of medical faculties at Oxford and Cambridge, England was not at the forefront of any such new developments.
The University of Paris was not, as for the other university disciplines, a great centre for law, because in 1219 Pope Honorius III had forbidden the study of Civil Law there. Since it was problematic to study Canon Law without Roman (Civil) Law, the centre of legal studies in France had moved to Orleans. It was not there, however, but at the North and Central Italian universities (Bologna, Padua, Perugia) that were found the outstanding innovators, such as Giovanni dâAndrea (d. 1348) in Canon Law, and Bartolus of Saxoferrato (d. 1357) and his pupil, Baldus (d. 1400) in Roman Law. Oxford and Cambridge both had flourishing Law Faculties, which educated influential administrators and officials, but they did not produce individual legal authors of importance: as Leonard Boyle has put it, with reference to Oxford (but the point seems equally true for Cambridge too) âthe faculty of canon law (and, needless to say, that of civil law) never amounted to much academically in the middle ages, and never occasioned a ripple of interest outside of England.â19
Finally, in placing the period discussed here within the history of the universities, an important development that took place towards the end of it should be considered. Up until the middle of the fourteenth century, the only universities with Theology Faculties, the setting for much of the most adventurous and broad-ranging thinking, were Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and the studium at the Vatican. But from 1349 onwards the Papacy allowed the establishment of Theology Faculties in many of the existing Italian universities, including Florence, Padua, Perugia and Bologna.20 And, whereas Paris, Oxford and Cambridge had been the only universities north of the Alps, with the exception of the law-centred University of Orleans, from the mid-fourteenth century many others began to be founded there, among the earliest of which were the Universities of Prague, Cracow (Jagiellonian University), Vienna, Erfurt and Heidelberg.
3Â Philosophy and Theology in Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth-Century Cambridge
The Kingâs Scholars were established, then, at a moment when in the Arts and theology England was about to enter its most brilliant period of achievement in the Middle Ages. But did any of that lustre penetrate the Fenland gloom of Cambridge, to which, rather than to the honey-stone splendour of Oxford, Edward II chose to send them? From most accounts, it would seem not. Cambridge was indeed, by 1317, long-established, and it was the only university besides Oxford where the full range of disciplines was taught (since Roman Law had been forbidden in Paris), and it boasts an extensive set of statutes antedating any that survive from Oxford or Paris.21 Yet Cambridge is treated as an afterthought in histories of the medieval university, at least so far as the intellectual life there is concerned.22 Even in a series that prides itself on historical and geographical completeness, the new Ueberweg: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, the recently published volume on the thirteenth century states, without qualification, that in Cambridge âneither in the Arts nor in theology was any famous Master active.â23
This sidelining can to some extent be justified by the size and character of Cambridge: as Courtenay points out, it was only a third as big as Oxford, and populated by students mainly from East Anglia and the North East.24 When the Kingâs Scholars were established, there was only one college in Cambridge, Peterhouse, but already six in Oxford; and, although both universities had the religious houses of many orders, it was those at Oxford that were regarded as the most important centres for theological training.25 Accordingly, especially in the period up to about 1320, the leading theologians at Cambridge were often Oxford trained, and it was there that, as was required of Bachelors of Theology, before they became Masters, they had completed the most important and far-ranging intellectual work of their career, by lecturing on the Sentences â although this does not mean that they were intellectually inactive at Cambridge.
The aim in the following paragraphs is not, then, an attempt to challenge in any way Oxfordâs unquestionable intellectual pre-eminence over Cambridge in the Middle Ages. It aims, rather, to consider whether â at least as a possibility, needing further research â Cambridge was also a considerable, though lesser intellectual centre in the half century before and after 1317.
To begin with the Arts, which were the first subjects to be studied, and for most students the only ones. The Arts Course, based on Aristotleâs texts and supplemented by the logica modernorum, was studied in fourteenth-century Cambridge, but almost nothing is known about the work of Cambridge Arts Masters. For the fifteenth century, there is a Logica Cantabrigiensis, a manual of logica modernorum put together for use in Cambridge, but certainly not all by Cambridge authors.26 In his essay here, Sten Ebbesen brings his readers to the Cambridge library richest in medieval logical manuscripts, but he comments that âmost or all of the relevant Caius manuscripts must have come into existence in an Oxford setting, as several of the identifiable authors represented in them can be connected to Oxford, while none is known to have been a Cambridge man.â27 Maybe, however, this disappointing judgement is too precipitate.
Rodney Thomson, who catalogued the manuscripts of Aristotelian commentaries surviving at both Oxford and Cambridge, has pointed out that âmore early glossed texts of logic and natural philosophy survive at Cambridge than at Oxford.â28 He goes on to mention the âastonishing number of namesâ of English commentators of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries preserved in them, and adds that âlocal surnames suggest that some of them might have studied and taught at Cambridge.â Moreover, sometimes there can be other documentary evidence of a link with Cambridge, to complement or stand instead of a local surname. In his essay here, Thomson mentions, by way of example, five writers of Aristotelian commentaries preserved in Caius or Peterhouse manuscripts, two of whom are linked to Cambridge just by their names, three by other evidence.29 It may be possible to add to the list. For instance, the William of Duffield who wrote a set of questions on the Posterior Analytics in Caius 668*/645 (early fourteenth century) could well be the same as the Franciscan Master of that name, who taught at Cambridge c.1314.30 Many of the commentaries and logical treatises in these manuscripts and the others at Caius and Peterhouse are anonymous. Once more work has been done on pieces that can be attributed to Cambridge authors, it may be possible to argue a Cambridge origin for some of them too.
With regard to theology, there must have been Masters, who were secular priests, not members of the religious orders, because at least one of the colleges, Michaelhouse, was founded in 1324 especially for students of theology, and more than four-fifths of the graduate degrees taken by its members were indeed in this subject.31 But the secular theology Masters have left little trace, except through donations of books.32 It is certainly, as Courtenay stresses, the religious orders who made by far the greatest contribution in medieval Cambridge.33 Its extent is a little less uncertain than it might have been thanks to two valuable sources: a contemporary list of the Franciscan Masters at Cambridge,34 and MS Assisi 158, which contains a good deal of Cambridge material, although it is described and discussed in a book called (unsurprisingly, perhaps) Oxford Theology and Theologians.35 Among the orders it was, as Courtenay adds, in practice, just the Dominicans and Franciscans whose convents there flourished intellectually â though John Baconthorpe, a Carmelite, an important Master of Theology in Paris and opponent of Aureol, probably taught there in the 1330s.36
Of the Dominicans, it is certain that William dâEyncourt (c.1340) Thomas Hopeman (c.1344âc.1350), and Thomas Ringstead (c.1347â53) taught in Cambridge. They all belong to the group of Dominicans with unusually strong interests in the Latin classics, which surface in their Biblical commentaries (dâEyncourt on Ecclesiasticus; Hopeman on Hebrews; Ringstead on Proverbs â and he also wrote a Sentences commentary).37 The most famous member of this group was Robert Holcot, distinguished not just for his classical interests, but as author of an enormously popular commentary on Wisdom and as a powerful and innovative theologian.38 Holcot certainly studied at Oxford and became a Master of Theology there, but a couple of manuscripts of the Wisdom commentary identify him as being from Cambridge and it has been conjectured that he taught there, perhaps shortly after 1340.39 To these fourteenth-century Dominicans can probably be added two Cambridge Masters from the end of the thirteenth century, known only through MS Assisi 158 â a certain Grenesby, who probably belonged to this order, and John Trussebut, who âmust have enjoyed a considerable reputation among his contemporariesâ.40
It was, however, the Franciscans, dominant in English intellectual life everywhere in the first half of the fourteenth century, who were from the start the central figures in Cambridge theology.41 The first Franciscan Master, Vincent of Coventry, came to Cambridge in the 1230s, some time before, it seems, a theology faculty was established in the university.42 His early successors were usually experienced teachers, who had become Masters of Theology elsewhere before they came to Cambridge.43 Among them, a number are of especial philosophical and theological distinction. William of Milton (Militona), at Cambridge in the mid-1250s, had been a Master of Theology in Paris by 1248, and had been involved in putting together the Summa Fratris Alexandri, the great and vast early Franciscan summa of theology.44 His immediate successor, probably from 1256/7 until his death in 1259, was Thomas of York, who had been a Master of Theology at Oxford, where he began his Sapientiale, which he continued at Cambridge and left unfinished. The Sapientiale is not just, as its first modern enthusiast described it, nearly a century ago, the âfirst metaphysical summa of the thirteenth centuryâ, but rather the only summa of that century or the next, which is properly speaking metaphysical.45 Thomas was unusually well-read in the Latin classics, strongly influenced by Arabic material and, in particular, Maimonidesâs Guide of the Perplexed, and is convinced that philosophy provides an alternative route, which he is following in his treatise, to the truths theologians more usually establish on the basis of revelation.46 His recognition as one of the most adventurous thinkers of his century has been delayed, because his work has never been printed â but an edition is now in progress.47
Less unusual as a thinker, although better known today through his disputed questions and quodlibets, was Roger Marston, who studied in Paris and then taught in Cambridge, probably c.1276â77 before becoming a Master in Oxford in the early 1280s.48 Like many of the Franciscans at this time, he was strongly influenced by Augustine, as well as by his teacher, John Pecham, and by Bonaventure. The career of Thomas Bungay followed the more normal direction of travel: he was Master of the Oxford Franciscans in 1270 and then Master of the Cambridge Franciscans after 1280 (he was, in between, Provincial of the English Franciscans). There is a good deal of material from his Cambridge disputations in MS Assisi 158, and further theological quaestiones are preserved in another Assisi manuscript,49 and he is also named as the author of a commentary on Aristotleâs De caelo et mundo surviving in a Caius MS (509/386).50
Did the most famous Franciscan theologian of the time, Duns Scotus, himself teach for a period in Cambridge? He is not included in the list of Cambridge Franciscan Masters (nor the Oxford one), but this omission is not strange, since Scotus became a Master of Theology only in Paris in 1305, near the end of his short life. A note in a near contemporary hand in another manuscript of his ordinatio records that he flourished âat Cambridge, Oxford and Paris, and died at Cologneâ. In his contribution to this collection, William Courtenay, referring to forthcoming work by Stephen Dumont, suggests that this list of locations might be chronological, and so Scotus began his studies at Cambridge.51
If so, the career of his contemporary, Richard of Conington, offers an interesting comparison. Richard is listed as an Oxford Franciscan Master but also as a Cambridge one.52 The entry in the Cambridge list suggests that he began his studies in Cambridge (his name, indeed, indicates that he is from a Cambridgeshire village), finished them and became a Master of Theology in Oxford (probably 1300â1306), and then returned to teach at Cambridge (c.1308), before becoming the Franciscan Provincial in England.53 Richard was a follower of the leading theologian of the previous generation, Henry of Ghent, one of the main targets of Scotusâs criticisms, and so it is not surprising to find that he was opposed to various of Scotusâs views, on some of which he disputed with him (in Oxford, apparently). His Sentences commentary is lost, but, as well as quotations of his views, disputed questions and quodlibets by him survive (but have not been edited).54
From c.1320âc.1350, the Golden Age for medieval English theology, a considerable number of the masters on the Cambridge list were, or seem to have been, important figures in the discipline â the order is as given there, the dates are at best approximate â no. 37 [in the list] Walter Beaufon (1317â19); no. 46 Henry of Costesy (1325â26); no. 49 Ralph Pigaz (1329); no. 55 Robert of Halifax (âAlifaxâ, âEliphatâ) (1336); no. 59 Giovanni of Casale (1340â41); no. 65 Adam of Ely (or âAdam Juniorâ) (1346); no. 72 John of Walsham (1360).
None of these figures has been properly studied, and those who worked in the 1320s, Beaufon, Costesey, Pigaz â all of whom may have studied at Cambridge as well as being Masters there â are particularly shadowy. The three are cited by Adam Wodeham (d. 1358), an independent-minded disciple of Ockhamâs who was probably the leading Oxford theologian in the period after him.55 Beaufon also seems to have been a target for Ockham himself, for his views on the Trinity. No surviving works are known by him or Pigaz, whose views Wodeham often associates with Richard Fitzralph and Walter Burley.56 Although Costeseyâs Sentences commentary has not been found, a commentary on Psalms, which shows a rare knowledge of Hebrew, and perhaps other biblical commentaries, survive. Costesy ended his period as Master at Cambridge by being summoned to the Pope at Avignon, because of his outspoken defence against a recent Papal Bull on the Franciscan theory of poverty.57
In the next decade, Robert of Halifax is a little better known, although there is no edition of his one surviving work, a commentary on the Sentences Books I and II, extant in a number of manuscripts and a text that was quite widely read on the continent. Halifax had become a Master of Theology in Oxford, before going to teach in Cambridge probably at the end of the 1330s.58 Around 1350 he returned to his native Yorkshire. Like other English Sentence commentaries of the time, Halifaxâs contains a small number of elaborate quaestiones, not closely linked to Peter the Lombardâs text, but exploring topics of contemporary intellectual interest, especially the human will and its relation to God. Also like some of them, it uses the language and methods that had recently been developed in Oxford in mathematics and physics in discussing theological problems.59
From the 1340s there are Giovanni of Casale and Adam of Ely. Giovanni was an Italian who had taught Franciscan Convent of Assisi; he would go on to spend time at Bologna. He was a Master at Cambridge probably in 1340â41. (Courtenay suggests that it may have been easier for Franciscans from abroad, such as Giovanni, to study theology and become Masters in Cambridge than in Oxford.60) Giovanniâs Sentences commentary is not known to survive, but a commentary on the Pauline epistles is preserved, as well as theological quaestiones.61 His most famous work by far is, however, the Quaestio de velocitate, disputed in Bologna in 1351 or 1352, but perhaps written earlier.62 This Quaestio was especially widely read in the fifteenth century, and printed in 1505.63 It introduced to Italy the new ways of thinking about physics developed in England in the 1330s and 1340s. He is usually, therefore, described as having introduced âOxford physicsâ to the continent. But there is no indication that Giovanni spent time in Oxford, and so the physics he learned, though no doubt first devised in Oxford, must have been flourishing in Cambridge too (as, indeed, the work of Halifax indicates). Adam of Elyâs commentary on the Sentences Books III and IV survives, but it has neither been edited nor even studied. Adam was an early reader of Bradwardine, whose views on future contingents he rejected.64 It is not known where, as a Bachelor of Theology, he gave his lectures on the Sentences. Oxford is the usual default assumption, but, since he came from Ely, less than twenty miles away, Cambridge is a distinct possibility, as Courtenay accepts.65
Over a decade later, in the mid-1350s, the Franciscan Master at Cambridge, the last but one on the list, was John of Walsham.66 A set of nine quaestiones survives, and the manuscript indicates that some were disputed by him at Cambridge, others, later, at the Franciscan convent in Norwich. Among the interests that emerge from them are the distinction between natural and revealed knowledge, and divine predestination. Pelster, who has studied the manuscript, represents John as a theologian independent of the great fourteenth-century thinkers, Scotus, Ockham and Bradwardine, and harking back to Henry of Ghent and Bonaventure. His view that philosophical reasoning is able to show the existence of God and the non-eternity of the world, and that the philosophers erred by their own philosophical standards, does indeed take up ideas adumbrated by Bonaventure; it deserves further investigation.67
There is another, important figure who might be added to the Cambridge list. Roger Rosetus seems almost certainly to have given his lectures on the Sentences in England, in the mid-1330s.68 Although it is generally assumed that, therefore, they took place in Oxford, Cambridge is equally possible as the setting, or as Courtenay suggests, perhaps more probable if, as some evidence indicates, he was from Italy, like Giovanni di Casale.69 Rosetus was another of the thinkers who used the new physical ideas and methods â which the case of Giovanni suggests rapidly became known and discussed in Cambridge â in his theology.70
This account of names, works and themes suggests strongly that the philosophy and theology of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century University of Cambridge does not deserve its present neglect, and that it offers more than ample material for a promising research project. But, if this conclusion is seen merely in terms of making the balance between Oxford and Cambridge a little less lopsided, then an important point will be missed. For what emerges most strongly from this material is the importance of the religious ordersâ own systems of education: their studia (houses of study), which formed networks stretching between and beyond universities.71
To take the Franciscans, the most important order in English earlier fourteenth-century intellectual life, as an example: the most important English Franciscan studium was certainly that in Oxford, occupying two sites and including the best library in the University.72 A secondary but still significant studium was the one in Cambridge, housed from the later thirteenth-century onwards on an ample site, in part of which Sidney Sussex College is now located.73 By 1325, the Franciscans also had secondary houses of study (studia secundae speciei) in each of the seven sub-division of the English province; those in London and Norwich seem to have been particularly important.74 There was a policy of sending Masters and sometimes students between Oxford and Cambridge. Consider the succession of those who, finishing their, Oxford Mastership, were sent to Cambridge, but also, for instance, Roger Marston, who became a Master in Oxford after teaching in Cambridge or Richard of Conington, who seems to have begun his studies in Cambridge and then continued them to become a Master in Oxford before returning to Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge were the only places where a student who had satisfied all the requirements of his degree could âinceptâ and become a Master, but the other studia served, not just as feeders for them (Stamford for Oxford, Norwich for Cambridge), but also as settings for theological work at the highest level. Wodeham lectured on the Sentences at Norwich, Ralph Pigaz lectured on them there probably after doing so at Cambridge, though before becoming a Master.75 And, later, the Cambridge Master John of Walsham would conduct disputations there.76 In the early 1320s, the London studium had three of the outstanding theologians of the century, Wodeham, Walter Chatton and Ockham, all teaching and writing there.77 Late medieval English intellectual history will be clearer and more accurate if the University of Cambridge is taken out of Oxfordâs shadow, but it will benefit most if this operation is part of a broader rethinking, in which the role of the universities is seen as part of a wider framework of education, learning, speculation and spiritual life.
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Coleman, J., Medieval Readers and Writers, (London: Hutchinson, 1981).
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Genest, J-F., âLe De futuris contingentibus de Thomas Bradwardineâ, Recherches augustiniennes 14 (1979), 249â336.
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Hackett, M. B., The Original Statutes of Cambridge University. The Text and its History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Hallamaa, O., âRoger Rosethâ in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Philosophy between 500 and 1500, ed. Henrik Lagerlund, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), II, 1162â64.
Leader, D., A History of the University of Cambridge. I, The University to 1546, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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Tachau, K., Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham. Optics, epistemology and the foundations of semantics, 1250â1345, (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen and Cologne: Brill, 1988) (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 22).
Thijssen, H., âCondemnation of 1277â, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), ed. Edward Zalta, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/condemnation/>.
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Wilshire, L., âThe Condemnations of 1277 and the Intellectual Climate of the Medieval Universityâ in The Intellectual Climate of the Early University. Essays in honor of Otto Gründler, ed. Nancy Van Deussen, (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1997) (Studies in Medieval Culture 39), 151â193.
Zutshi, P. âWhen did Cambridge become a studium generaleâ in Law as a Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Melodie Eichbauer, (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 153â171.
See Alan Cobban, The Kingâs Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 9â15.
See especially the papers here by Courtenay (Chapter 2) and Helmholz (Chapter 4).
The two medieval volumes of the History of the University of Oxford, I. The Early Oxford Schools, ed. Jeremy Catto; II. Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Jeremy Catto and T. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 1992), with their chapters on the different disciplines written by experts, are one of the striking exceptions. Another is Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), by William Courtenay, a rare scholar who combines the most detailed university history with a deep and sophisticated understanding of medieval logic and theology.
Damian Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge. I, The University to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Cobban, The Kingâs Hall; Alan Cobban, The Medieval English Universities. Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1988).
But see Section 3 of this Introduction.
See his A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016) and Catalogue of Medieval manuscripts of Latin Commentaries on Aristotle in British libraries II (Cambridge, Turnhout: Brepols), 2013.
See below, Section 3 of this Introduction.
See below, 16.
But see below, 12n21.
For a short account, with up-to-date bibliography, of this much disputed topic, see Hans Thijssen, âCondemnation of 1277â, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), ed. Edward Zalta, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/condemnation/>. On the validity and extension of the 1277 condemnations, see Luca Bianchi, Il vescovo e i filosofi. La condanna parigina del 1277 e lâevoluzione dellâAristotelismo scolastico (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990), 35â40.
See the not entirely satisfactory study by Leland Wilshire, âThe Condemnations of 1277 and the Intellectual Climate of the Medieval Universityâ in The Intellectual Climate of the Early University. Essays in honor of Otto Gründler, ed. Nancy Van Deussen (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1997) (Studies in Medieval Culture 39), 151â93.
See John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers. The problem of paganism from Augustine to Leibniz, (Princeton and Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2015), 155â59.
For a clear introduction to this very difficult thinker, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Courtenay, Schools, 151â7. Courtenayâs book, along with his Adam Wodeham. An introduction to his life and writings (Leiden: Brill, 1978) (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 21), and the relevant chapters in Vols I and II of the History of the University of Oxford provide the best introduction to English intellectual life at this time.
A scrupulous analysis of Ockhamâs philosophical arguments and positions is given in Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989 â 2nd edn); for details of his life, see Courtenay, Schools, 193â96.
Courtenay, Schools, 216â18; and cf. Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham. Optics, epistemology and the foundations of semantics, 1250â1345 (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen and Cologne: Brill, 1988) (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 22) on Ockhamâs limited influence.
An excellent survey of Parisian theology in the period, focused on the problem of Godâs foreknowledge, is Chris Schabel, Theology at Paris, 1316â45. Peter Auriol and the problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingents (Aldershot, Burlington, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, 2000).
On Buridan, see Jack Zupko, John Buridan. Portrait of a fourteenth-century Arts Master (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). Important work in philosophy went on in Italy too, inside and outside the universities: see La filosofia in Italia al tempo di Dante, ed. Carla Casagrande and Gianfranco Fioravanti (Bologna: Mulino, 2016).
Leonard Boyle, âCanon Law before 1380â in History of the University of Oxford, 1, 531â564, at 557.
See Paul Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 357â58.
For the statutes, see M. B. Hackett, The Original Statutes of Cambridge University. The Text and its History, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1970. There is controversy about whether (a) Cambridge was formally recognized as a studium generale only in a letter of Pope John XXII of 1318, responding to a request from King Edward II, which may well have been connected with his establishment of the Kingâs Scholars, or whether (b) it was already one before then (see Patrick Zutshi, âWhen did Cambridge become a studium generaleâ in Law as a Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Melodie Eichbauer (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate), 2011, 153â71, who summarizes the arguments and himself favours (a)). Certainly, the University of Cambridge was widely considered to be a studium generale long before 1318.
Cobban, Medieval English Universities, provides a more balanced treatment of the two institutions, but gives no space to their intellectual achievements. Leader, History, does include chapters on the different disciplines, but they tend to provide an indiscriminate list of names and works, with little attempt to investigate intellectual distinction â a striking contrast with the chapters on logic, natural science and theology in the medieval volumes of the History of the University of Oxford.
Die Philosophie des Mittelalters IV. 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Alexander Brungs, Vilem Mudroch and Peter Schulthes (Basel: Schwabe (Ueberweg: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie)), 50 (Jacques Verger). Later, this volume does in fact treat three masters (Thomas of York, Roger Marston and Thomas of Bungay) who worked in Cambridge (see below).
Schools, 51â52. But A. B. Emden (A Biographical register of the University of Cambridge to 1500, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, xxixâxxx) points out that, in 1360, the Cambridge colleges provided in principle for about 142 fellows, whilst those in Oxford for only 63, although the numbers in reality were often smaller than those in the statutory provision. Most students, Emden goes on to comment, lived outside colleges. Comparison of numbers of students taking degrees is possible for only a few years in the mid-fifteenth century, when the records of the two universities overlap: here the numbers of Cambridge are lower than at Oxford, but not greatly.
Courtenay, Schools, 54.
L. M. De Rijk, âLogica Cantabrigiensis. A fifteenth century Cambridge manual of logicâ, Revue internationale de philosophie 29 (1975) 111â12, 297â315.
See below, 87.
Catalogue of Latin Commentaries, 16â17.
See below, 78. Thomson relies on the fact that Chelveston is only 35 miles from Cambridge to link William of Chelveston to it, but there is in fact further documentary evidence to tie him to the university: see Emden, Register (Cambridge).
Emden, Register (Cambridge), 197; he might, alternatively, be an Oxonian William of Duffield, also active (but not known as a Master or writer) in the early fourteenth century: see A. B. Emden, Biographical register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957â59), I, 601.
Leader, History, 80â82. According to the Founderâs Statutes (printed in A. E. Stamp, Michaelhouse. Notes on the History of Michaelhouse published on the 600th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Society by Hervey de Stanton (privately printed, 1924), 41â47, at 42) those coming to the college must be either Arts Masters, or those about to incept and become Arts Masters, who intend, after their Masterships to go on and study theology. Stampâs book does not investigate the intellectual life of the college, and, from the surviving documents, there is unfortunately little basis for doing so.
Leader, History, 179â82.
See below, 40â41.
Ed. in A. G. Little, âThe Friars and the Foundation of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Cambridgeâ in his Franciscan Papers, Lists, and Documents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943) (Publications of the University of Manchester 284, Historical Series 81), 122â43, at 133â34 (and see Plate V).
A. G. Little and F. Pelster, Oxford Theology and Theologians, c. A.D. 1282â1302 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1934). Later, Pelster published, as part of an article with a misleadingly narrow title (âDie Quästionen des Johannes von Walsham O. F. M.. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Franzikanerschule von Cambridgeâ, Franziskanische Studien 34 (1952), 129â46, at 129â36) a very valuable survey of the Franciscan Masters at Cambridge and their work.
See John Marenbon, âBaconthorpe [Baco]â in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1011; cf. Courtenay, Schools, 54. It is also possible that the interesting Benedictine theologian who commented on the Sentences in the mid-1330s, known simply as âMonachus Nigerâ, did so in Cambridge: see Courtenay, Wodeham, 90â95, Schools, 274 and below, n. 65.
See Courtenay, Schools, 54; Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 203â20.
On Holcot as a classicizing friar, see Smalley, English Friars, 133â202; on the Wisdom commentary, see John Slotemaker and Jeffrey Witt, Robert Holcot (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9â10; Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 263â65. Richard Crossâs contribution to the present collection provides a vivid introduction to Holcotâs manner of theological thinking.
See Slotemaker and Witt, Holcot, 3â4.
For Grenesby, see Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology, 81â82; for Trussebut, see Little, âFriarsâ, 135â36 (from where the quotation is taken) and Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology, 101.
On the English Franciscans and theology, see Courtenay, Schools, 66â69. For the Cambridge Franciscan convent, see Little, âThe Friarsâ and John Moorman, The Grey Friars in Cambridge, 1225â1538 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).
Leader (History, 33) says that âthe Cambridge theology could well date from the first decade after 1209, as those migrating Oxford scholars [i.e. the ones who came to Cambridge in 1209 and began the university] included several theologiansâ, but cf. Little, âFriarsâ, 134â35 and Moorman, Grey Friars, 12. The earliest evidence Moorman finds (29â30) for the existence of a theology faculty at Cambridge dates from the 1250sâ60s, though it is generally accepted that it existed by the 1240s: see Zutshi, âWhen did Cambridgeâ, 160.
Little, âFriarsâ, 134â35.
See Victorinus Doucet, Prolegomena = Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologica IV (Quarrachi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1948), ccxlâccxlii. It is very probable, though not certain, that the âFr. W. de Miltonâ, fifth on the list of Cambridge Franciscan Masters, is identical with this William of Militona.
Ephrem Longpré, âFr. Thomas dâYork, O. F. M. La première somme métaphysique du XIIIe siècleâ, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 19 (1926), 875â930.
There is a description of the Sapientiale in Brungs, Mudroch, Schulthess, Philosophie, 777â79, 848, and a vivid account of its importance and unusual character in Fiorella Retucci, âThe Sapientiale of Thomas of York, OFM: the fortunes and misfortunes of a critical editionâ, Bulletin de Philosophie médiévale 52 (2010), 133â59 (appendix by Joseph Goering).
On the plans for publication, under the auspices of the Thomas Institut, Cologne, see http://www.thomasinstitut.uni-koeln.de/11758.html?&L=7.
The chronology is difficult to work out: see Rogeri Marstoni Quodlibeta quatuor, ed. Gerard Etzkorn and Ignatius Brady (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1968) (Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica 27), 9*â31*.
Assisi MS 196; see Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 132, n.14 for details.
See Moorman, Greyfriars, 157â58, Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology, 74â75 and Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 132. For the commentary, see Thomson, Catalogue of Latin Commentaries, 86, but Pelster doubts whether the attribution is trustworthy. Assisi MS 158 may also indicate that Robert of Orford, an unusual Franciscan who strongly defended Aquinas against his critics, was teaching in Cambridge, c.1275: see Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology, 12 and Emden, Register (Cambridge), 435. On two other Oxford-trained Cambridge Franciscan Masters, whose thought is known only indirectly, Walter of Knolle and Adam of Hoveden, see Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 133.
See below, 42â43.
On Coningtonâs close relations with Scotus, see Stephen Dumont, âWilliam of Ware, Richard of Conington and the Collationes Oxonienses of John Duns Scotusâ in John Duns Scotus. Metaphysics and Ethics, ed. Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood and Mechthild Dreyer (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1996) (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 53), 59â85. Cf. also Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology, 63, 260â61.
Little, Friars, 133: â31us Fr. Ricardus de Conitonâ, sed incepit Oxonâ. et resumpsit Cantâ.â It is hard to fit Moormanâs (Grey Friars, 165) discovery that he was in Cambridge in 1303, when he joined the Guild of St Mary, into this chronological picture, and Dumontâs discussion suggests that it needs further investigation.
For an account of the material, with an extract, see Victorinus Doucet, âLâOeuvre scolastique de Richard de Conington, O. F. M.â, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 29 (1936), 396â42. For the quotations, see Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 135.
See Courtenay, Wodeham.
See Courtenay, Wodeham, 61â62, 65â66.
See Little, âFriarsâ, 139â41; Courtenay, Wodeham, 65.
See William Courtenay, âSome Notes on Robert of Halifax, O. F. M.â, Franciscan Studies, 33 (1973), 135â142, at 139 for dating (later than that suggested by others).
See Courtenay, âSome Notesâ, 140â42; Schools, 272.
Courtenay, Schools, 109â10.
On Giovanniâs life and works, see Chartularium Studii Bononiensis S. Francisci : saec. XIIIâXVI, ed. Celestino Piana (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1970) (Analecta Franciscana 11), 18â20.
See Anneliese Maier, âDie âQuaestio de Velocitateâ des Johannes von Casaleâ, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 53 (160), 276â306, repr. in Maierâs Ausgehendes Mittelalter. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts, I (Rome: edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964) (Studi e testi 97), 381â411.
Maier, âCasaleâ, 382 (in reprint).
See Jean-François Genest, âLe De futuris contingentibus de Thomas Bradwardineâ, Recherches augustiniennes 14 (1979), 249â336 at 268â71 (with details of MSS of the Sentences commentary).
Courtenay, Schools, 110, cf. 274 and see below, 42. In favour of Oxford, Courtenay says, is the fact that one of Adamâs student colleagues and disputing partners was a lively Benedictine, known simply as Monachus Niger, and Benedictines usually had their higher education in Oxford. But there was provision at Cambridge for Benedictine students from 1340 (Leader, History, 48), and so it is possible â as Courtenay indeed accepts â that the Monachus Niger was also a Cambridge man. See also William Courtenay, âNicholas of Assisi and Vatican MS. Chigi B V 66â, Scriptorium, 36 (1982), 260â63 (and cf. n. 36 above).
For details of the quaestiones, extracts and summaries, see Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 137â46.
On Bonaventureâs position on the eternity of the world, see Marenbon, Pagans, 141â42; for Johnâs position, see Pelster, âDie Quästionenâ, 145â46.
See Courtenay, Wodeham 120â21 and his âNicholas of Assisiâ. Parts of the Sentences commentary have been published: Roger Roseth. Lectura super Sententias. Quaestiones 3, 4 & 5, ed. Olli Hallamaa, (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Seura, 2005) (Helsingen Yliopiston Systemaattisen Teologian Laitoksen Julkaisuja 18).
C. 109â10.
For an introduction to his work, with bibliography, see Olli Hallamaa, âRoger Rosethâ in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Philosophy between 500 and 1500, ed. Henrik Lagerlund, Dordrech; Springer, 2011, II, 1162â64.
For England, this point was observed by A. G. Little in âTheological Schools in Medieval Englandâ, English Historical Review, 55 (1940), 624â30 and developed in detail in Courtenay, Schools, especially 56â117. For a brief description of the ordersâ education systems, see M. Michèle Mulcahy and Timothy Noone, âReligious Ordersâ in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. Jorge Gracia and Timothy Noone, Malden and Oxford; Blackwell, 2003, 45â54.
Courtenay, Schools, 68.
See Moorman, Greyfriars, 39â43.
Courtenay, Schools, 67.
Courtenay, Schools,107â8.
See above, 21.
Courtenay, Schools, 64, 194.