The historiographical frame used to study medieval scholasticism has largely focused on great minds (such as Aquinas) and institutions (such as the university), often without careful investigation of how the two shape one another. Edited by Antonia Fitzpatrick and John Sabapathy, Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism showcases new approaches to the relationship between individuals and institutions, not always well known in Anglophone circles, that attempt to provide a holistic view of how medieval scholasticism actually worked. The volume, available in open access, is the product of a 2015 conference at St John's College Oxford and contains essays from both emergent and established scholars.
In their forty-nine-page introduction, Fitzpatrick and Sabapathy draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf's The Waves to propose avenues for a historiographical frame that is fluid and capable of encompassing multiple forms of identity. After reviewing the approaches of influential scholars such as Sir Richard Southern, Jacques Le Goff, Alain Boureau, Alain de Libera, Aron Gurevitch, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Jacob Burckhardt, they present models to help scholars think through how organizational forms and intellectual practices shape one another. These include historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to intellectual groupings and institutionalization that draw on the work of Niklas Luhmann, Max Weber, and John Searle, among others.
The collection is organized into two parts, the first focused on the construction and criticism of intellectual traditions, and the second focused on organizations and social practices with contributions exploring topics that range from ethics, law, and metaphysics to saints’ cults and religious orders. Blaise Dufal's essay examines how thirteenth- and fourteenth-century masters used patristic authority to assert their own intellectual identity. Fitzpatrick focuses on Dominican defenses of Aquinas's theory of the rational soul as the human being's only substantial form, and she underlines how competition between Franciscans and Dominicans drove forward the debate on bodily continuity after death. John Marenbon reconsiders Pietro Pomponazzi's intention in adopting a neutral position on the problem of mortalism versus the immorality of the soul by investigating the academic choices of this enigmatic thinker and his sixteenth-century Italian institutional background. Matthew Kempshall explains that Nicholas Trevet's choice to write annalistic histories was the result of a Dominican pedagogic institutional tradition. Gert Melville explores how the followers of charismatic leaders, such as Stephen of Muret, initially free from institutional norms, ultimately resorted to institutional forms to ensure their continuity. Sylvain Piron traces the trajectory of Franciscan evangelical perfection as a form of anti-institutional resistance through the figures of Peter John Olivi and Angelo Clareno. Peter Biller investigates Dominican Rolando of Cremona's contribution to shaping the central document in an inquisition into heresy, the deposition, while reassessing the paradigm of inquisition as institution. John Sabapathy shows how Dominican Robert of Courson approaches topics such as excommunication, scandal, and sacraments as products of social relations that are best treated pragmatically. Emily Corran reveals that masters’ quodlibets dealing with cases of conscience were in fact indebted to pastoral writings. Cornelia Linde investigates Robert Holcot's argument that licensed Dominican mendicants represented legitimate confessors who fulfilled the Fourth Lateran Council's requirement that the faithful should confess annually to their own priest (proprius sacerdos). Isabel Iribarren, through an analysis of Jean Gerson's epic poem Josephina, discusses how the chancellor of Paris advanced his intellectual project to promote the cult of the marriage of Joseph and Mary by introducing developments in doctrine based on probable reasoning rather than scripture.
An insight that emerges from these contributions is the continued usefulness of the concepts of “textual community” and “communities of learning” briefly discussed by Fitzpatrick and Sabapathy in their introduction (28). The notion of “textual community” circumvents the problems of “schools” as intellectually uniform organizations and understands them rather as sets of individuals with distinct views nevertheless bound to their group (as in Fitzpatrick's discussion of the Dominicans who championed Aquinas's position on bodily continuity through very distinct readings). Communities of learning account for various institutions, even the virtual institution of “being-an-arts-master” evoked by Marenbon (106) that are formed by elements such as station, place, and networks (for instance Kempshall's account of the historiographical writings of the versatile yet order-bound Nicholas Trevet). In the absence of texts, “communities of learning” is still a useful concept, especially if one's methodological approach involves mapping constellations and networks (as Biller does in his investigation of people around Rolando of Cremona).
Where we draw the boundaries around “scholasticism” may be the central question of this collection and is addressed directly by David d'Avray in his afterword. The multiple forms of scholasticism examined clearly exceed Riccardo Quinto's common definition of scholasticism as a set of intellectual practices that have to do with a specialized way of reading texts (Riccardo Quinto, Scholastica. Storia di un concetto [2004]). Individuals such as Robert of Courson, Godfrey of Fontaines, and John of Gerson were not cloistered in ivory towers, but wandered to and fro spreading their ideas and feeding their experiences back into their intellectual products—quodlibets, epic poems, historical and other writings—which again often circulated beyond the university. All the more reason to heed Fitzpatrick and Sabapathy's call for a flexible historiographical frame that can account for the richness and diversity of scholasticism as it existed in the medieval world at large. Such a frame encourages scholars to pay attention to those subsystems traditionally on the margins of scholasticism (such as oral teaching and debate, especially outside traditional places of learning). The goal of future research is already visible in this collection, namely to provide a contextualized understanding of scholasticism as “ideas in action” (273), using those methodological tools that can shine light on both known and unknown thinkers and their practices.
