The Sentences in Sixteenth-Century Iberian Scholasticism

CHAPter 8 The Sentences in Sixteenth-Century Iberian Scholasticism Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste* Late scholasticism, sixteenth-century Iberian scholasticism in particular, are typically associated with the ascendancy of Thomism, which in turn partly resulted from the replacement of Peter Lombard’s Sentences with Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as the standard book to be read and commented on in European faculties of theology. This replacement undoubtedly represents a break with the tradition of commenting on the Sentences that began in the thirteenth century; nevertheless, it did not stop the reading of the Sentences and its commentary tradition, which lasted until the eighteenth century. The Sentences continued to be present in sixteenth-century university teaching, but in a completely different and more limited way. The systematic replacement of the Sentences with the Summa originated at the University of Salamanca in the late 1520s. From there it spread to the entire Iberian Peninsula, where, by the end of the sixteenth century, there were more than twenty universities and colleges where theology was taught. The adoption of the Summa as the basis for Jesuit teaching, established in the Ratio studiorum, helped to make the Summa as the fundamental theological work in all Catholic universities in Europe and America. Since the Summa theologiae became so prominent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholastic thought, scholarship has paid far more attention to the process that * Lidia Lanza is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/75934/2011). Marco Toste holds a fellowship granted by the Instituto de Filosofia, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, within the project Iberian Scholastic Philosophy at the Crossroads of Western Reason: The Reception of Aristotle and the Transition to Modernity (PTDC/FIL–FIL/109889/2009), and financed by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. We thank William Duba, José Meirinhos, João Rebalde, and Trine Wismann for providing important material for our research, and the librarians of the Universidade de Coimbra, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Arquivo Distrital de Braga, and Biblioteca da Ajuda for their help. Unless otherwise indicated, we have checked all manuscripts first-hand, either in libraries or on microfilm. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�83046_0�0 The Sentences In Sixteenth-century Iberian Scholasticism 417 led to the replacement of the Sentences with the Summa, notably in the case of the University of Salamanca, and to the ideas developed in the commentary tradition on the Summa, than to the role of the Sentences in late scholasticism, which has been neglected. More than thirty Sentences commentaries were written in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century, of which a considerable portion is still extant only in manuscript. The bulk of these commentaries have never been studied, and for many authors we have very limited biographical data. Further, while scholars have concentrated on authors and works produced at the University of Salamanca, far less attention has been afforded to authors and intellectual contexts of other sixteenth-century Iberian universities. Stegmüller identified many commentaries in his catalog of the manuscripts containing late scholastic Portuguese theological and philosophical works,1 but his work has not been continued. All this makes the Sentences in Iberian scholasticism a completely uncharted territory. This chapter aims to provide an initial overview of the presence of the Sentences in late Iberian scholasticism, in the period that saw the replacement of the Sentences with the Summa as the main textbook in faculties of theology. The chapter is divided into two main sections plus an appendix. In the first section, we analyze the sixteenth-century statutes of the various Iberian universities, which will permit us to understand the role assigned to the Sentences within the teaching of theology; this analysis is intended to provide only a gen- eral picture, given the inchoate state of the research on this material and the uneven information available to us. For some of the main universities, such as Salamanca, Coimbra and Valencia, there are abundant records, while for some regional universities the material is still unedited or no longer extant. In view of the influence of Salamanca, we shall devote more attention to this university and to the way in which it influenced the others. This first section of the chapter will allow us to understand the change that occurred in the commentary tradition: commentaries on the Sentences were replaced by commentaries on commentaries on the Sentences. In the second part of our chapter, we offer a presentation of the Iberian commentary tradition on the Sentences, by pre- senting the works and their authors. The chapter concludes with an appendix 1 See Friedrich Stegmüller, Filosofia e teologia nas Universidades de Coimbra e Évora no século xvi, trans. Alexandre Morujão (Coimbra, 1959). A considerable part of this work had been pre- viously published, in some cases providing more information, as “Zur Literargeschichte der Philosophie und Theologie an den Universitäten Evora und Coimbra im xvi. Jahrhundert,” Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 3 (1931): 385–438..

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