This chapter paints the political and intellectual backdrop of Padua in the 1300s, which sets the stage for Alberti’s education. While Rolandino, Lovato, and Mussato were intellectual giants of a commune, Petrarch, Conversino, and Vergerio were literary giants at a court – that of Francesco Il Vecchio da Carrara, a patron of classical medals, art, and humanist educators and antiquarians. Accordingly, five factors made Padua a center of early humanism: independent university faculty, accession of classical rhetoric, Petrarch and his library, Carrara’s support for educators and antiquarians, and the city’s absorption by Venice, allowing unfettered education to gift Alberti a literary and visual universe.

Apart from the myth that he failed his theology exam in the Society of Jesus, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s scholastic training is largely unstudied. This chapter outlines Hopkins’s philosophy course at Roehampton and his theology course at St Beuno’s, identifies his various teachers, and assesses his modest contribution to Catholic theology. Taking into account the ways the Society of Jesus modified and updated its curriculum in the second half of the nineteenth century, it argues that in Hopkins’s day the Society of Jesus was never merely ‘Suárezian’ – even at St Beuno’s – but rather diverse and at times even genuinely creative.

This essay aims to show how one remarkable practitioner of vernacular scholastic literary theory, Reginald Pecock (d. c. 1361), Bishop of Chichester, deployed it to service diverse orders of worth in his works by at once upending and apparently re-accepting authorised ecclesiastical discourses, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and orthodox definitions of God as creator or as infinite. Focusing especially on the theoretical category of ordinatio, it investigates how Pecock both upsets and re-accommodates such discourses in places where the articulation and control of spiritual authority in this world and the tapping of divine authority from the next were at stake. In both his rejection of standard doctrinal discourses and his (re)accommodation of them in his own new system, Reginald deploys a full repertoire of scholastic terms, practices and attitudes. Pecock’s novel and astoundingly ambitious reconfiguration of Christian knowledge and doctrine was a gargantuan programme, endeavouring to efface and outdo traditional discourses of the Church whilst at the same time taking pains palpably, even anxiously, to be equivalent or answerable to that which it would displace. Pecock, in attempting re-cognition of the familiar, ended up recognising it dissonantly within his own unfamiliar discourse.

The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.

This essay reads the Roman de la Rose as taking up Ovid’s playful association of sex with the origins of human society. Jean de Meun’s Rose returns repeatedly to the narration of political origins – the fall from a Golden Age – imagining an idyllic communal past before it was shattered by conflict over wealth and women. These stories frame erotic desire as inevitably linked to the law and to possession, associating eros with desire for private property. I argue that Aristotle’s Politics functions as an unacknowledged literal referent that troubles the poem’s allegorical treatment of justice and social origins. Whereas Golden Age fables typically speak in unmarked terms about human comity and common possessions, Aristotle and medieval Aristotelian commentaries speak in terms of gendered power dynamics, masculine ownership and the fate of women as property. The Rose reveals the literal truths of scholastic philosophy to be in conflict with mythic truth, while anatomising the necessarily gendered dynamics of human sociality. In a political sphere in which women are considered in the same category as property, the heterosexual desire for possession will always be political. The Rose also leads us to consider whether the political, in turn, is always erotic.

After an introductory excursus on the concept of the inns as early modern England’s third university, this chapter outlines the form of legal instruction which they provided by means of oral ‘learning exercises’, notably case-putting in moots and other exercises involving the argument of hypothetical cases in law,and ‘readings’ or lectures at both the inns of court and chancery.

The second section (‘The State of the Learning Exercises to 1640’) considers the supposed decline in the performance of exercises. It argues that even though they may have been rendered largely obsolete by the advent of the printed law-book, there is little to suggest that they were not generally performed in a conscientious and regular fashion before the outbreak of the civil war. But it was one thing to preserve the system as a going concern, quite another to revive it after the disruptions of the 1640s and ‘50s.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

With the new millennium, papal power sought to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land through a series of eight crusades, but these campaigns were military and political failures, especially at the expense of the Papacy. However, they did succeed in opening the way for the scholarship of the Islamic world to enter western European intellectual life. With the founding of universities, new scholarship slowly emerged. The pioneering teachings of Pierre Abélard, Roger Bacon, and Albertus Magnus led to a revival of interest in the ancient writers with their emphasis on rational thought to secure human knowledge. This movement, called Scholasticism, reached its pinnacle with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who sought a reconciliation of Aristotle’s rationalism and Christian theology. A major implication of Aquinas’ success was the acceptance by scholars within the universities and the Church that both reason and faith serve as sources of human knowledge. William of Ockham extended the Scholastic movement and his predecessor Roger Bacon by presented a law of parsimony in scientific explanation, which in turn laid the foundation of empirical science.

This essay interprets Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951 by situating the book within the Marburgian tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy. To do so, Panofsky’s relation to Marburgian neo-Kantianism is first contextualized and explicated, specifically by way of his well-known relationship to Ernst Cassirer and his own programmatic statements about art historical method. With this foundation in place, Panofsky’s specific claims in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism are positioned as an attempted art-historical translation of the Marburgian commitment to ground knowledge on underlying structures of knowledge. Panofsky’s effort in this regard is shown to relate to nomological traditions of scholarship, wherein covering laws are an express and essential aim of research. Interpreting Panofsky’s argument in this way helps clarify the book’s uneven reception in the humanities, wherein an ideographic approach focusing on historical specificity for its own sake is a more accepted norm.

This chapter provides a detailed assessment of Walter Bailey’s medical genres in the vernacular and how they reflect changing thought styles from scholasticism to empiricism. The ongoing process is demonstrated by first-hand evidence obtained by analysing both macrolevel structural compositions of genres and various text types within them. Language change is located on the discourse level by identifying stylistic varieties, showing the mechanism of change on the ideological level. Bailey belonged to the learned elite of his time and mastered a large repertoire of different genres and text types. He gives us convincing proof of the early transition period by employing old and creating new ways of writing. He developed the genre script of the scholastic commentary to unprecedented perfection in Peppers (1588), and innovated a new style of reporting on his experiments in Waters a year earlier. The passage anticipates the future way of doing and writing science, showing the author’s curiosity and inquisitiveness, qualities that are typically attributed to seventeenth-century Royal Society scientists. The new mode of knowing surfaces passim in his other texts too, where observation of nature is preferred to book wisdom.

This chapter views the relationship of humanism to medieval school traditions through the prism of Erasmus, the most outspoken and influential critic of the schools among those who embraced the “new learning” in the early sixteenth century. On close examination, the case of Erasmus suggests a less dichotomous view of intellectual change than polemical rhetoric can imply. The choice between humanism and scholasticism was not absolute. Erasmus illustrates how the new learning aggregated itself to old methods and traditions in theology, without necessarily replacing them.

Peirce’s early essays have been thought to frame a grand system later developed more fully (’On a New List of Categories’, 1867) and to provide some of that system’s details (the theory of cognition sketched in three 1868–1869 papers). But the formal structure limned was later understood differently: it is an enduring system in appearance only. These essays suggested though they did not consistently express a conceptual idealism in which true thoughts are distinguished from reality by nothing but their incompleteness – a view later contradicted. Yet, with intentional irony, those same essays were in method empirical. Many have damned Peirce’s writings as fragmentary and contradictory, but these would be faults only were he a system-builder. Instead, his conjectures posed obvious problems and were meant to invite inquiries along diverse and mutually inconsistent lines, in which additions and refinements might be made by which those problems can be solved.

With both the role of professionalization in the second decretal age, and the divergence between canon law and theology, contingency must be given its due, as against an assumption that the separation of theology from a canon law which was professionalized and based on papal decretals was in any way inevitable. Decretals and professionalization were indeed integrated in Western Europe around 1200, and in a different intellectual sphere from university theology, but there was no necessity about it. Without the legacy of the first decretal age, there might never have been a second decretal age, though there would surely have been a system run by academically trained lawyers. Similarly, there was no necessity about the separation of canon law from theology. A change of theological fashion is part of the explanation, but so too is the direction in which the Breviarium of Bernard of Pavia pointed the system. Bernard was the Dionysius Exiguus of his age.