Methodology

This project cannot be conceived independently of a large spectrum of required skills (codicology, palaeography, textual criticism, philology, intellectual history, hermeneutics, philosophy, science, informatics) that are crucial for dealing with the material under investigation. The team will begin by establishing the corpus, locating and identifying surviving Principia. In this initial step the team members will examine catalogues and collections of manuscripts from libraries all around Europe, especially Eastern Europe, given the high number of manuscripts from those libraries that have not been analysed. In many cases, under a vague title such as Opuscula theologica one finds various fragments from the intellectual production of late-medieval universities, including, no doubt, new texts for our corpus. The members of the team trained in the texts of later-medieval universities (especially those familiar with the Sentences commentaries from this era) will have little difficulty in identifying new fragments belonging to our corpus (recognizing topics, themes, structures, questions titles, authors, etc.).

We have so far listed around 35 surviving Principia (each set consisting of 20-25 folios, totaling 700-875 folios for investigation), but it is estimated that the project will double or triple this number, notably from manuscripts in Vienna (Wien, ÖNB 4048) and in the University Library in Basel (Basel, UB A-XI-23) or the Amploniana library from Erfurt (Erfurt CA 2° 173) that contain entire collections of Principia that have never been studied but have been recently identified by the PI.