Scholastic textualities in early modernity

Approaching present-day Paris from the south, the ‘rue-Saint-Jacques’ passes through the Latin quarter near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne (Paris IV) on its way to the Petit Pont bridge that crosses to Île de la Cité near Notre Dame Cathedral. For many centuries, this was the avenue of approach to the city for travelers from all points south. The Romans included this street in the original design of the ancient city of Paris (Lutetia) as early as the 1^st century BCE; during the Middle Ages it became part of the pilgrimage route to Compostela, and a chapel to St. James the Great was established along the road close to the medieval wall to serve the pilgrims that passed that way.

The eventual name ‘Saint-Jacques’ not only reflected the association between this Parisian road and its eventual destination at the Shrine of St. James in the northwest corner of Spain, but also with the Dominican community that established a home there. Beginning in 1217, the Dominicans settled in Paris, and soon took possession of the chapel of St. James. Known more recently for its association with the Jacobite revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, during the medieval and early modern periods the ‘Couvent Saint-Jacques’ served as an important link between the Dominicans and intellectual life of the University of Paris.

Quickly becoming an international center, Saint-Jacques would draw students from across Europe for centuries. Arriving in Paris to begin his studies in 1507, Francisco de Vitoria would have likely traveled north along sections of the same medieval pilgrimage route, eventually approaching Paris from Spain along the ‘rue Saint-Jacques’ to take up residence at the Dominican convent of the same name. For Vitoria, the draw of Saint-Jacques was found not only in the access it provided to the wider university, but also in the inner academic life cultivated inside the convent. During the thirteenth century, Saint-Jacques hosted figures like Albert the Great, Hugh of St. Cher, and Thomas Aquinas. In the centuries following, it continued to provide a home for those studying to be Masters of theology at the university. During these same years, however, Saint-Jacques also consistently functioned as a studium—a house for the formation of clerical and religious students, the model for which was adopted in part from those similar forms of clerical formation found in Cathedral and monastic schools, and those clerical studia more recently established in Italy and in some other parts of Europe.

During Vitoria’s time at Saint-Jacques, he experienced a pedagogical revival within the Dominican studium, which emphasized the use of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as a basic text of instruction for the course in theology. Although perhaps surprising from a modern perspective, Aquinas’s Summa was not often used in classroom instruction before this time, and was not the subject of widespread commentary until the sixteenth century. Although a thoroughly medieval text, in many ways the reception history of the Summa theologiae is decidedly early modern. Although Aquinas himself seems to have designed the text in part to suit the needs of his own teaching in Dominican formational context, the widespread use of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in universities throughout Europe forestalled the broader adoption of the Summa. Although certainly not unknown to scholastics working in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, scholars engaged with Aquinas primarily through his Sentences commentary rather than the Summa. Because the Sentences continued to serve as a medium for scholastic discourse, even conversations between Aquinas’s critics and his defenders used commentary on the Sentences as the space in which their academic conversations took place. Even within the Dominican Order, several chapters throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries forbade the use of the Summa as an instructional text within the Order’s studia, proscribing instead the use of the Sentences in order to conform to the wider university practice. With tacit permission, however, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the studium faculty at Saint-Jacques implemented the Summa as a pedagogical text, programmatic for the course of theology offered there. During his time at Saint-Jacques, Vitoria was influenced extensively by the Flemish Dominican Peter Crockaert, and eventually by John Fenario as well. The emphasis placed by Crockaert especially on the ‘second part’ (Secunda pars) of the Summa would also leave a lasting impression on Vitoria, who was deeply influenced by the unique approach to virtue, the moral life, and Christian sanctification that can be found in this section of Aquinas’s text.

Contemporary scholarship has done much to uncover the original historical influences that shaped the Summatheologiae during the thirteenth century. The influx of Arabic Aristotelian texts in the Latin West provided a unique set of philosophical and theological challenges for scholastics of Aquinas’s generation; during this same period, the Dominican presence in the Byzantine East also began to yield a new set of questions and texts. Aquinas’s predecessor at Paris Hugh of St. Cher visited Byzantium personally in 1230 and, by the time Aquinas began work on the Summa in the mid-1260s, a wealth of new Greek patristic and Byzantine sources were newly available in the West. Although removed from this original context, as a received text in early modernity, the Summa retained many of these influences as intrinsic features of its textual structure, even as new questions and sources came to be woven into its interpretive fabric.

During the 1520s when Vitoria returned to Spain and began to teach first at Valladolid and then at Salamanca, he began to implement the practice of teaching from Aquinas’s Summa directly in class. At Salamanca, the Summa formally replaced the Sentences by the mid-sixteenth century, and many other universities throughout the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere began to formally adopt this practice as well. Originally emerging at the University of Paris in the 1530s, during the 1540s the Society of Jesus began to found a number of important colleges throughout Europe that would adopt the Summa as the foundational text of instruction; this practice would subsequently be enshrined in the editions of the Society’s Ratio Studiorum that appeared between 1586 and 1599.

As an academic methodology, the early modern practice of textual commentary often united classroom teaching and engagement with other scholars and with issues of contemporary significance. During this period, Iberian scholasticism would experience a number of important intellectual revolutions that would have expansive implications for the development of early modern thought. From the influence of the late-sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Jesuits at La Flèsche and Coimbra on René Descartes to the developing tradition of international law that traced its roots to the sixteenth-century Salamanca school, many of the developments that took place during this period provide important context for the conceptual innovations that shaped later modernity. As a result of the attention paid by twentieth-century historical scholarship to thirteenth-century scholasticism and medieval thought more generally, contemporary scholars find themselves in possession of a great wealth of information about the medieval historical context of a text like the Summa theologiae. Extant work on the subsequent reception history of this text in modernity is significantly less expansive by comparison, however. Yet as a structural feature of university life during this period, the early modern textuality of the Summa theologiae is intrinsically entwined with the intellectual history of this period—and therefore invites the attention of contemporary scholars who wish to better understand the complex reception history of this medieval text and its original sources within the spaces of modernity.

_{Featured image by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}