BRADWARDINE (BRAGWARDIN, BREDWARDIN, BRADVARDINUS), TOMMASO. — English theologian, philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, born in the diocese of Chichester ca. 1290, died at Lambeth (London) on 26 August 1349. He accompanied Edward III on his expedition to the Rhine in 1338, and was again part of the king’s retinue when he landed in France in 1346. In 1348 B. was elected archbishop of Canterbury and received episcopal consecration at Avignon in July 1348. Despite the plague then raging in England, he immediately set out for Canterbury; but as soon as he landed he fell ill and died on the journey, before reaching his archiepiscopal see.
B.’s principal work is the Summa de causa Dei contra Pelagium (London 1618), which he dedicated to his colleagues and students at Merton College (ad suos Mertonenses, as the title reads). It is a defence of the “cause of God,” written with warm and profound conviction, against certain tendencies in the theology and philosophy of the time that sought almost completely to suppress divine foreknowledge of future contingents in order to safeguard human free will. In his zeal B. falls into the opposite extreme and professes a determinism that leaves human freedom very little scope.
B.’s influence was important, especially in the field of moral theology and that of the mathematical natural sciences. With his Tractatus de proportionibus motuum (Paris 1495, Venice 1505, Vienna 1515), B. became the founder of the new dynamics of the fourteenth century. His commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences appears to be lost. Other works: Arithmetica speculativa (Paris 1495 and 1530); Geometria speculativa (ibid. 1495 and 1516); Ars memorativa (unpublished); De futuris contingentibus (partly edited by B. M. Xiberta, in Aus der Geisteswelt des Mittelalters, II, Münster 1935, pp. 1169–80). His contemporaries already honoured B. with the title Doctor profundus.
Dict. of national biography, II, pp. 1096–98; J. F. Laun, T. von B., der Schüler Augustins und Lehrer Wiclifs, in Zeitschr. f. Kirchengesch., 47 (1928), pp. 333–56; Überweg, II, pp. 619, 622–23, 788 (bibl.); K. Michalski, Le problème de la volonté d'Oxford et à Paris au XIVe siècle, Leopoli 1937, passim; I. J. Churchill, B., in DHG, X, coll. 345–46 (bibl.); A. Maier, Der Funktionsbegriff in der Physik des 14. Jahrh., in Divus Thomas, 24 (1946), pp. 147–65; id., Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrh., Roma 1949, cap. 5. Anneliese Maier