New Gerard of Bologna Edition

A selection of questions from Gerard of Bologna's Quodlibeta has come out, for sale here.

The editor is David Piche.

Price: 87 Euro (expensive, but I'll probably buy it eventually)

Here is the publisher's summary:

Le présent ouvrage entend faire connaître un acteur et témoin privilégié des débats universitaires en philosophie de la connaissance au début du XIVe siècle : Gérard de Bologne (ca. 1240/50 – 1317), premier grand intellectuel de l’ordre des Carmes. Afin de rendre manifeste l’importance historique de ce maître en théologie de l’Université de Paris, nous offrons l’édition critique, accompagnée d’une étude doctrinale, de quatorze questions quodlibétiques qui relèvent du champ de la gnoséologie. En examinant ce corpus, on rencontre un penseur qui prend position de façon résolue au sujet de problèmes majeurs en théorie de la connaissance : il soutient, notamment, l’élimination de l’espèce intelligible et l’identification du concept à l’acte d’intellection. En outre, on y découvre un savant universitaire qui, par le vaste registre des philosophes de son temps dont il connaît et rapporte les théories, dresse une « cartographie » exemplaire des positions en présence sur le terrain de la gnoséologie à une époque charnière de l’histoire de la scolastique latine.

This edition will prove most useful for those working in 14th c. philosophy. Gerard was a contemporaneous critic of Scotus, and later Scotists kept responding to Gerard for about a hundred years.

I checked out the volume from the library. Here are a few brief comments.

1. The edition is based on the four complete mss., with some reference to the various incomplete witneses.

2. Visually, the edition is very hard to read. Variants are linked to the text by footnotes, and the sources are done by reference to paragraph numbers. Consequently, to read a single line is to be constantly interrupted by the footnote numbers. Maybe I'm too picky. Fine. It's just my experience. The editor has also quite liberally broken up the text with headers, to the point of separating individual arguments from each other. The whole thing is very "busy". This is probably due to the requirements of the series, rather than the fault of the editor. Initial arguments, objections, etc. are also broken off by editorial insertions telling the reader what is happening.

3. Note that this is a selection of questions having to do with cognition, not the complete Quodlibeta. But the editor was very generous in how he defined cognition, for we get questions on divine ideas and the formation of the divine act of knowing, so it's very useful to me in my work on early scotist theories of divine ideas (in this case, they all ignored Gerard).