Conference: Summistae: The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Summa Theologiae’ – 16th to 18th Century
17-19 October 2013, Universidade do Porto
The Summa Theologiae is one of the classical works of the history of theology and philosophy. Beyond its influence in the Middle Ages, the Summa marked the teaching and the making of theology from the end of the fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. The replacement of Peter Lombard’s Sentences with the Summa as the standard text in the major chairs of the faculties of theology occurred first in Spain (though the lecturing on the Summa was already a practice in Dominican studia by the second half of the fifteenth century), but soon extended to all the universities and higher education colleges of the Catholic European area. Owing to this, commentaries on the Summa (in full or in part) started to be produced. The commentary tradition on the Summa became a specific literary genre.
The Summa commentaries are important for two reasons: they continue the tradition of medieval thought and they represent the Scholasticism which was known to Descartes and Leibniz.
The interest in the Summa commentaries has grown in recent decades. Although some conferences and collective volumes have been dedicated to the study of a single author, to the late scholastic political thought or to the commentaries produced in the sixteenth-century University of Salamanca, this is the first conference specifically devoted to the Summa commentaries. As the Summa touches on all the philosophical domains, this conference may provide an outline of the thought produced in early modern university.
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