The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus

This project began in 1990 as an outgrowth from my principal field of academic training in classical and early Christian culture into topics involving the continuity and revival of that culture in the Middle Ages and European Renaissance. Focus on the later reception, use, and transmission of Patristic-age texts, what scholars speak of as the Nachleben of ancient influential figures in subsequent ages, led me to study especially the influence of major early Christian writers whom I had studied at some length, like Origen, Lactantius, and Augustine, among scholars of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance whom I discovered only more recently, like Gregory of Rimini, Ambrogio Traversari, Hugh of Orvieto, and Marsilio Ficino. What became evident to me was that like their predecessors, those later figures had a passion for both divine wisdom and eloquence which guided them ad fontes, back to the works of earlier scholars who sought to give voice to timeless truths in masterful writing, practicing the highest standards of expression still cherished in their secular culture. Study of the medieval Christian humanists who worked during the transformational fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tells the epic story of the gradual reintensification of concern for classical texts, original sources instead of compendia, a desire to reconnect logical, abstract discourse with poetry and rhetoric capable of stirring the passions, a growing mysticism, and a desire for reform. My research culminated in the discovery of Giles of Viterbo, who, living at the height of the Italian Renaissance, was the beneficiary of the vast recovery of ancient sources and the creative genius of his surroundings.