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The beautiful Latin MS 198 of the John Rylands Library preserves one of two currently known manuscript copies of the Servite Lorenzo Opimo of Bologna’s Scriptum on the Sentences, the only such text by a Servite that survives. In 1494, the Chapter General of the Servite Order made Lorenzo the order’s teaching doctor, since the representatives declared that his work, primarily his questions on the Sentences, would be required reading for Servite students and masters of theology. No doubt as a result, Lorenzo’s Scriptum was printed in Venice in 1532. To most medieval intellectual historians, the printing, the author, and even the religious order are virtually unknown. This two-part article puts this unique text in its doctrinal and institutional context. Part I argues that Lorenzo delivered his Sentences lectures at the University of Paris in 1370–71, presents and analyses the tradition of the three textual witnesses, and offers a question list.
Commandments or Decalogue, promulgated by God to help the Jewish people re-learn the natural law. Human positive law was made by kings or commonwealths for the common good; but any human positive law which contravened natural law was null.33 Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, in which these arguments were contained, was the basis for theological instruction in Catholic universities across Europe from the early sixteenth century, replacing Peter Lombard’s Sentences as the text from which lecturers read and commented.34 Not all Catholics agreed with Aquinas’s scheme in detail: the
his lectures on the fourth book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences , a prescribed text in the schools. The works that followed it, including On Civil Lordship , together constituted Wyclif’s Summa Theologiae , an eight-year undertaking to which this early theological text acted as a preface. The decision to devote a separate treatise to the respective forms of lordship was a very natural one for Wyclif, since divine and civil lordship corresponded respectively to universal, eternal lordship and particular, transient forms of lordship. The relationship between universal
authorities. Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the most widely disseminated work of scholastic theology between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, held that bishops were not a distinct order. Priesthood was the highest of the church’s seven orders,13 but ‘The term bishop is a name of both dignity and office’.14 Furthermore, of these seven orders, ‘Two alone are called sacred … namely the diaconate and presbyterate, because we read that these were the only two which the primitive Church had, and only concerning these do we have the Apostle’s precept’.15 William Durand of Mende
cardinal virtues. 20 Instead, he defines justice as ‘in subveniendo miseris’, the relief of the wretched or the suffering, a description taken directly from Augustine’s De trinitate . 21 Such an approach omitted any notion of due and, in its stead, placed the concept of misericordia (the act of showing mercy to the wretched) at the very heart of justice. 22 It was influential, given the status which Peter Lombard’s Sentences rapidly attained as a foundational textbook in the curriculum of the schools in the second half of the twelfth century. 23
, 397–415. 21 Maginn, ‘Whose Ireland?’, 239. 22 Rapple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck’, 237, 241. 23 Thomas O’Connor, ‘A Justification for Foreign Intervention in Early Modern Ireland: Peter Lombard’s Commentarius (1600)’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), Irish Migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1800 (Dublin, 2003), 14–31; quotation 14. 24 O’Connor, ‘A Justification for Foreign
covered this theme. Peter Lombard’s synthesis of earlier authors argued similarly for the natural condition being one of gradual development of cognitive and physical abilities. Reynolds summed up Peter Lombard’s views: ‘Those who object that ignorance is a penalty for sin fail to appreciate the distinction between ignorance and mere nescience, for ignorance is the lack of knowledge of what one ought to know.’ 133 Then Albertus Magnus, in the 1240s, dealt with the impairments of infancy in his Commentary on the Sentences. In Summa theologiae Aquinas wrote on
Ireland, with the associated antiProtestant and anti-Stuart attitudes which that implied; an ethos captured in Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh’s Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill (Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell) composed probably between 1616 and 1630, and the pro-O’Neill version of Archbishop Peter Lombard’s history of Ireland printed at Leuven in 1632.85 80 Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 50–54; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The culture and ideology of Irish Franciscan historians at Louvain 1607–1650’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians (Dublin, 1991), pp. 11–30. 81 Tadhg
Franciscans in particular were fiercely loyal to Scotus and mistakenly claimed him as a fellow countryman, born at Downpatrick. Scotus wove his major treatment of the human soul into his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is now known as the Ordinatio or Opus Oxoniense.56 This work was the centrepiece of the ambitious edition directed by Luke Wadding, with the encouragement and assistance of Giovanni di Campagna, minister general of the Observant Franciscans, from St Isidore’s College Rome in the 1630s, and printed at Lyons in 1639.57 Scotus’s chief argument
: for the grant to be valid, it was argued, both the Church’s prosperity and, even more fundamentally, ongoing indigenous consent should have been secured. However, the Church lay in ruins and there had been a consistent lack of just English treatment of the Irish over centuries. The most systematic scrutiny of the implications of Laudabiliter attempted during the Nine Years’ War would be found in Peter Lombard’s De Hibernia insula commentarius, composed in 1600. Lombard, a professor at Louvain, was himself an English-Irish townsman. The Commentarius, a remarkable