[Quisquiliae] Supplementare: a ghost story

I've just started a job-related blog, Quisquiliae, whose remit will not always be separable from that of this blog.  As and when there is an overlap, I'll add a cross-reference (with appropriate tags) here.

The first such import involves a quotation from Michael Scot's translation of Aristotle's De generatione animalium (a1220) in John Pecham's Quaestiones de anima (1270s).  You can read the post here.

Peter Auriol and scholarly inertia

The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982) has only two substantial discussions of Peter Auriol (a page each on future contingents and on intentions), though there is also a footnote on his “esse apparens”.  This fairly reflects the state of modern scholarship on Auriol when the CHLMP's chapters were written in the late 1970s.

But since the late 1980s, thanks to Katherine Tachau, historians of 14th-century philosophy have become increasingly aware that Auriol was just as important as his much more famous confrère William of Ockham, and the literature has proliferated accordingly.  Readers might therefore expect him to feature rather more prominently in the brand-new Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2010).

Alas, no.  Not only is he now mentioned on fewer occasions, but the most substantial discussion of him in any of the chapters reads in its entirety as follows:  “A fellow Franciscan, Peter Auriol, insisted that the infused virtue of charity plays a more important role in salvation.  In his view, infused charity is not simply the consequence of divine acceptance but necessary by its very nature in order to make the soul acceptable to God” (ch. 36, “Virtue theory”, by Bonnie Kent).

In Robert Pasnau's introductory chapter, Martin Stone confidently predicts that “Within twenty years Henry, Giles, Durand, and Auriol will become a part of the canon” (p. 5).  In your own time, folks.

Frustra fit per plura (V)

Here's yet another of Auriol's statements of ontological parsimony:

‘Constat enim quod omnis natura refugit superfluitatem – quanto magis divina?  Pluralitas quidem ponenda non est absque causa, quia frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora.’  (S I.45.iii)

Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences, vol. 2

I can't wait to get my hands on the second volume of Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: Current Research, which so far seems to have only made it into the Warburg Institute library.  In the meantime, as Brill are being coy about it, here's the chapter list (with authors omitted for clarity's sake):

—  The Pseudo-Peter of Poitiers Gloss
—  Stephen Langton
—  The Glossa in IV libros Sententiarum by Alexander of Hales
—  The Sentences Commentary of Hugh of St.-Cher
—  Thomas Aquinas and his Lectura romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi
—  Robert Kilwardby's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
—  William de la Mare
—  Henry of Harclay and Aufredo Gonteri Brito
—  On the Limits of the Genre: Roger Roseth as a Reader of the Sentences
—  Richard Fitzralph's Lectura on the Sentences
—  Peter of Candia's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
—  Martin Luther
—  Conclusion: The Tradition of the Sentences

It seems some standardization of the titles wouldn't have gone amiss.