Abstract

Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–1264) belongs among the most important medieval encyclopedists. Around 1300, an anonymous author using Vincent’s name compiled Speculum morale, a moral encyclopedia drawing, without acknowledgment, on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. In 1708 the French Dominican scholar Jacques Echard set out to resolve the ambiguities of the Speculum Morale in a work that is a fascinating window into the understanding of textual authority and plagiarism. As this article argues, Echard’s solution reflects textual-analytical principles as much as Thomist politics at whose intersection appears a modified understanding of plagiarism dependent on the privileged textual position of the Summa.

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