scholarly journals Gloriosissimus Galienus: Galen and Galenic Writings in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Latin West

2019 ◽  
pp. 319-342
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Latin West

William of Auvergne and the Manichees

Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 63-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland J. Teske
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Latin West ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Church ◽  
Scholarly Attention

William of Auvergne became a master of theology in the University of Paris in 1223 and was appointed bishop of Paris by Gregory IX in 1228. William governed the church of Paris until his death in 1249, while continuing to write the works which constitute his immense Magisterium divinale et sapientiale. Despite the fact that he was the first of the thirteenth-century theologians to appreciate the value of the Aristotelian philosophy that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, his writings have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Étienne Gilson has sketched well the impact of the influx of Greek and Arabian philosophical works into the Christian West: Up to the last years of the twelfth century, when the Christian world unexpectedly discovered the existence of non-Christian interpretations of the universe, Christian theology never had to concern itself with the fact that a non-Christian interpretation of the world as a whole, including man and his destiny, was still an open possibility.

Michael Scot in Toledo: Natura naturans and the Hierarchy of Being

Traditio ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy K. Pick
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Medieval Science ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Arabic Philosophy

Michael Scot was a central figure both for the transmission of Arabic philosophy to the Latin West and for the development of medieval science and astrology, yet much still remains unknown about his life and career. In part of a longer article dedicated to teasing out some of the strands of Michael Scot's influences and impact, Charles Burnett poses intriguing questions about the importance of his early sojourn in Toledo. He shows that Michael, along with Salio of Padua and Mark of Toledo, continued the translating activity begun in the twelfth century in Toledo, and he wonders whether Michael — like the twelfth-century translators Dominicus Gundissalinus, Gerard of Cremona, and John Hispanus — was closely associated with the cathedral of Toledo. Burnett hypothesizes that Toledo could have been the place where Michael first came across the works of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes that he is credited with translating from the Arabic, and he notes that many of Michael's sources for his astrological treatise, the Liber introductorius (hereafter LI), were available in Toledo. Burnett suggests that by Michael's final departure from Spain to Italy, around 1220, he may have already made considerable headway in both his translating and astrological activities.

Neckham, Alexander (1157–1217)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
New Science ◽  
Latin West

Alexander Neckham is one of the leading thinkers in the English appropriation of the new science made available during the twelfth century. His best known writings, especially De naturis rerum (On the Natures of Things), show a prodigious acquaintance with natural history. Neckham was most concerned, however, that the study of the natural world be made to serve the purposes of theology. He thus strove not only to draw moral lessons from nature, but to apply to theological method the doctrines of the new logic, especially Aristotle’s Topics. While Neckham cannot be said to have mastered the texts that were flooding into the Latin West, he certainly did realize the challenges and the possibilities that they offered to inherited theologies.

Eriugena, Johannes Scottus (c.800–c.877)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dermot Moran
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
First Principle ◽  
The West ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

Johannes Scottus Eriugena is the most important philosopher writing in Latin between Boethius and Anselm. A Christian Neoplatonist, he developed a unique synthesis between the Neoplatonic traditions of Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine. Eriugena knew Greek, which was highly unusual in the West at that time, and his translations of Dionysius and other Greek authors provided access to a theological tradition hitherto unknown in the Latin West. From these sources, Eriugena produced an original cosmology with Nature as the first principle. Nature, the totality of all things that are and are not, includes both God and creation, and has four divisions: nature which creates and is not created, nature which creates and is created, nature which is created and does not create, and nature which is neither created nor creates. These divisions participate in the cosmic procession of creatures from God and in their return to God. As everything takes place within Nature, God is present in all four divisions. Eriugena influenced twelfth-century Neoplatonists but was condemned in the thirteenth century for teaching the identity of God and creation.

From Hilary of Poitiers to Peter of Blois: a Transfiguration journey of biblical interpretation

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Hilary Of Poitiers

AbstractThe Transfiguration narratives have received considerable attention from New Testament scholars, but so far very little has been written about them from the point of view of their reception-history. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which they have been interpreted in the Latin West from the time of Hilary of Poitiers in the fourth century to Peter of Blois in the early thirteenth. Among these writers, from the big names like Jerome to the lesser known figures like Peter of Celle, a varied tapestry emerges where light allegory plays an important part, whether in the symbolisms given to the choice of the three disciples, Peter, James and John, or to the dazzling clothes of Christ as baptismal – a particular insight of Bede, which keeps recurring in subsequent writers and preachers. Unlike the East, where the Transfiguration became a major festival on 6 August from the seventh century onwards, the Latin West was slow to absorb it; but it was given particular impetus by Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, in the twelfth century. Whether read as narrative in connection with Lent (‘glory before cross’), or as a festival in its own right, the Transfiguration emerges as an unusually rich source of biblical interpretation that poses real challenges to the use of the religious imagination today. And it provides a significant contribution to the development of a balanced view of reception-history in our own time.

HabitusRevisited: A Reply to Cary Nederman

Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 77-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia L. Colish
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
Latin West

In a recentTraditioarticle, Cary J. Nederman has added another valuable study to the series of papers he has been publishing over the past few years. This body of work has the laudable goal of showing that, across the twelfth century, thinkers were taking an increasingly Aristotelian line in the fields of ethics and political theory, on the basis of ideas transmitted indirectly via works available in Latin well before the appearance of the integral Latin translations of the texts of the Stagirite deemed to have launched the “Aristotelian revolution” of the thirteenth century in these fields. Throughout this burgeoning oeuvre, Nederman has been quite successful in supporting his case for a more gradual and less cataclysmic reception of Aristotle in the Latin West than the standard accounts acknowledge. It is not the purpose of this paper to challenge that larger argument. Nonetheless, with respect to the Aristotelian doctrine ofhabituson which Nederman focuses in hisTraditioarticle, we would like to suggest that his analysis needs to be reconsidered. We offer the following pages as anamplificatioof his thesis, with the aim of adding nuance to it by bringing forward material that he omits. Our intention here is not so much to criticize Nederman's reading of the texts onhabitusin the twelfth century that he does adduce, and certainly not to object to his larger project, but rather to indicate that there is more to the story, and so to refine his analysis in the hope of strengthening it.

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