Trivet, Nicholas

TRIVET, NICHOLAS. - Humanist, historian, philosopher and Dominican theologian, b. at Norwich, ca. 1258, d. between 1328-30.

Bachelor in the Dominican schools at Oxford in 1299-1300; regent master of theology there in 1302-1307. After an absence of 7 years, during which he stayed in Paris, in 1314-15 he is again at Oxford. In 1318 he worked on behalf of John XXII; in 1324, lector in the Dominican convent of London.

A humanist, he commented on Livy, Juvenal, the Problemata of pseudo-Aristotle, the Declamationes Senecæ, the tragedies of Seneca, the De cons. philos. of Boethius and the De discipl. scholarium of the pseudo-Boethius. He also wrote De astronomia and the Canones de coniunctionibus appositionibus et eclipsibus solis et lunae. As a historian, he wrote the Annales sex regum Angliae qui a comitibus Andegai, originem traxerunt (ed. L. d'Achery, Spicilegium, VIII, Paris 1669, and Th. Hog, London 1845), a Hist. ab orig. mundi ad Chr. n., and some chronicles of the Heptarchy. As a philosopher and theologian, besides the commentary on the De cons. philos. and an Extractio ex Politicis Arist., he commented on various parts of the Bible and the first three books of the Sentences, wrote six Quodlibeta and some Questiones disputatae, a De officio missae and a Scutum verit. contra impugnantes statum perfectionis. He was a determined champion of Thomism both within and outside the Order.

Bruno Nardi