Ioannis Duns Scoti Collationes Oxonienses eds. by Guido Alliney e Marina Fedeli (review)

Abstract

As the final volumes of John Duns Scotus’s Opera Omnia are published by the International Scotistic Commission (Vatican), this volume of the Subtle Doctor’s Oxford Collationes are a welcome addition to all the texts we now have at our disposal. Indeed, we can enumerate the corpus of critical works now available: the Opera Philosophica (Noone et al) along with the ‘safe’ texts of the Reportatio IA (Wolter/Bychkov) and, at this writing, the first seventeen distinctions of Reportatio IV (Bychkov/Pomplun). The Oxford and Parisian Collationes offer the remaining pieces to the scholarly puzzle around Scotus, and a clearer portrait of his development as philosopher and theologian is slowly coming into view. The scholarly debates around the Collationes (their authenticity as well as their dating) have been alive since the beginning of the 20th century. While the Wadding (III: 339-430) and Vivès (V: 131-317) editions reproduce the Collationes under one title (Collationes Parisienses), there is textual evidence from Scotus himself that some of these belong to the period during which he was a student in Oxford, at the Franciscan house of studies. As early at 1927, Carlo Balić claimed that it was a mistake to consider all these as part of his Parisian years, and that, indeed, the greater part were from his earlier years in Oxford. It was later established that the Wadding/Vivès editions did not contain all the Collationes. Between 1927 and 1929 various additional Collationes were discovered. As a result, the listing of (what would become) the first fourteen was established on the basis of Magdalen Codex 194 (discovered by Longpré) and the ordering of numbers fifteen to twenty-four were the result of the discovery of Merton Codex 65 and Balliol Codex 209 (Balić). To these we can add the discoveries of Merton Codex 90 and Peterborough Codex 241 (Cambridge), both by Balić. Collationes were student exercises, held outside of ordinary university work and most often in the houses of studies of the various religious orders. Ephrem Bettoni held them to be authentic but not important to our understanding of Scotus’s teaching. Palémon Glorieux thought they