Frater Bercaldus – Berealdus – Bertholdus de Maisberch: Analysen und Dokumente zu Johann Albert Fabricius’ Hinweisen auf Berthold von Moosburg

In early modernity, church historians initially showed little interest in Berthold of Moosburg. They knew him as a commentator of Proclus, but they did not recognise his importance for the history of Neoplatonism. The librarians and bibliographers who came across Berthold’s commentary on Proclus in the Balliol College Library at Oxford showed no interest in the philosophical content of this work. An article on Berthold in the monumental work Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum (1719) summarised the available information. It was Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736) who took notice of it. Fabricius was very interested in Proclus as well as in Neoplatonic theology and its narration in the Elements of Theology; he had started to collect all available information regarding this issue and had also come across Berthold’s commentary. However, he did not ignore him, as many had done before, but properly recognised the importance of Berthold for the history of the reception of Proclus’s philosophy. Fabricius always referred to the Dominican thinker when dealing with Proclus’s Elements of Theology, in particular in his own Bibliotheca graeca. One of the attentive readers of this work was the German philologist Friedrich Creuzer. In 1822, within the framework of publishing Neoplatonic writings, Creuzer reedited Proclus’s Elements of Theology. As a consequence of this new edition, Proclus together with his medieval commentator came into the focus of leading representatives of classical German philosophy.