5 - Scholasticism: survival and revival

Summary

Endings, in the history of ideas, are no easier to identify with certainty than beginnings. Scholasticism, that product of the mature intellectual culture of medieval Europe, was to experience, even within the period surveyed in this volume, more than one revival. Revitalisation might indeed be a better term; for that which has not died need not in the strict sense be revived, and there is ample evidence to indicate that the scholastic tradition, however exhausted it might seem at times to be, clung stubbornly to life. The advent of the printing press ensured the preservation, the transmission, and the wider dissemination of many scholastic texts. Nor was this characteristic only of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – when it was only to be expected that what were still the standard works in theology and philosophy would be committed to print. Well into the seventeenth century we find, most notably, the twelve-volume edition of the work of Duns Scotus published in 1639. A year later – an instance of particular relevance here – Jean Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Politics was printed at Oxford. The place is as significant as the date – as a reminder that academic conservatism played its part in keeping the scholastic mode alive. Hobbes' attack on the schoolmen – from whose works, nonetheless, he no doubt took more of his ideas than he cared to acknowledge – indicates, again, that the doctrine he had received at the turn of the century was still to the fore some fifty years later.