Mediaeval Sophia—a new on-line journal

I got this in the e-mail the other day:

I take pleasure in informing you, also on behalf of the whole staff, that we have put online the first issue (1/January-June 2007) of the new e-review of Officina di Studi Medievali "Mediaeval Sophia - Studies and researches on medieval knowledge." The review, which has all formal authorizations as a periodical publication, will be updated every six months and will be put online in July and December; it will be placed side by with the academic journal of Officina di Studi Medievali, "Schede Medievali", which will continue to appear once yearly.

In this phase "Mediaeval Sophia" is online with reading and saving of the texts in PDF format, free of charge, for all sections. To connect use the link: www.mediaevalsophia.it. When you enter the site you will be asked to do free registration, with a form to be filled in all parts requested.

We are in the experimental phase and you will excuse us if there are any management problems, which, however, we are working on. Indeed, we will be very happy if you tell us about any problems and difficulties and if you suggest any ways to improve both the services and the review, which is open to contributions from anyone interested in our "International academic community of medieval studies."

For operational difficulties or for information and communications you can contact:

redazione@mediaevalsophia.it
redazione@officinastudimedievali.it
webmaster@mediaevalsophia.it

Thank you for your kind attention,
Alessandro Musco

President of Officina di Studi Medievali
Deputy-Editor of Mediaeval Sophia

OFFICINA di STUDI MEDIEVALI
Via del Parlamento, 32 - 90133 Palermo (Italy)
P. IVA 02473330823 - C.F. 97000790820
Tel. +39 (0)91 / 586314 - Fax. +39 (0)91 / 333121
E-mail: info@officinastudimedievali.it - staff@officinastudimedievali.it
Web: www.officinastudimedievali.it

Thomas-Institut goes YouTube

The people over at the Thomas Institut in Cologne have put together a nifty short documentary about their Institute. The description runs as follows:

This video is a little documentary of the Thomas-Institut of the University of Cologne. The Thomas-Institut is a research Institute whose function it is to serve the study of medieval philosophy by preparing critical editions and historical and systematic studies of medieval authors.

An imbedded YouTube clips follows:

New journal: American Theological Inquiry

Got the following in this morning’s e-mail:

AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY (www.atijournal.org)

A Biannual Journal of Theology, Philosophy of Religion, Culture, & History (forthcoming: January 15, 2008).

Particular topics of interest include:

• (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, or Evangelical) Perspectives on the Current State of American Christianity.
• Current theological/philosophical trends in the Western world.
• Cultural/philosophical apologetics.
• Ecumenism and/or criticism of other traditions (ostensively) within the scope of ancient orthodoxy (Creedal Christianity)
• Systematic theology.
• Perspectives on history/historical events from an orthodox viewpoint.
• Engaging contemporary culture with the gospel.
• Engagement with the Patristical literature.

Please visit: http://www.atijournal.org for SUBMISSION GUIDELINES and additional information about the Journal.

Thanks to private funding, access to American Theological Inquiry is FREE. The Journal will be published in a PDF format, biannually, on January and July 15th.

As ATI prepares for its first edition on January, 15, 2008, we welcome the suggestions, ideas, and feedback of the American community of Christian scholars. To provide feedback to the Journal, please follow this link.

It may be something of a stretch to post it here, but the journal might be a place for a Thomist to say something interesting. I’d rather be too thorough. Those who submit articles are also asked explicitly to affirm their adherence to the four early creeds.

(Sotto voce: I’ve been meaning to think about ecclesial community, its creeds, and its sacred texts; maybe I’ll put together a post on my personal web site…).

St. Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences

Thanks to Thomas Osborne at Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St Thomas, Houston, for a link to the Commentaria of St Bonaventure on Book 1 of the Sentences, which has both the Latin and the English. Click here to go to the commentary on Book 1. Other translation work is in progress. And since the Franciscans were responsible for the critical edition on Peter Lombard's Libri sententiarum, you can find out about that, here.

Frederick S. Paxton and Cluniac Death Rituals

(Boosterism mode: ON): Medieval studies is a fascinating series of disciplines. While hunting around recently for information on post-Gratian canon law texts—I need to become literate in the Quinque compilationes antiquae—I came across the web page of Frederick S. Paxton of Connecticut College, who had written and posted a careful article on the recent and exciting work concerning the origins of the Decretum (prompted in large part by the work of Anders Winroth).

But there is more on his site, and for those interested in St Thomas's moral teaching, it provides a keyhole picture of something that mattered the whole world to the medievals, and perforce to Thomas: the rituals surrounding death. For Paxton has been at work producing a "reconstructive edition" of death rituals used at Cluny. Now Cluny is far removed from the world of the Dominicans, true, but reading through Paxton's edition gives one the sense of how communal death was to those living in religion, and how religious linked the process of dying to the liturgy of the Church, and hence to the biblical texts that undergirded her liturgy. The text says, towards the end:

Absolve, Domine, animam famuli tui ab omni vinculo delictorum, ut in resurrectionis gloria inter sanctos tuos resuscitatus respiret.

Absolve, Lord, the soul of your servant of all the chains of sin, so that he may breathe again in the glory of the resurrection, brought back to life among your saints.

Paxton has posted working versions of his Latin edition and English translation on his web page, in MS Word formats.

Those of us who labor in the fields of medieval philosophy and theology perhaps need reminding from time to time that the medieval theories we study drew their lifeblood from the daily realities of medieval living—and dying (Boosterism mode: OFF).

Thomistic Seminar at Princeton

I came across this site and this event a bit back. The "Thomistic Seminar" is an annual meeting at Princeton, more akin to a graduate seminar—taking place in a single week's time—than a conference with papers' being presented and discussed. The seminar sports a full and attractive web site, with information about its present doings, as well as past seminars. Also listed are the faculty for this summer's seminar, including David Gallagher and Gyula Klima.

Fr Torrell’s intellectual journey

Fr. Jean-Pierre Torrell has placed on his personal web page at the University of Fribourg an autobiographical account of his personal intellectual life, entitled "Mon parcours intellectual," dating from early February of this year. A fascinating read. At the base of the web page you'll find a PDF file of his bibliography, listing—gulp!—392 different writings. Of particular notice among the newer items is Nouvelles recherches thomasiennes. Cinq études revues et augmentées, to appear this year.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Just rediscovered this resource, located at Notre Dame University: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It’s an on-line storehouse that contains reviews of important books in philosophy, covering some recent and well-known books about St. Thomas, by reputable reviewers. You can read, for free, reviews about Aquinas, Thomist, medieval, and more.

Revue Thomiste: website

The illustrious journal Revue Thomiste is continuing the update of its website. You can find there:

• news on the upcoming conference entitled Antithomisme: histoire, thèmes, figures, which will be held May 11-12 2007.
• information on their book series Bibliothèque de la Revue Thomiste, which consists of a series of manuals, introducing the theological disciplines from a thomistic viewpoint, and a series of dissertations.
• summaries of the articles published since 1998 and a list of authors from 1993-2002.
• information on how to order the volumes of previous conferences easily via PayPal.
• a 6 minute clip in which the director, Fr. S.-Th. Bonino op, presents the journal.

Excerpts from Garrigou-Lagrange's commentary on De Eucharistia

This in, from Peter Kwasniewski, after the conference on Aquinas and the Sacraments at Ave Maria University in Florida in early February:

The clearest and most accessible treatment of Eucharistic topics I have yet found is contained in one of the volumes of the running commentary on the Summa theologiae composed by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange for his students at the Angelicum (including Karol Wojtyla — I wonder if we can ascertain whether these manuals were among the books Wojtyla studied during his student days).  The document contains a selection of texts on, among other things, the prephilosophical or “common sense” notion of substance, the relationship of a subject to its accidents, the analysis of quantity in its various aspects (part outside of part; location and position).  There are also some texts on other sacraments and on the causality of the sacraments.

Kwasniewski provided two documents, the first covering Garrigou-Langrange’s commentary on the Tertia pars, qq. 73-82 (in Word or PDF format) and another with comments of Garrigou-Langrange on the Eucharist (again, in Word or PDF format).

The status quaestionis of Gratian Studies

Some recent research into the anti-mendicant controversies reminded me just how much Thomas knew about and employed canon law, all throughout his career. I have been reading Anders Winroth's important book, The Making of Gratian's Decretum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and just found out that the author has a home page for Gratian studies. One of the many gems in the site is a lecture that Winroth gave at the Twelfth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in 2004, entitled "Recent work on the making of Gratian's Decretum." To read the lecture (in PDF format) is to get a refresher course in Gratian and his work. I believe that I have mentioned before that the entire Decretum is on-line: a crucial resource.

New blog about Aquinas

Here’s a neat one, just in time for St Thomas’s feast day (January 28^th): a new blog devoted to Aquinas is just coming on-line. Entitled ‘Aquinasblog,’ it

…attempts to describe the high points of his thought, sketching out in a big picture way the key ideas and (more interestingly) the connections between them.

Welcome aboard. We all wish the site good luck, and much Google juice!