INTRODUCTION by the Last Decade of the Thirteenth Century

INTRODUCTION By the last decade of the thirteenth century, the practice of holding quodlibetal disputations in the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris and at various mendicant studia elsewhere was well established. Each academic year at Paris, during the Advent and Lent periods pre- ceding Christmas and Easter respectively, the University continued to suspend classes in theology and to hold more open sessions in which audience members asked the masters and their bachelors to debate questions on any topic they wished, de quolibet. As this volume demonstrates, by the 1290s not only were masters of theology from the secular clergy holding such quodlibetal sessions, but so were masters from four orders or houses of canons regular (Saint-Victor, Mont-Saint-Éloi, Val-des- Écoliers, and Premontré), three monastic orders (Benedictines, Cluniacs, and Cistercians), and the four main mendicant orders (Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans). Written records of these sessions survive down to the 1330s, although the disputations themselves continued to be conducted beyond that date. These records are the subject of this volume. Much more than was the case with volume I of this book, volume II deals with quodlibeta that have never been printed, or have not been published in modern critical editions. According to the titles, the division between the two volumes of this book is chronological: the \ rst volume is on the thirteenth century and the second covers the fourteenth. This division does correspond roughly to the contents of the volumes, although it would be more accurate to say that the mid-1290s is the cut-off point. In a few cases, however, due to the character of the chapters, some of the material in volume II still concerns the previous years, mainly the early parts of Martin Pickavé’s thematic treatment of individuation, Russell Friedman’s survey on Dominicans after Aquinas, and Thomas Sullivan’s piece on monks and canons regular. In the last two cases, the material is usually less known and unpublished. In a real sense, then, the division between volumes I and II mirrors the relative availability of the material. For volume I, there are modern criticical editions of the often important quodlibeta of Guerric of Saint- Quentin, Thomas Aquinas, John Pecham, Roger Marston, Henry of Ghent (still in progress), Godfrey of Fontaines, Vital du Four, Thomas 2 introduction of Sutton (volume II), James of Viterbo (volume II), and Peter John Olivi, as well as more minor collections. For the fourteenth century, it often appears that quodlibeta have been critically edited based on the criterion of ease, i.e., when they are in one or two manuscripts or contain relatively little material. This is the case for Thomas of Bailly, James of Thérines, John Lesage, Peter Thomae, and Francis of Marchia, although the somewhat more popular quodlibeta of Durand of St Pourçain, William of Alnwick, and William of Ockham have also been published. At any rate Glorieux and many other earlier scholars were more concerned with the thirteenth century than the fourteenth, and it seems that his fourteenth-century entries require more revision. Thus the present volume is more about manuscripts, traditions, and question lists than about doctrine or the development of any individual thinker’s ideas. In fact, some of those authors whose quodlibeta are avail- able in critical editions—such as the seculars Thomas of Bailly and John Lesage or the Franciscan Gonsalvus of Spain1—have been avoided in order to focus on unedited material. The authors here have had to do considerable manuscript work for their chapters, in some cases years of manuscript work. I believe the result will prove extremely useful both as a survey of theology in the early fourteenth century and as a reference work for the coming decades. As in the case of the rst volume, the present one contains three dif- ferent types of chapters: thematic chapters, those on individuals, and those on groups. To these we add a fourth type: two brief chapters on manuscripts containing unique collections of quodlibetal material. Thematic pieces open and close the volume: a treatment of the principle of individuation in quodlibeta constitutes the rst chapter, and an index of scienti c quodlibetal questions is in an appendix to the volume. Chapters on individuals cover the secular theologians Peter of Auvergne, John of Pouilly, and Thomas Wylton, and the important Franciscans John Duns Scotus and Peter Auriol. A few major authors of the quodlibetal genre do not receive separate chapters, for example Hervaeus Natalis, John of Naples, and William of Ockham, but they 1 Gonsalvi Hispani, Quaestiones disputatae et de quodlibet, ed. L. Amorós (Bibliotheca franciscana scholastica, 9) (Florence 1935), pp. 389–426 for the Quodlibet. Glorieux omit- ted this Quodlibet of 11 questions, contained in Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale 661, ff. 126ra–130va, which Amorós dated to Gonsalvus’ regency in 1302–03. For Thomas of Bailly and John Lesage, see the chapter on Peter of Auvergne below, n. 1..

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