INTRODUCTION

THIS second series of Questions original: "Questiones." These were formal academic lectures structured as a series of debates on specific problems, a standard teaching method in medieval universities. seems to be the last of Bacon’s courses of lectures preserved from his career at the University of Paris, and shows some interesting developments of his thought. The great age of philosophic teaching inaugurated by Albert Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), a prominent German Dominican friar and philosopher. and St. Thomas Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the influential Italian theologian and philosopher. was still in the future. The Summary of Created Beings original: "Summa de Creaturis," a work by Albert the Great. may have been in the course of composition, and it is with that, if anything, that Bacon’s ideas may be usefully compared, or with the almost contemporary work of Thomas of York, to which attention has recently been directed by Miss Sharp in her Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century (British Society of Franciscan Studies, 1930). It must, however, be remembered that Bacon was an "Arts man," lecturing in the faculty of Arts, while Albert and Thomas of York were friars, teaching in the Divinity Schools Theology departments. without having gone through the Arts course (see Collection of Records of the University of Paris, Volume I, part i, number 57)¹ It is not to be expected in any case that questions raised in later controversies should be treated here. Yet the very existence of such a collection as that of the Amiens Manuscript bears testimony to the influence that Bacon exerted on the minds of his contemporaries up to the close of the thirteenth century, when it was copied. The collection of so many treatises, perfect and imperfect, must have been, after the lapse of half a century, a work of some difficulty, and bears witness to the esteem in which even scraps of his work were held. The particular set now printed seems to have been the subject of special care. A number of subsidiary arguments have been added in a hand which is called in the note ‘Autograph’—not that I assume it to be in the hand of Bacon, though it is of the same general appearance as the notes in his hand published by Monsignor Pelzer in his Examples of Vatican Handwriting, Volume I (Rome, 1929)—to distinguish them from the hand in which the manuscript is

¹ It was only in 1259 that the Dominicans A Catholic religious order, also known as the Order of Preachers. made an order for the establishment of a School of Arts original: "Studium Artium." in each province. (Collection of Records of the University of Paris I, number 335.)