Quaestiones Disputatae “De productione rerum” “De imagine” et “De anima” e schola bonaventuriana (codex Conv. Soppr. D.4.27 Bibliothecae Nationalis Centralis Florentinae) by Mikołaj Olszewski (review)

Abstract

The question of whether there exist other quaestiones disputatae attributable to St. Bonaventure, beyond those contained within the definitive Quaracchi critical edition of his Opera Omnia, is a subject which has divided scholarly opinion for nearly a century. During the mid-twentieth-century, several newly discovered sets of quaestiones disputatae were claimed as authentic Bonaventurian works. Most notably, the Quaestiones de theologia transcribed by George Tavard and the Quaestiones de caritate et de novissimis edited by Palémon Glorieux. This is to say nothing, of the extensive and much discussed collection of draft quaestiones identified by François-Marie Henquinet in Assisi Bibl. Com. 186, which include the Quaestiones de prophetia, de raptu, and de nostra cognitione Dei. As those who follow the debate concerning Bonaventure’s literary corpus will know, Bonaventurian authorship of these quaestiones is by no means certain and was called into doubt by important figures such as Ignatius Brady and Henri-François Dondaine. More recently, it has been questioned by Jean-Pierre Torrell and Barbara Faes de Mottoni. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, little research has been devoted to identifying and critically engaging with other potentially authentic Bonaventurian quaestiones disputatae. One promising collection of quaestiones, with a strong claim to Bonaventurian authorship, is the Quaestiones de productione rerum, de imagine, and de anima, contained in a thirteenth-century Florentine manuscript (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conv. Soppr. D.4.27). Scholarship has been aware of these quaestiones since the rediscovery of the manuscript by the Quaracchi fathers during the nineteenth-century, and they have, in turn, been claimed as genuine works of Bonaventure by no less eminent Bonaventurian scholars than Jacques Guy Bougerol and Balduinus Distelbrink. Having said this, they have remained, for the most part, unedited and neglected. Re-