This study offers a close-up - and vivid - depiction of the actual process of graduating in the thirteenth-century as a Master of the University of Paris. Like Oxford and its offshoot, Cambridge, Paris was run as a medieval guild, with the Masters setting requirements and standards which aspiring apprentices (students) and journeymen (Bachelors of Arts) had to meet before they could be tested in the knowledge and skills they would need as Masters of Arts in their own right. For those who sought to become Masters in the higher-degree subject of Theology, the final examination required them to display the necessary skills in disputation, lecturing, and preaching (disputatio, lectio, and praedicatio). A Bachelor of Theology as well as a Master had to preach to the University at intervals. The structure of a sermon differed from that of a lecture in ways which were currently undergoing development. All this is discussed with close reference to surviving examples.

The preparatory studies for such examinations were the principia, which a candidate would have written as prologues to Biblical commentary. When he became a Master he would give an address at his inauguration (a principium or introitus); as a lecturer he would begin a course of lectures on a text also with a principium). However, the friars were first and foremost preachers, and the development of medieval Latin preaching reached significant stages in the thirteenth century; and this too is explored in some detail. The formal requirements of order and design were largely applied to lecturing as to preaching.

Candidates who were friars had to submit to the same process of examination, despite a certain amount of wrangling with the secular scholars about the syllabus as the mendicant Orders entered the new universities. In the 1250s two such candidates were to become leading figures in their own Orders, the Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan, Bonaventure. Parts Two and Three of the book deal with Aquinas and Bonaventure, respectively, taking each through the development of his writing after considering the principium for his inception and the resumptio with which the ceremony concluded. This makes possible a comparison of their approaches, suggesting that Aquinas may have felt free to design a resumptio in his own way.

For Aquinas there follow chapters on what appear to be his ‘student’ Prologues and on early and late Prologues delivered after his Inception, then on the Prologue to his commentary on John's Gospel, given during his second regency at Paris between 1268 and 1272. The concluding chapter of this part considers Aquinas's approach to the relationship between preaching and Biblical commentary, including the Prologues to the Summa Theologiae.

In the section on Bonaventure there are chapters on his Prologue to his commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, now rescued from the opprobrium they met when first published and becoming the standard theological textbook of the remaining medieval centuries. His commentaries on John and Luke follow. A chapter considers Bonaventure's own approach to the relationship between preaching and Biblical commentary. Both scholars produced writings in genres beyond those which were formally required for academic life. The prologues to Bonaventure's Breviloquium and his later Collationes are given a chapter each, as is his Prologue to the Collationes on the six days of creation.

The concluding remarks make the point that the restrictive requirements of early scholastic Paris did not prevent scholars making their own way to independent work of their own. The book nevertheless makes it clear that the higher education of the day was above all a training in rigorous habits of mind. A text or a question was to be addressed above all by divisio and subdivision and the closest possible analysis of its parts. There are two Appendices, one for comparison on the Divisiones Textus of four Masters of the thirteenth century. The second, an outline translation of Bonaventure's Principium address at Paris, takes the form of a link.

This is an important book in its combination of close reference to the texts and its lively evocation of the world in which they were created and the intellectual characters of two prominent scholars.