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In the summer of the year 1704, after many days of exploring the library of St Victor replete with manuscripts of works of authors of our Order I was looking for, on 30 July, at last, a codex with this title fell into my hands: Tractatus de consider alione novissimorum. The epigraph excited my spirit; I open the codex and after barely a glance recognize all things to be similar to the Speculum morale.1The words belong to Jacques Echard (1644-1724), a Dominican scholar best known for his work on the encyclopedic history of Dominican authors, Scriptores ordinis Praedicatorum.2 His description of a textual discovery in the library of St Victor in Paris is a taunting reminder of the wealth of material contained in one of the best endowed manuscript libraries of Europe prior to its dissolution in the French Revolution, as well as of the wealth of Echard's own trained memory, accumulated over decades of close study of medieval texts.3 In this case, however, the reference is quite specific. While working on the Scriptores Echar d was pursuing another major project, which would eventually be published in 1708 as 'The Summa of St Thomas returned back to its author or a Dissertation on the writings of Vincent of Beau vais' Sancii Thomae summa suo auctori vindicata sive de V. F. Vincentii Bellovacensis scriptis dissertatio).4 The aim of the Dissertatio is simple and bold in its straightforwardness: to provide a definitive resolution to a controversy involving two illustrious Dominican scholars, the encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (c.H90-c.l264), and the great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). At the core of the controversy was the recognition of a sizeable portion of Aquinas' s Frima secundae and Secunda secundae of the Summa theologiae, verbatim and without acknowledgment, in the moral encyclopedia Speculum morale printed in 1624 as part of the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais. Although many of Echard's contemporaries considered the Speculum morale a genuine work of Vincent, complementing his encyclopedic specula of natural knowledge naturale) , human sciences doctrinale) , and history historiale) by providing a wealth of material relevant to preaching and ethics, the treatise differed from other works of Vincent both in its method and structure.5 A particular thorn in the eye of scholars increasingly sensitized to text appropriation and the nascent notion of plagiarism was the inclusion of unacknowledged passages identical to Aquinas' s Summa. If Vincent, who died ten years before Aquinas, was indeed the author of the Speculum morale , then Aquinas was a plagiarist. To Echar d, whose order has been championing the Angelic Doctor's writings as equivalent in stature to those of St. Augustine, even the Bible itself, such a proposition was unacceptable. His excitement marks the realization that the discovery of yet another unacknowledged source of the Speculum morale had brought him closer to his vindication of Aquinas.Echard's eventual identification and precise mapping of what is to a large extent a compilation of verbatim passages from four other authors besides Aquinas, has become an essential tool for the study of the Speculum morale^ and is an outstanding witness to the high standard of scholarship at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But the Dissertatio also brings us into contact with a perspective that is as innovative as it is problematic. His judgment of the compiler as a plagiarist draws on an understanding of textual plagiarism formulated as recently as the seventeenth century, and represents a new, stricter level of standards against which medieval compilations have little chance of maintaining their autonomy. As he unravels the maze of sources of the Speculum morale and uncovers its "real" authors, Echar d effectively disassembles it into its constituent parts and discounts it as a text of historical significance. Yet his dismissal of the compilation, and the sharp distinction between the genuine work and the plagiate, are informed not so much by a desire to understand the techniques of medieval compilation in their context - a context very close to that of the actual composition of Aquinas' s Summa - as by the politics of a milieu characterized by passionate expressions of Thomist and anti-Thomist sentiments. … |
