School texts

The books the Catholic schools lectured on

School texts

For centuries the Catholic schools taught by reading and expounding a few books: Aristotle's logic with Porphyry's Introduction, then his natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics, Dionysius, Boethius, Peter Lombard's Sentences. They stand here in the order of the Paris arts statute of 19 March 1255: in the Latin the masters read, with St Thomas's commentary lectio by lectio, a public-domain English translation beside it, every passage with its Bekker number.

The old logic 3

Porphyry's Introduction, the Categories and On Interpretation, read in Boethius's Latin from the twelfth century on.

The new logic 4

The Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations, which reached the Latin schools in the twelfth century.

To follow: the natural books, the Metaphysics and the Ethics with St Thomas's commentaries, Dionysius the Areopagite, Boethius, the Liber de causis and the Sentences.

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