Henry of Harclay

The English—though not the Scottish—historiographical tradition has not generally been hospitable to the ideas conceived and discussed within its boundaries. Hume, Lingard and Macaulay did not dwell on intellectual history; barely a trace of it can be found in the volumes of the original Oxford History of England, with the honourable exception, perhaps, of Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England. The idea of an eighteenth-century ‘English Enlightenment’, albeit plausible, has not caught on. Yet one of the liveliest and most distinctive traditions of scholarship, empirical science, innovative logic and abstract philosophy flourished in England from at least the age of Anselm onwards, institutionally sustained first by monastic houses and later by universities, and refreshed by constant cross-Channel interaction. To its great credit the British Academy has for many years quietly published a series of the outstanding witnesses to the earlier and more inaccessible phase of this tradition, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, and has consequently deprived historical scholars of any excuse for its further neglect. The present edition of the Quaestiones Ordinariae of Henry of Harclay, however, marks a new and momentous departure by including a particularly accessible translation of the text, which opens it to a much larger readership of historians of other periods, philosophers and others who might not have command of a rather forbidding scholastic Latin. With a little concentrated effort they will find it a revelation: an aperçu into a wide-ranging mind beholden to nobody, capable of historical thinking as well as of original ideas about the limits of the knowable, the nature of being and human free will

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Audience measurement · Enlightenment · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Revelation · Scholarship · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy