Author’s Response (Mark Clark, Catholic University of America)
In her review of our volume in the series Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, Magdalena Bieniak states the following: “Clark’s central claim is that Langton used Peter Lombard’s lost biblical commentaries on the Pentateuch. This would mean Lombard’s glosses on the Psalms and Paul’s epistles were not his only exegetical works, as Ignatius Brady suspected in the ‘Prolegomena’ to his edition of Lombard’s Sentences (vol. 2 [1981], 7*). Clark’s theory would also show these lost commentaries had a long-lasting impact. Unfortunately, his proof does not stand up to scrutiny.” This statement, like the review itself, is false in some respects and misleading in others. In this brief response, I’ll show why. But because I know Bieniak to be a serious and accomplished manuscript scholar, my remarks will be rather more thorough than less, for her criticisms are to be taken and treated seriously.
In the volume in question, Joshua Benson and I presented the fruits of seven years of editorial work sorting out the order of Stephen Langton’s many lectures on Genesis. The heart of the volume, the “central claim” as it were, is establishing the order and development of Langton’s prologue introductions to Genesis and the Pentateuch (and by extension of his lectures on the same) over his three decades of teaching theology at Paris. That is what took us seven years to sort out and establish, and that is the main point and quality of the volume.
Over the course of those same seven years, we transcribed and sourced portions of his many lectures on Genesis itself, but in the volume we published only the prologues and accompanying translations. If their order and development was our central concern, publishing transcriptions and translations of his many prologue introductions to Genesis and the Pentateuch was our second main object. Those of us now editing Langton’s lectures on Genesis and most of the Old Testament are using the groundwork established by the Auctores volume as a guide to our current work, namely editing Langton’s actual lectures (as opposed to his prologues) in the order in which he gave them.
A third objective was correcting common misconceptions of the dates of Langton’s theological career. As Riccardo Quinto, with whom both Bieniak and I worked closely before his untimely death, made clear, my discovery that Langton began lecturing as a theologian on the Historia scholastica in the mid-1170s meant that he came to Paris to study the Arts earlier and lived longer than scholars had long supposed (Riccardo Quinto, “La constitution du texte des Quaestiones theologiae,” in Étienne Langton: Prédicateur, bibliste, théologien, ed. Louis-Jacques Bataillon, Nicole Bériou, Gilbert Dahan, and Riccardo Quinto [2010], 525–62, at 554 and n. 84.) This was also the main contribution of the volume with regards to supposition theory, since in publishing Langton’s earliest prologues, we showed that he was using supposition theory in connection with discussion of the Trinity (hence the name “personal supposition”) at least a decade earlier than most scholars have supposed. As for Bieniak’s remarks about Peter Lombard and supposition theory, Steve Brown argued decades ago that the Lombard likely had and used supposition theory in the Sentences in the late 1150s (Stephen Brown, “Medieval Supposition Theory in Its Theological Context,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 3 [1993]: 121–57, which contains an edition of Walter Chatton’s Lectura, book 1, d. 4, q. 1, aa. 1–2). Having discovered at least three early versions of the Sentences composed and taught by Peter Lombard himself between 1153 and 1159, we are in a better position to evaluate that claim. But the discovery of collections of the Lombard’s biblical prologues (Bern, Stadtbibliothek, MS A 94.7; Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MSS 1485–1501; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 2627; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nat. lat. 3705; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 14399, and in other manuscripts as well) introducing many books of the Bible, including multiple versions of Peter Lombard’s prologue introduction to Genesis and the Pentateuch, discussed below, all of which were cut out of manuscripts preserving the lectures of Peter Lombard which they introduced, gives us real hope of locating his original lectures on Genesis. If and when we find those, then we will be in a position to know for sure whether or not Peter Lombard himself had and used supposition theory in his biblical lectures as well.
It is, therefore, both false and misleading to state, as Bieniak does, that “Clark’s central claim is that Langton used Peter Lombard’s lost biblical commentaries on the Pentateuch.” It would be more accurate to say that in my introduction to the volume I also make the case that Stephen Langton, like his own master, Peter Comestor, had and shared with his students biblical prologues and glosses of Peter Lombard. In editing Langton’s prologues, Benson and I and others with whom we worked closely for those seven years, notably Alexander Andrée and Timothy Noone, couldn’t help noticing that Langton was not just glossing the Bible or the glossed Bible but also referring to another master’s glosses. As Bieniak notes, we discuss these references, which constitute indirect evidence that Langton was sharing with his students the prologues and glosses on prologues of a preeminent predecessor.
I will provide just a few of many examples discussed in the introduction that illustrate the thinking of our editorial team then and now. The first are found at the very start of his lectures on Genesis itself (at fol. 2vb of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 14414, itself preserved in the library of St. Victor), which among other things preserve copies of Langton’s first ever lectures on the literal sense of scripture. There Langton is recorded as saying: “Item notatur alia glosa, ‘insinuans Scriptura,’ . . . et eam prosequere usque in finem . . . Item notatur alia glosa, ‘divina Scriptura’” (“Likewise another gloss is noted, ‘Scripture implies’ . . . and follow it to the end . . . Likewise another gloss is noted, ‘divine Scripture’”). These occurrences of “notatur alia glosa” are both written out and not abbreviated, so that there can be no mistake in transcribing them. Each of Langton’s references that state “another gloss is noted” cannot be self-referential because Langton is not reporting what is said in the gloss itself, as he does in reporting the contents of the second gloss referred to (“Item notatur quod quattuor sunt partes Sacrae Scripturae”). Instead, it is the gloss itself that is noted, and since Langton, whenever he speaks for himself, speaks in the first person (cf. e.g., Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 112, fol. 3va, 9 and 15 and 29 lines from the top of the column: “respondeo”), it cannot be his view that is here reported. Instead, when Langton said to his students that another gloss is noted, he and they already knew by whom that gloss was noted. We editors, however, were left to wonder by whom. But since Langton also refers in his prologues to someone other than Peter Comestor, his own teacher, as “magister” (introduction, p. 121, Latin passage and English translation provided in footnote 189), and since Langton also elsewhere refers to Peter Lombard without naming him, simply as “he” (“Qui dicit hoc in Sententiis,” introduction, p. 12, column 4, which preserves Langton’s glosses in Peterhouse 112, fol. 3rb), with no antecedent reference that could possibly be taken to refer to Peter Lombard, as if both he and his students knew that they had the Lombard’s other works at their fingertips—I address Bieniak’s criticism of our reading of this last passage, below, when I discuss her specific criticisms—Benson and I (and Andrée and Noone) came to the conclusion that the master in question was almost certainly Peter Lombard. Bieniak, however, finds the indirect evidence that I presented in the introduction unconvincing, to say the least. As she puts it: “I see no convincing evidence of the existence of Lombard’s hidden biblical glosses.”
In one sense, our argument with Bieniak about indirect evidence no longer matters, for since the publication of that Auctores volume, I and others have found numerous copies of Peter Lombard’s own prologues introducing many books of the Bible; the evidence for authenticity is overwhelming, including dating, attributions, evidence for place, use, etc. Editing them now is a team of scholars (David Foley and Simon Whedbee for the New Testament prologues; Joshua Benson, Alessia Berardi, Peter O’Hagan, Riccardo Saccenti, and I for the Old Testament prologues), and already we have discovered multiple versions of the prologues that we are editing. There are so many such prologues, and so many versions of each, that it will take multiple volumes to publish them all. The availability of this direct evidence has shifted the scholarly ground. Bieniak’s critique is that we failed to make the case that Langton was referring to Peter Lombard’s prologues and glosses, but with the latter’s prologues in hand we can now show with direct evidence, as opposed to the indirect evidence relied upon in the Auctores volume, that Langton did in fact model his own prologue introductions to Genesis (and to many other books of the Bible) on those composed by Peter Lombard. And even more to Bieniak’s point, we can now tie Langton’s references in his own prologues and lectures on Genesis directly to the prologues and biblical glosses of Peter Lombard that he was referencing.
A different example from the same opening lines of Langton’s first-ever lectures on Genesis will illustrate the degree of precision with which we can now tie Langton’s biblical glosses, using both indirect and direct evidence, to those of Peter Lombard. Langton directs his students (in BnF lat. 14414, fol. 2rb, bottom) to “note another gloss that begins thus, ‘whenever Sacred Scripture etc.’” The gloss in question is not found in the Primitive version of the Glossed Genesis (a copy of which is found in Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 14398), which both Andrew of St. Victor and Peter Lombard used to gloss Genesis, the latter throughout the entirety of his Parisian teaching career. It is, however, found in BnF lat. 14399 (fol. 2vb, bottom), the version of the Glossed Genesis revised and enormously augmented by the Victorines around the time of the Lombard’s death in 1160. We can thus now show, by means of his own many precise instructions to his students, that Langton was lecturing using this Victorine version of the Glossed Genesis, whether he used BnF lat. 14398 itself or a copy that he and his students made.
But how does this connect Langton to Peter Lombard? It turns out that the Victorines fashioned this prothematic gloss (and many others) from Peter Lombard’s prologue introduction to Genesis and the Pentateuch, the very same one that they used in its entirety to introduce their version of the Glossed Genesis. Here, however, their proximate source was the Lombard’s prologue; cf. BnF lat. 14399, fol. 2rb: “Cum ergo tot modis divina Scriptura exponatur, non mirum signa obscura et a nostris sensibus remota in ea repperiantur.” Peter Lombard’s ultimate source was of course Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim 1.18 (CSEL 28/1, ed. Joseph Zycha, p. 27, lines 12–20), but the important point for our purposes is that Langton was directing his students to a gloss in the Victorine version of the Glossed Genesis that the Victorines had taken from the very prologue that Langton himself used as a model for his own prologue introduction to Genesis and the Pentateuch. He and his students knew well whose glosses they were using and discussing when he said to them: “another gloss is noted.”
In short, the very arguments in our volume that Bieniak dismisses as speculative and false can now be shown, by means of both indirect and direct evidence, to be true. Langton not only had the Lombard’s prologues in forging his own but shared and used them with his students, just as we suspected. Moreover, the team of scholars now editing Peter Lombard’s prologues introducing many other books of the Bible is also finding clear evidence connecting them to prologues composed by Peter Comestor, Stephen Langton, and others all the way up to Bonaventure, Aquinas, and beyond. The Lombard’s prologues inaugurated a tradition that mapped a new course for medieval theology, just as I argued in the Auctores volume.
That said, it is still important to address Bieniak’s remarks about our alleged misreading of the manuscripts, not only because almost every article and book that Benson and I have ever published relies principally on manuscript evidence but also and even more importantly owing to the many critical editions that are forthcoming in the next few years: the Glossed Genesis, primitive and Victorine versions (ed. Clark); the lectures of Antonius Andreas on Aristotle’s De anima and those of John of La Rochelle, Hugh of St. Cher, and Odo Rigaldus on the Sentences (ed. Clark, Giacomo Fornasieri, Noone, adiuvantibus Benson and Saccenti); the three earliest versions of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (ed. Berardi, Clark, and Saccenti); Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica (ed. Clark, David Foley, Allison Michael, Sara Moscone, and Simon Whedbee); Peter Lombard’s prologue introductions to most of the books of the Bible (ed. Benson, Berardi, Clark, Foley, O’Hagan, Saccenti, and Whedbee); Langton’s lectures on the Old Testament (ed. Benson, Berardi, Clark, and Michael); and William of Alnwick’s Determinationes (ed. Clark, Fornasieri, and Noone). Those who take Bieniak’s remarks at face value will perhaps be skeptical of the quality of those editions, which is reason enough to address her criticisms, especially since Bieniak herself is a serious scholar and editor of texts.
She mentions two pieces of evidence above all, which she denies indicate that Langton had and shared with his students copies of the Lombard’s glosses on Genesis. For each, I’ll first reproduce Bieniak’s words and critique, before presenting evidence that shows her critiques are misguided and that we were right all along. I’ll address them in the order that Bieniak does, which also reflects the order of their importance to our argument.
- Bieniak: “First, the theory builds on the alleged ‘regular third person references found in every manuscript’ (2 and 11). In reality, either the quoted third-person verbs are not there (e.g., the manuscripts have ‘nota’ instead of ‘notat,’ and ‘quaeritur’ instead of ‘quaerit’—see pages 11–12) or the understanding of the analyzed passages is flawed.”
Bieniak states bluntly that Joshua Benson and I misread graphemes in Peterhouse 112, but we did not. In fact, scholars as distinguished and experienced with editing manuscripts as Noone and Andrée, who read these manuscripts and these passages with us many times, shared our judgments. Here are some of the reasons why we read them the way we did. For one thing, Langton’s third-person references to Peter Lombard are found in all of the lectures he delivered over the course of his lengthy (three plus decades) Parisian teaching career. For another, the scribe in Peterhouse, which records the final form of his glosses on the Old Testament, always writes “nota,” Langton’s second-person, singular imperative telling his students what to focus on, in one of two ways: first, he writes out “nota” in full; second, he uses the standard abbreviation, “not” with the letter “a” over it. For examples of the former, see out of countless others in Peterhouse 112: fol. 3va, 7 lines from the bottom of the column, last word in sentence: “Nota” (written out); fol. 3va, 16 lines from top, end of line: “Nota” (written out); fol. 3va, 30 lines from top: “Et nota” (written out); fol. 4rb, 28 lines from top: “Nota quod” (written out). For examples of the latter, see fol. 6ra: four instances of “nota” abbreviated by the same scribe in standard fashion, i.e., “not” with the letter “a” written above it: line 18: “Nota tamen quod omnes”; line 36: “Nota Beda hic dicit”; line 38: “Et nota secundum animam”; line 43: “Nota dicit”. Anyone who wishes can turn to almost any folio in Peterhouse 112 or in Peterhouse 119—the two codices used to form one manuscript—to verify that these two ways of writing “nota” are ubiquitous.
In fact, a standard abbreviation for the third-person singular, found in every manuscript I’ve ever looked at, is the verbal stem in question, e.g., “dic” for “dicit” with a macron over “dic.” We thus read “not” with a macron over it as “notat,” a reading readily distinguishable from the two standard and ubiquitous scribal renderings of “nota.”
As for Bieniak’s second example, namely, our supposedly false transcription of “qr” with a macron over it as “quaerit,” the story is the same. She says it should be “quaeritur,” and I have myself seen instances in other manuscripts where it is thus disambiguated. But in this manuscript the scribe consistently renders “quaeritur” in the standard fashion, namely “qr” with a passive flag over it. Examples are ubiquitous in both manuscripts, but here are a few examples from Peterhouse 112 for those who care to look: fol. 3va, 14 lines from top, end of line: “Sed quaeritur” (qr with flag for passive), “quare” (qr with macron); fol. 4rb, 25 lines from top: “Sed quaeritur” (qr with flag for passive); fol. 4rb, 30 lines from top: “quaeritur quare” (qr with passive flag; qr with macron); and idem., lines 31–32 from top: “Sed quaeritur quare” (qr with passive flag; qr with macron). The advantage posed by three of these four examples is that they show the most common scribal use of “qr” with a macron over it, namely to signify “quare.” But the context invariably shows how graphemes should be disambiguated, and in this case because the phrase in question begins, “Ita enim (qr with macron) quomodo,” it is obvious that “quare” (“why” or “for what reason”) would make no sense before “quomodo” (“how” or “in what way”). By contrast, our rendering of “quaerit”—“For thus he enquires into how”—makes perfect sense, if one allows for the possibility that Langton is referring his students to the glosses of another master.
In short, Bieniak’s criticism of our transcriptions of what are standard scribal renderings of third-person singular verbs is hard to understand, given the same scribe’s use of actual standard scribal renderings for the alternative readings (“nota” and “quaeritur”) she prefers. These third-party references cannot be explained with reference to the Bible itself, to persons such as Moses, the presumed author of the Pentateuch, or to individual glosses in the Glossed Genesis. They must, therefore, refer to a master whose glosses and opinions Langton was sharing with his students. The fact that the scholars now editing Comestor’s lectures on the four glossed Gospels, Foley and Whedbee, are finding abundant evidence that Comestor, Langton’s teacher, shared the Lombard’s biblical views with his students in similar fashion only strengthens my conviction and confidence in our transcriptions and understanding of these and similar passages.
- Bieniak: “First, the author fails to notice that Langton’s usual source sufficiently explains the ‘abnormal’ reference: the entire passage ‘Qui autem in verbis Dominicis . . . ad aedificationem caritatis intendit, Domini sunt verba quae dicit’ comes from Lombard’s Sentences (book 4, Brady’s edition 2:315, l. 6). Second, substituting the crucial pronoun ‘quae’ with ‘qui’ is a scribal error. Clark prefers the corrupted ‘verba qui (?) dicit’ (Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 112, fol. 3rb) to the correct ‘verba quae dicit’ (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plutei 9, Dex. 7, fol. 133va–vb and Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 177, fol. 2r) because he mistakenly links ‘dicit’ to the subsequent ‘Hoc in Sententiis.’”
Here, in contrast to her first critique, Bieniak’s criticism is easier to understand and possibly even plausible and correct, although she seemingly has no idea that Langton was using editions of the Sentences composed and revised by Peter Lombard himself before 1160 rather than the edition of the Sentences produced by Ignatius Brady which, though magisterial, reproduced a version of that work in use in the schools of Paris roughly a century later.
That said, Bieniak presents evidence and arguments that I myself considered and rejected for reasons that I shall now outline. In hindsight, I should probably have included the following discussion in my introduction, but I omitted it as a rather lengthy mental road not taken. Here, however, of necessity I present it in full.
When we transcribed this portion of Peterhouse 112, I considered (at length) but rejected Bieniak’s interpretation, according to which “qui” was a scribal error for “quae,” such that Langton would have said simply, “Hoc in Sententiis,” for several reasons. First, the version reproduced by Langton in the lemma (underlined here as in the manuscript) at fol. 3rb of that manuscript, which ends with “Domini sunt verba,” makes perfect sense as is for two reasons (text on p. 13 of the introduction): “Gregorius super Ezechielem. Qui in expositione Sacri Eloquii, ut auditoribus placeat aliquid fingit, sua verba loquitur, non Dei. Qui autem in verbis dominicis aliter quam is qui protulit senserit, sub alio intellectu, et tamen ad aedificationem caritatis Domini sunt verba. Qui dicit hoc in Sententiis.” The first reason is thus that the second sentence as here presented by Langton, which ends with “Domini sunt verba,” has a parallel structure with the first, which ends with “non Dei.” The “sunt” would have been emphatic in spoken Latin, meant as an intentional contrast with “non Dei.” Rendered in English: from “not God’s” to “they are the words of the Lord.” We cannot now hear Langton in the classroom, but what the scribe recorded would have made perfect sense aurally to his students. Although I am keenly aware of the presence of scribal mistakes, I am also attentive to the sound of the lecture itself, especially so with Langton, whose spoken cadences are invariably intentional.
A second and related reason is that, as I then discovered from editing early versions of the Lombard’s Sentences, the reading cited by Bieniak, reproduced in Brady’s edition, and known to me at the time I was puzzling over this (in Mazarine 177 and other manuscripts), was in fact a truncated version of a lengthier original added by the Lombard. Langton, like his own master, Peter Comestor, and like the Victorines, had access to all three early versions of the Sentences composed and taught by Peter Lombard prior to his death in 1160. The passage from Gregory is not found in book 3 of the Primitive version (in Lincoln Cathedral MS 230), which would subsequently become book 4 after Peter Lombard had added a new book 1, nor is it found in Lincoln Cathedral MS 31, the first of the versions in four books known to us, where what would nearly a century later become Distinction 13 of book 4 (fol. 165r, “De poenitentia”) is located. It is, however, found in the second of the four-book revisions authored by Peter Lombard that we have, namely Hereford Cathedral MS O.VIII.9, at the very bottom of fol. 100v. There it reads as follows: “Gregorius super Ezechielem. Qui in expositione sacri Eloquii, ut auditoribus placeat, aliquid fingit, sua verba loquitur, non Dei. Qui autem in verbis dominicis aliter quam is qui protulit senserit, sub alio intellectu, ad aedificationem tamen caritatis, Domini sunt verba quae dicit, quia ad hoc solum nobis Deus per totam sacram Scripturam loquitur, ut nos ad suum et proximi amorem trahat.” There were, therefore, multiple truncated versions of the original in the manuscript tradition!
The question facing us editors was which truncated version to choose: the version that appears in Langton’s lectures in Peterhouse 112, with the lemma ending in “Domini sunt verba” and the new sentence, not a lemma, starting with “Qui dicit,” or the truncated version cited by Bieniak, which would mean that the version in Peterhouse 112 is the result of a scribal mistake. The whole thing depends on whether one believes that the Latin as recorded in Peterhouse 112 is what Langton said (as I do) or whether one believes that what is written is the product of a scribal mistake (as does Bieniak). Since the Peterhouse manuscript (comprising originally 112 and 119) was composed during Langton’s exile as his final and comprehensive word on the interpretation of the Old Testament, I found (and still find) it hard to believe that a scribal mistake at the very beginning of that biblical “Last Will and Testament” would have been overlooked by Langton himself, a stickler for detail. It is possible but in my view highly unlikely.
A final consideration was ultimately decisive to me and to us. I knew from decades of working on Langton on Comestor’s Historia scholastica and the latter’s lectures on the Glossed Gospels that Langton was an invaluable witness to the textual history and development of those works, because he habitually shares with his students such information. I also knew that Langton, like his own master, Comestor, had access to the three early versions of the Sentences, copies of which were kept in the library of St. Victor and used by the Victorines to revise and augment substantially the primitive Glossed Genesis in BnF lat. 14398. These facts, together with the circumstance that we suspected strongly, that Langton had similar access to the Lombard’s biblical works—a circumstance that we now know in hindsight to be a fact in the light of the discovery of Peter Lombard’s biblical prologues and of Langton’s prolific use of them all—led me to decide in favor of a reading according to which Langton simply referred to Peter Lombard, whose biblical glosses he and his students were on our supposition already discussing, with the standard familiar pronoun beginning a sentence, namely “Qui.” On this understanding, Langton was familiarizing his students with the textual history of the Lombard’s Sentences, just as he had done with Comestor’s History.
Thus, while I freely concede the possibility of Bieniak’s hypothesis, which does explain the circumstances, for the reasons stated I still prefer the reading as found on fol. 3rb of Peterhouse 112. But whether one agrees with my transcription and reading or with Bieniak’s, the fact is that this passage by itself does not decide the issue of whether Langton discussed with his students the glosses and opinions of Peter Lombard on the Bible. The third-person references suffice to show that he did.
I close with three observations. The first is that, armed now with the Lombard’s biblical prologues that we now know for a fact that Langton used throughout his career, we are more confident than ever in the order of Langton’s lectures on Genesis and the Pentateuch that we set forth in the Auctores volume. In this regard, Tim Noone and I spent the past fourteen years sorting out the history and development of the many manuscripts preserving Hugh of St. Cher’s lectures on the Sentences, a topic upon which Bieniak herself has written and declared a supposedly definitive solution. Tim has just now passed away (11 May 2025), to the great sadness of many of us, but anyone doubting our ability to sort out complicated manuscript traditions owing to Bieniak’s remarks should read carefully our findings when they are published.
Second, we who are editing the works of Peter Lombard, Peter Comestor, and Stephen Langton have learned that, to establish the chronological order of their works and especially of the many different versions of their works, one must be very careful to identify the specific versions and editions of the sources that those masters were using. We now know the very sources that Langton was using, both to compose his own prologues and to gloss the Bible, and so are much farther along with this than we were even two years ago. And yet everything we are finding strengthens our confidence in the findings published in the Auctores volume.
Third and finally, Bieniak’s review makes it seem as if there is an isomorphic relationship between graphemes in manuscripts and their disambiguated, full forms. But as every experienced manuscript editor knows, reading and transcribing manuscripts is more art than science. Scribes frequently use different graphemes for the same word, nor is it uncommon to find a scribe using the same grapheme for different words, even on the same folio. Thus, even though there is plenty that is straightforward in transcribing manuscripts, in almost every case there are graphemes for which much depends on judgment: assessing the scribe’s habits; understanding context, etc. Those with experience reading and editing manuscripts will recognize at once the truth in what I say here, but it is important to state this for those without such experience, since they might be misled into thinking that reading and interpreting the Latin shorthand of the manuscripts of the Scholastic High Middle Ages is in every case as simple and straightforward as Bieniak’s review implies.
Reviewer’s Response (Magdalena Bieniak, Uniwersytet Warszawski)
The reviewer’s task is to evaluate the reviewed work, not the overall scholarly output of the author, including ongoing and future endeavors. My review focuses on the accuracy and soundness of the arguments presented, hardly even touching upon the plausibility of the defended theses, and says nothing about the author’s other publications and studies. Each study and its arguments deserve their own assessment. Moreover, I do not refer to the findings of other authors. Hence, I am not sure why Mark Clark, in his reply to the review, names nearly a dozen renowned scholars involved in other research projects. They have not put forward the arguments I criticize. Nor is it accurate to claim, as Clark does, that Stephen Brown’s 1993 article (“Medieval Supposition Theory in Its Theological Context”) attributes the supposition theory to Peter Lombard. The article demonstrates how the theory was employed in thirteenth-century commentaries on Sentences book 1, d. 4, but—contrary to Clark’s assertion—it neither argues nor implies that Peter Lombard himself made use of that theory.
It is beyond question that Langton employed Lombard’s biblical glosses, given that he commented extensively on Lombard’s Collectanea on the Pauline Epistles. Also, there is no controversy about his constant use of glosses by other masters, as can be seen from his habitual references to the Glossa ordinaria. What does require proof—and what Clark argues for in the book—is whether “Langton based the Old Testament lectures that he delivered throughout his Parisian teaching career on the lectures on the Old Testament of Peter Lombard, long deemed lost”: this is the “working hypothesis” that Clark presents “throughout” his introduction, to use his own expressions (2). Moreover, he continues to defend the same hypothesis in his reply to the review. I therefore fail to see how my statement—“Clark’s central claim is that Langton used Peter Lombard’s lost biblical commentaries on the Pentateuch”—is either false or misleading.
Clark appeals to his readings (notat and quaerit) of a couple of paleographic abbreviations found in one manuscript—Peterhouse 112—to dismiss my criticism of one of his arguments. Yet even if one were to concede that the scribal signs he quotes are ambiguous (at best), this does little to support his case. As Clark rightly observes at the end of his reply, “Scribes frequently use different graphemes for the same word, nor is it uncommon to find a scribe using the same grapheme for different words, even on the same folio.” That is correct. For this and other reasons, it is methodologically unsound to draw far-reaching conclusions from two unclear abbreviations in a single manuscript. Unfortunately, this is what Clark ends up doing in the book. Even though he claims that there “are regular third person references found in every manuscript” (11), the transcription that follows on page 12 presents only the two verbs just mentioned (in Peterhouse 112), which are not confirmed by the other manuscripts he cites. Thus, his strong claim lacks sufficient evidence.
I appreciate that Clark finds the reading “Domini sunt verba quae dicit” plausible and that he considered this possibility from the outset. The issue, however, is not merely that he chose a different reading, but that, instead of sharing his doubts with the reader, he reinforced his interpretation with such terms as “unmistakably” (13), “clearly” (14), “obvious” (14), “of necessity” (14 n. 37), “manifestly” (14 n. 37). He then used the controversial reading as evidence that Langton was glossing Peter Lombard’s lost lectures. This rhetorical strategy gives the impression of certainty where there is, in fact, none.
I wish Clark all the best in his future research. Twelfth-century biblical glosses represent an extraordinarily complex and important part of the medieval intellectual heritage—one that deserves far more scholarly attention than it has received. I sincerely hope that the planned editions and studies will shed some light on this valuable material.
Author’s Reply (Mark Clark, Catholic University of America)
Magdalena Bieniak’s response to my response makes clear that her review is in fact false and misleading in all essential respects. I showed with hard evidence that we read the graphemes correctly, contrary to her assertions, and provided examples that show beyond doubt that Langton was sharing with his students a distinguished predecessor’s lectures on the same materials. As to the identification of that predecessor as Peter Lombard, I explained that Joshua Benson and I were aided constantly by scholars as distinguished as Timothy Noone, Alexander Andrée, and Riccardo Saccenti, with whom we worked for years on this and other editions; they all agreed with us on that identification. She seems not to understand that we follow habitually the editorial working methods of those who trained us (in Noone’s case, the peerless Franciscan editor, Gedeon Gál; in my case, Stephen Brown, himself trained by Gál); those working methods require working in teams and the consulting of other expert editors in any and all cases of doubt. Once Bieniak’s review appeared, I sent it not only to distinguished scholars who worked with us on this and other editions but also to others who never have worked with us, the latter so that I could have an independent peer review as it were. All were in agreement that we had not misread the manuscripts. Moreover, they, like we, were taken aback that Bieniak, a manuscript editor of some repute, would claim without argument that our ordering of Langton’s prologues to and lectures on the Pentateuch, supported at great length with massive amounts of evidence, was incorrect. Doing so seemed to them, as to us, irresponsible.
Whatever motivated Bieniak’s review, ultimately the new manuscript evidence that we continue to find as we follow the evidentiary trails opened up by our Auctores editions will decide this argument once and for all. As I have already noted, since the publication of that edition we have found the prologues of Peter Lombard introducing Genesis and the Pentateuch (and many other books of the Bible as well) that Langton was sharing with this students. We can now show with precision the actual texts to which he was referring them, and when we have published our editions and translations of the Lombard’s biblical works and prologues, juxtaposed with those of Peter Comestor and Stephen Langton, who used them as exemplars for their own, everyone interested will be able to see that these biblical prologues of Peter Lombard, just like his prologue to the Sentences, inaugurated a teaching tradition that extended all the way to Bonaventure, Aquinas, and other thirteenth-century giants, not just to Langton and those in the Lombard’s immediate scholastic orbit.
