Latin theology between the Carolingian renewal and the eve of the Reformation, roughly 750 to 1500. The section holds 15 authors and 990 notes, in English translations that are public domain or freely licensed (Spade’s Ockham, CC BY 4.0; Birch’s Ockham, published 1930).
Ratramnus of Corbie
Ratramnus of Corbie (d. c. 870), who wrote against his own abbot on the eucharist at the request of Charles the Bald, and was read by Ridley and Cranmer seven centuries later.
Author index: Ratramnus of Corbie
- On the Body and Blood of the Lord — Written at the request of Charles the Bald, and against his own abbot Paschasius Radbertus: the body in the sacrament is Christ’s body in figura, not the same flesh born of Mary in visible form. (1 notes)
- The De Sacramento Altaris — Birch’s edition and translation (1930) of Ockham’s tract on the sacrament of the altar: his preface and introduction, the English of the whole tract (three questions, forty-one chapters on substance, quantity and quality in the sacrament of the altar) and his notes. United States public domain (published 1930). (49 notes)
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), abbot of Bec and archbishop of Canterbury, the father of scholastic theology — faith seeking understanding.
Author index: Anselm of Canterbury
- Cur Deus Homo — Why God Became Man (1094–98), a dialogue with the monk Boso and the classic statement of the satisfaction theory of the atonement: sin is an infinite dishonour to God which man owes and cannot pay, and God alone can pay but does not owe — so the one who makes satisfaction must be both God and man. (49 notes)
- In Behalf of the Fool — The first and most famous objection to the ontological argument, with its answer. (12 notes)
- Monologium — The earlier and longer of the two meditations (1076), written at his monks’ request as an example of meditation on the grounds of faith. (80 notes)
- Proslogium — Written 1077–78 as Fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” (27 notes)
Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard (1079–1142), the sharpest logician of the twelfth century and its most notorious teacher, condemned at Soissons and again at Sens.
Author index: Peter Abelard
- Historia Calamitatum — The Story of My Misfortunes, written as a letter of consolation to a friend: Abelard’s account of his own rise as a logician, his rivalry with William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon, his love for Heloise and its punishment, the burning of his book at Soissons, and his flight from one enmity to the next. (17 notes)
William of Ockham
William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), English Franciscan, the leading logician of the fourteenth century and the name behind “Ockham’s razor.” His nominalism, his handbook of logic (the Summa logicae) and his later quarrel with Pope John XXII over Franciscan poverty made him one of the most disputed minds of the late Middle Ages.
Author index: William of Ockham
- Summa Logicae, Part I — Spade’s selection from Ockham’s handbook of logic, on terms: what a term is, mental, spoken and written terms, concrete and abstract names, universals, supposition and signification, with Adam Wodeham’s prologue and Spade’s notes. Translation by Paul Vincent Spade, CC BY 4.0. (29 notes)
- De Insolubilibus — Ockham on the insoluble sophisms, the Liar and its kin, from Summa logicae III.3.46. Translation by Paul Vincent Spade, CC BY 4.0. (1 notes)