ABSTRACT
Of all the many ways of thinking philosophically which were followed in the Middle Ages, the scholasticism of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Paris and Oxford theologians, such as Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, is what many non-specialists think of as most characteristically medieval philosophy, or even as medieval philosophy full stop. In fact, it was a very particular manner of medieval philosophizing, developed quite late in the philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages and mainly confined to Latin thinkers, although influential on Jewish and Byzantine thought (Chapter 9, sections 4 and 2). The scholastic approach was the outcome of two very different types of development: on the one hand, the standardization of the academic practices that had been growing up already in the twelfth-century schools; and, on the other hand, the encounter with a whole range of new sources translated from the Greek and the Arabic. This chapter begins by examining both these developments and their outcome in terms of the pattern of studies at Paris and Oxford and the types of text in which scholastic philosophy and theology is preserved. The framework would stay much the same in the universities until and beyond the end of the Middle Ages. The first section thus provides a background to this chapter and the one which follows.
