The World of John of Salisbury (review)

444 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:3 JULY i987 study on the commentary tradition alone is too narrow. As a survey leading to a "more comprehensive" view of medieval logic it should not be read without a full complement of other studies now available on medieval logic. ALAN R. PERREIAH University of Kentucky Michael Wilks, editor. The World of John of Salisbury. Studies in Church History, Subsidia, vol. 3. Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1984. Pp. xii + 469. $45.oo In the summer of 198o, a conference was held to commemorate the 8ooth anniversary of the death of John of Salisbury. This handsome volume commemorates the conference by making available to a wider audience a selection of the papers presented there. As befits a memorial to a figure of such wide learning and varied activity, the range of contributions is large. Justice cannot be done to all twenty-five studies in a short notice, and so what follows is itself a selection. Apart from two excellent bibliographical surveys by David Luscombe, some reflections by Pierre Rich6 on the ambience of John's schooling in letters, and a graceful tribute by Christopher Brooke, the pieces are quite specific. Among those historically oriented, there is Olga Weijer's straightforward review of Metalogicon II.lo on the chronology of John's studies in France (a matter recently reopened by R. W. Southern), and Anne Duggan's typically judicious analysis of John's attitude towards Thomas Becket as revealed in the correspondence. Other papers are more clearly historiographical. These include Marjorie Chibnall's astute comparison of the stances taken by John in the Historia Pontificalis and the letters. Besides Rich~, three contributors treat the character of twelfth-century 'humanism' as represented by John. Klaus Guth analyses this ideal as a coherent, comprehensive pattern for clerical life. Rodney Thomson contrasts John's interest in antiquity with that of a learned predecessor, William of Malmesbury. Janet Martin continues her important, powerfully revisionist enterprise of elucidating John's attitude towards classical writings, not to say his occasionally suspect use of them. As part of this project, Martin reiterates her suspicion that the so-called Institutio Traiani, attributed by John to Plutarch, was actually his own invention (194-95) . The suspicion is disputed by Max Kerner in one of his two contributions. The second of Kerner's pieces treats of John's familiarity with Roman and canon law. Related items include Tilman Struve's study of the central notion of the organic state in John's political thought; Georg Miczka's analysis of his use of the Summa Trecensis; and Jan van Laarhoven's reconsideration of the much-discussed 'theory of tyrannicide' in the Policraticus. The essays on political theory are among those of special interest to the student of medieval philosophy. There are others. After surveying the uses of lectio and philosophia in John, Edouard Jeauneau considers the varous authors recommended by him for a philosophic education. These include Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, but also Scripture and the Fathers. Jeauneau ends with John's role in the re-translation of BOOK REVIEWS 445 Pseudo-Dionysius by John Sarrazin and suggests that this same translator may have earlier produced the anonymous translationova of Aristotle's PosteriorAnalytics (lO38 ). Charles Burnett reconstructs Chartrian manuscripts on medicine (MSS 16o, 171), astrology (MS ~13), practical astronomy (MS 214), and education in the quadrivium (MS 498, the second volume of Thierry's Heptateuchon). He prints some portions of these and related texts. (We are able to confirm that the Johannitius commentary in Helmingham Hall MS 58 reproduces that in the destroyed Chartres MS 171, the first folio of which was preserved in photostat by Loren MacKinney; compare Burnett, t59. ) In a very brief discussion, Gillian Evans considers a few examples of John's use of Boethian arithmetical doctrine. Finally, Rodney Thomson offers a highly speculative account of the composition of the Entheticus de dogmatephilosophorum, describing it as a "semi-private statement of John's own philosophical principles" (~95). The alterations recorded in extant manuscripts, Thomson argues, show the evolution of John's thought in the years after 1x55. As a whole this valuable collection of essays admirably suggests...