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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
This year marks the 750th anniversary of the death of the first two Dominican masters at the University of Oxford, Robert Bacon OP and his student and successor Richard Fishacre OP. From the former there survives only a Psalms commentary and a sermon. From the latter, however, we have a number of works, including the earliest Sentences Commentary composed in England. Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences offered to their readers, which eventually included all candidates for the degree of master of theology at the leading medieval universities, a systematic exposition of texts from the Fathers, principally St. Augustine. It was therefore seen as the locus of speculative or “dogmatic’ theology as opposed to “moral” theology, the locus of which was the Scriptures.
This role for Lombard’s work, moreover, was reaffirmed in a so— called epistola secreta, a sealed letter, issued by Pope Innocent IV and addressed to Robert Grosseteste, who was at the time bishop of Lincoln but who still kept a close watch on developments at the studium where he had spent so much time and invested so much energy.
1 See Thomas. Kaeppeli, , Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi (Rome, 1980), p. 3:311Google Scholar.
2 See Abate, G., “Lettere secretae d'Innocenzo IV e altri documenti in una raccolta inedita del sec. XIII,”Miscellanea Franciscana (1955), p. 347, n. 149Google Scholar.
3 Ginther, James, “Theological Education at the Oxford Studium in the Thirteenth Century: A Reassessment of Robert Grosseteste's Letter to the Oxford Theologians,”Franciscan Studies 55 (1998), p. 83–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See my edition of the Prologue: “The Science of Theology according to Richard Fishacre: Edition of the Prologue to his Commentary on the Sentences,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972), p. 96–98Google Scholar.
5 I have edited this text and published it under the title “The Moral and Spiritual Theology of Richard Fishacre: Edition of Trinity Coll. MS O.1.30,”Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 60 (1990), p. 5–143Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., p. 19–20.
7 Ibid., p. 31.
8 See my article, Richard Fishacre's Treatise ‘tie libera arbitrio’, Moral and Political Philosophies in the Middle Ages, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy, eds. Bazàn, B. Carlos, Andü;jar, Eduardo, Sbrocchi, Leonard G., vol. 2 (Ottawa: Legas, 1995), p. 879–91Google Scholar.
9 Oxford, Balliol Coll. MS 62, col. 3.
10 Statuta antiqua universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. Gibson, S. (Oxford, 1931), p. 49Google Scholar.
11 I take 1267 as the terminus ante quern from Roger Bacon's philippic in that year against the modern theologians who had abandoned the source of Christian truth, the Bible, in favour of novelties; Opus minus, in Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, ed. Brewer, J. S. (London, 1859Google Scholar; reprinted, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1965), p. 329.
12 Eschmann, Ignatius Theodore, The Ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Two Courses, ed. Synan, Edward A. (Toronto, 1997), p. 196–97Google Scholar.
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