New Research Professor joins our Research Group, following exciting discoveries in Lincoln Cathedral Library

Mark Clark has recently joined the University of Lincoln and our Medieval Studies Research Group as a Visiting Research Professor. Professor Clark is the John C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair of Medieval Church History and Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he has taught for many years. Professor Clark is working on two exciting projects that arise directly from discoveries he has made at Lincoln Cathedral Library.

First, he is editing, together with Joshua Benson and Riccardo Saccenti, the earliest known versions of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, preserved in Lincoln MS 230 and Lincoln MS 31, respectively. The former, which shows that Peter Lombard originally composed the Sentences in three books and not four, is invaluable, because it shows he began by working from the biblical Gloss early in his career to produce a book for teaching and not, as long supposed, by working on the Sentences late in his career as a theological masterwork. The latter, in four books but with a radically different organization from the version edited by Brady, which is now known to date to the mid-thirteenth century, shows Lombard’s development of the Sentences during his own teaching career at Paris from the early 1140s until his death in 1160. These are the only two copies we know of made by him during his teaching career. Together, and they are being juxtaposed in this edition and translation, they will literally remake and revolutionize all existing scholarship on the origins of Scholasticism, on the schools of Paris, and on the University of Paris that grew out of them.

Second, he is writing a monograph on how Scholastic lectures became schoolbooks in the High Middle Ages, a topic that will be of keen interest to the many scholars who study the history of the book. The two manuscripts just mentioned are crucial, since they illustrate this process beautifully between 1140 and 1160, when the first institutional processes were put into place. David D’Avray asked Professor Clark and Christopher de Hamel how to understand the change between the chaotic orality that he has documented in Professor Clark’s publications and the beautiful finished process that he showed for the Glossa ordinaria of the thirteenth century. Using manuscripts that preserve primitive and augmented versions of the Gloss, Professor Clark can now show, owing to these Lincoln mss and owing to still more recent discoveries of copies of Lombard’s actual lectures on the Old Testament (apart from the well-known work on the Psalms), that those who augmented the Gloss also turned the Sentences, even while Peter Lombard was still teaching, into a textbook. He is also using Lincoln MSS 80 and 86, which preserve early versions of Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, to show how this process continued in the next twenty years, from 1160 to 1180. A Hereford manuscript, O.VIII.9, which preserves another early version of the Sentences copied at Paris, is also of keen interest, since it is apparent that Lincoln, as the hub, and Hereford, together with other English cathedrals, were intimately connected to the cathedral school at Paris, first that of the old Cathedral of St. Mary and then of its successor, the current Notre Dame, from the time when Lombard first began to teach. This too is of considerable interest, since it would appear that scholars have mistaken the character of the cathedral schools in England during the twelfth century and leading up to the founding of the universities at Oxford and Cambridge.

We are delighted to welcome him to our group and look forward to hearing more about his work.