LATE MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY AT PRAGUE UNIVERSITY
New Evidence on Commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences
Lecture by Martin Dekarli
Department of Auxiliary Sciences of History and Archive Studies, Faculty of Arts,
University of Hradec Králové
For over 170 years, the historiography of Prague University has focused on national tensions between Bohemian academics and their foreign peers. The main sources of contention between local schools were the intentional proliferation of manuscripts of John Wyclif’s works and the turbulent events associated with the public activities of Wyclif’s adepts, the Czech Realists (Stanislav of Znojmo, Štěpán of Páleč, Jan Hus, Jerome of Prague, Jakoubek of Stříbro along with others) in Prague’s Art Faculty. Between 1395 and 1413, Prague controversies intensified between the via moderna and the via antiqua, along with debates over Wyclif’s controversial doctrine regarding universals, divine ideas, the Eucharist, and political theology. Twentieth-century scholarship improved our knowledge of these topics by publishing some of the extant sources in editions. Since the 1950s, Andrzej Póltawski, Damasus A. Trapp, Zophie Włodek, Josef Tříška, and Jaroslav Kadlec, along with others, published research on the Prague Theological Faculty prosopography, institutional records, and Sentences commentaries. This lecture aims to present a current record of the manuscript sources and to shed new light on debates about divine ideas from Sentences commentaries of Prague masters before 1400.