4. Individual and institution in scholastic historiography: Nicholas Trevet

Matthew Kempshall

Augustine’s epitome of the relationship between the divine institution of history and the human narration of individual historical events presented scholastic readers with as many questions as answers. Understanding the cause of events and setting out the sequence of human actions presupposed different types of knowledge and different purposes in writing. The individual instance of Nicholas Trevet, and the structure and practice of the institutions to which he belonged, indicate the complexity of the relationship between historical causation and historiographical narrative which resulted.

Augustine – the divine and human institution of history

According to Augustine, narrating individual historical events should be closely tied to the divinely instituted ordo temporum. This approach was founded on the purpose which such narrative is designed to serve. History, in this sense, should be distinguished from aetiology: ‘It is history’, Augustine writes, ‘when deeds done, whether by God or by humans, are commemorated … it is aetiology when the causes of what is said or done are set out’.² This is the conceptual demarcation which underpins his otherwise blunt statement that he will not try to narrate or commemorate the calamities of the second Punic War because, were he to do so, he would become nothing other than a writer of history.³ Analysing the causes of a particular event, on this reckoning, went beyond the writing of history. If the meaning of past events lay in the reasons why something happened, then the task of identifying them belonged, strictly speaking, not to the historian, but to prophets – individuals who proclaim God’s will in the future, but also in the past and the present. This did not mean that, for Augustine, narrating history was an otiose act. Writing down an individual’s res gestae, commemorating their deeds, could still serve a moral-didactic function: the subject-matter of history is useful (utilis) because it teaches or nurtures through examples (exempla) and hence constitutes the first of seven steps of spiritual understanding.⁴ However, this ethical utility clearly needed to stop short of the presumption of augury and divination. The result was an equivocal approach to history, two senses in which its record might be conceived: divine institution in the ordo temporum; human institution in the sense familiar from Quintilian and Lactantius (and subsequently Boethius, Cassiodorus, Cassian and Hrabanus Maurus), as a practice which is formative, exemplary and instructive.

One consequence of Augustine’s strictures in the middle ages was for writers of history to concentrate on chronography, recording the sequence of events within an overarching order of time. In formal terms, this meant annotating events to Easter tables, but this physical conjunction carried an interpretative significance, too. According to Augustine, humans experience time as a distension of the soul, an expression and consequence of their sin. Past, present and future, by contrast, exist simultaneously in God as a single point of ‘now’ (simul nunc). This differentiation between human and divine perception applies to the temporal succession of individual events, but also to the entirety of world history. As a result, only when the created universe is seen in its totality will the significance of the ordo temporum become clear.⁵ This is why prophets – humans who share, at least in part, God’s atemporal perspective – use the past tense to speak of events in the future. This is also why chroniclers left the providential significance of events open to interpretation by continuators – their historiography was a process, inherited from predecessors and passed on to successors. Such modesty was encapsulated in disclaimers. ‘I leave allegorical readings and interpretations appropriate to human conduct to be expanded by the learned’, wrote Orderic Vitalis, ‘setting myself the task of relating … straightforward history [simplex historia]’. Orderic’s aim was to record events whose significance might be revealed only in the future, or by those blessed with greater understanding and ability than his own.⁶ Likewise, William of Newburgh writes: ‘I am only a simple narrator [simplex narrator], not a prophetic interpreter [praesagus interpres]’.⁷

Such analytical restraint was particularly important for contemporary events. Again, this approach was indebted to Augustine, in this case to a division of the history of the world into six ages. On this reckoning, ‘sacred history’ was complete at the end of the fifth age, with the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Thereafter, the world had entered into old age (senectus mundi) and, as such, was characterized by exterior decay and interior renewal. Events in this sixth age are still governed by God, but they will not necessarily have the significance for the economy of salvation which can be traced for events in ages one through to five. God can, and will, continue to intervene directly in history, but such active providence will be even harder to unveil than in the past: ‘God’s ways are inscrutable and his judgements past searching out’ (Romans XI: 33). More prevalent in the sixth age, if not its defining characteristic, is permissive providence: God will allow events, and nature, to take their course.⁸

Augustine’s influence on medieval historiography concentrated attention on the constraints under which it operated: history was distinct from aetiology; chronography from prophecy; permissive providence from active providence. While humans could still learn from individual moral exempla and chart a natural order of events which was experienced in time, the providential order of those events might be unknown and, in the sixth age, unknowable. The resulting bifurcation of divine and human institution clearly raised fundamental methodological questions for historical narration. These came into particularly sharp focus when Augustine’s conceptualization was read alongside Aristotle’s analysis of knowledge and art.

Aristotle – individual actions and particular experience

Aristotle’s account of intellectual induction from particulars carried clear consequences for the individual deeds and events which form the subject matter of human history. The idea that empirical narrative could never, by itself, form the basis for a truly scientific discipline was aired in the Nicomachean Ethics, when Aristotle crisply dismissed the claims of sophists to teach political science. The acquisition of political knowledge, he argued, requires systematic reflection on the underlying principles of laws, not just the collection of individual examples. Without an understanding of the goal of the political community or of different forms of government, true knowledge of politics is impossible.⁹ In the Ethics Aristotle’s primary target was law and lawyers, but the criticism was also levelled at history and historians. The Poetics, for example, compared history to poetry very much to the former’s disadvantage:

Still more influential was Aristotle’s analysis of scientific knowledge in the Physics, Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics.

Since humans know something only when they know its causes and principles, ‘science’ requires, by definition, a knowledge of causes, and its principles had to be necessary and universal.¹¹ Both science and art derive from experience, where experimentum is the accumulation in the memory of a plurality of individual things. Whereas experience retains knowledge only of those singular particulars, art makes a universal judgement about the similarities found in the many things memory has stored. Experience may therefore know that something is (quia, quod), but art knows the cause and the reason why (causa, propter quid). Moreover, if art expresses a knowledge of causes, then, unlike experience, it can be taught, since teaching, too, requires a knowledge of causes.¹² The object of scientific knowledge is demonstrable and necessary, proceeding sometimes through induction, sometimes through deductive syllogism; art may not be concerned with things which come into being by necessity or in accordance with nature, but it still denotes a capacity to make something in accordance with a true course of reasoning.¹³ Singular instances, individual events and empirical particulars all remain, in and of themselves, the subject of experience, not of knowledge. This is not to say Aristotle thought there was no value in those particulars. His approach in the Historia animalium, for example, was to accumulate material preparatory to its explanatory study; likewise in the Politics, where particular circumstances of individual human communities are analysed to produce more generally applicable ‘types’ of human association. Nonetheless, the intellectual apprehension of experiential material will depend on the category of knowledge being attempted and addressed. Peter of Abano’s exposition of Aristotle’s Problemata encapsulates the point when explaining why some types of knowledge create a disposition (habitus) and others do not. The difference lies in the distinction between the scientific knowledge produced by demonstration and the ordering of cause and effect and the more common application of the term to knowledge drawn from the practically limitless and disordered number of particulars: the latter proceeds from narrative (that is, history), precept (that is, laws) or experience (that is, custom).¹⁴

For scholastic writers, there were clear implications to reading Aristotle’s emphasis on causality as the object of knowledge alongside Augustine’s distinction between history and aetiology. Both propositions appeared in close proximity at the start of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.¹⁵ Their consequences were spelled out by Vincent of Beauvais. A chronological account of res gestae from the beginning of the world to the present day, arranged according to the sequence of time (series temporum), will be a source of wonder (admiratio), refreshment (recreatio) and utility (utilitas). However, such material does not pertain to philosophy, because history narrates only singular deeds and, according to Aristotle, art cannot result from particulars.¹⁶ Its utility is determined by the nature of the audience. Aristotle’s Problemata, for example, asked why it is that people in general derive more pleasure from exempla and fables than from enthymemes and syllogisms. The answer is that the majority of people like to learn quickly, and they always learn more readily, by induction from what is familiar, from particulars accessible to their senses, than by deducing what is universal from demonstrative proofs. For Peter of Abano, this was why reading about the deeds of Trojans and Romans is more likely to keep people awake. It is also why people take greater pleasure from Roman history than res gestae which are either very old – his example is (Seneca’s) Hercules – or very recent – pope Boniface VIII.¹⁷

Put Aristotle and Augustine together, in other words, and it becomes clear why the subject of ‘history’ should have been absent from scholastic classificatory schemata of knowledge.¹⁸ Its material was taught as part of an initial training in grammar and served, at best, as a form of ethical instruction tailored to an audience of young, simple, uneducated or ignorant minds. This is why Giles of Rome opened his mirror for princes with a disclaimer that he would not proceed in a narrative manner.¹⁹ Giles never denies the didactic value of an exemplary method – a ruler ought to read about praiseworthy deeds (laudabilia gesta) and the history of his kingdom in order to learn how to rule correctly. For philosophers, however, Giles echoes the warning from the Ethics: to descend from general principles to particular eventualities is to practise unreflective sophistry.²⁰

It has been a longstanding criticism of medieval historiography that it either was not interested in or deliberately ignored the analysis of causes, even though causation had been made central to the definition of history-writing by a range of classical authorities. Tacitus stated his intention to describe ‘reasons and causes’, not ‘occurrences and events’; Virgil declared ‘happy … the person who has been able to understand the causes of things’.²¹ Concentration on causation had consequences for classification into genre and, in particular, for the distinction between writing history and compiling annals. According to Aulus Gellius (in a text known, in part, to John of Salisbury and, in full, to the Oxford Franciscan lector John of Wales), history is an exposition or demonstration of ‘deeds done’, while annals provide a compilation of these res gestae, following the order of each year; history is therefore superior because, whereas annals set out what was done and in what year it was done, history also sets out the reason (ratio) and the deliberation or prudential calculation (consilium) behind it.²² It is not the general applicability of this distinction which is at issue here, so much as its affinity to a scholastic historiography which was rooted in Aristotle’s analysis of how knowledge and art derive from the experience of particulars. The historical writing of Nicholas Trevet provides a case in point.

Nicholas Trevet – consolation, tragedy and instruction

The outlines of Trevet’s career and the chronology of at least some of his writings are reasonably secure. He incepted in theology at Oxford around 1302 and taught there until c.1307; a series of quodlibets and quaestiones survive, together with commentaries on Genesis and Exodus which were endorsed by the Dominican general chapter at Strasbourg in 1307. From c.1308 Trevet was in Paris, at the convent of Saint Jacques, returning to Oxford for a second spell as regent master in 1314 around the time he completed a commentary on the Psalms. From 1324 he was in London as the Dominican lector, until his death sometime after 1334.²³ It was during this final period that Trevet wrote, from the early 1320s, his Annals and Chronicles, the first a record of the deeds of Angevin kings from 1135 to 1307;²⁴ the second an account of the first five ages of the world from the creation to the birth of Christ,²⁵ a Latin text from which he subsequently produced an Anglo-Norman adaptation for Edward I’s daughter, Mary of Woodstock.²⁶ What has always intrigued modern scholars is the series of texts Trevet produced alongside these directly exegetical, theological and historical works. In the first instance there was a commentary on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written around 1300;²⁷ followed by a commentary on Seneca’s Declamations (specifically the Controversiae), written perhaps as early as 1306; then commentaries on Seneca’s Tragedies and the first and third decades of Livy’s Ab urbe condita,²⁸ both of which were completed before 1318. At some point between c.1300 and c.1318 Trevet also produced an exposition of the poetic and historical contents of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. These were all works which took Trevet beyond the institutional axis of Oxford and Paris, in particular to the Dominican houses of northern Italy (Santa Caterina in Pisa, Santa Maria Novella in Florence) and, after 1308, apparently to the papal court at Avignon, earning him the patronage of the Dominican cardinal Nicholas of Prato (who commissioned the commentary on Seneca’s Tragedies after reading Trevet on the Consolation and Declamations)²⁹ and Pope John XXII (to whom Trevet dedicated a copy of his commentary on Genesis).³⁰ These are also all works which set up an approach to the writing of history which is strikingly at odds with the annals and chronicles Trevet himself went on to compose after 1320.

It is, of course, methodologically problematic to start from an assumption about what sort of text ‘should’ be produced by a particular writer at a particular time given a particular sort of intertextual background, but Trevet’s Annals and Chronicles offer a prime example. Take the conjunction of Boethius and Seneca which is so central to Trevet’s ‘literary’ output.³¹ The Consolation of Philosophy emphasized the mutability of fortune and the transitoriness of worldly goods as counterpoints to the immutability of wisdom, virtue and truth. When Trevet expounded Boethius, he accordingly underlined the value of contemplating how temporal power and happiness can be so swiftly overthrown.³² The writing of history was a natural extension of this principle: ‘[A]ncient times are full, and the present times are full too, of examples of kings whose happiness changed to misfortune’.³³ This was originally a Stoic insight: for Seneca, ‘the greatest solace exists in the thought that what has happened to you has been suffered by everyone before you and will be suffered by everyone who comes after. For that reason … it is the nature of things to have made common what is made hardest to bear so that the equality of fate might be a consolation for its cruelty’.³⁴ However, it clearly resonated in late antique historiography, from Rufinus of Aquileia’s translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History to Orosius’s generalization from Virgil’s sententia, ‘perhaps it will help one day to remember even these things’ – remembrance of the past provided consolation for the sufferings of the present.³⁵

When Trevet turned to Seneca’s Tragedies he emphasized their combination of pleasure and utility, defining the latter as the correction of moral conduct through exempla. Like a prudent doctor, Seneca coated bitter medicine with honey in order to cloak ethical teaching in pleasing fables, eradicating vice and cultivating virtue.³⁶ Once again, however, the underlying theme is the impermanence of human power, set alongside the corrupting effects of worldly passion. The result is a narrative of fortune and fate, to which regal families (of Athens, Thebes and Troy) are particularly and destructively susceptible. This process is exemplified by the house of Atreus, in which the consequences of fraternal strife are played out across successive generations.³⁷ Trevet accordingly introduces the Tragedies with a definition of the genre familiar from Isidore’s Etymologies: its subject matter is antiqua gesta, the misfortunes of kings and of great men and the res publica.³⁸

Between Trevet’s exposition of the Consolation and the Tragedies came his commentary on Seneca’s Declamations.³⁹ Schoolroom exercises on legal cases ( causae or controversiae) were not the most obvious text, perhaps, for Trevet to choose, as he put it, to rescue from obscurity, but his justification was that they served a complementary function to Cicero’s De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Eloquence, according to Cicero, is acquired in three ways: through art, imitation and exercise. Cicero himself, according to Trevet, provides guidelines for the first, but Seneca for the second and third. The primary value of the Declamations therefore lies in their epigrammatic sententiae – pithy and striking maxims for which Sallust is held up as a prime exponent. As a result, the text is shot through with reflections on the mutability of fortune, the impermanence of human happiness, on tyranny and tyrants and the degeneration of society through luxury and sloth.⁴⁰

When Trevet turned, finally, to Livy’s Ab urbe condita, he compiled supplementary material and chronology from a range of historical sources: Justin’s Epitome of Pompeius Trogus; Sallust; Virgil; Valerius Maximus; Eutropius; Augustine and Orosius. Livy’s own statement of intent is analysed as a rhetorical proemium designed to make its readers benevolent and teachable, especially through setting out its utility. Trevet accordingly reiterates the usefulness of imitating good examples and avoiding the wicked. He also draws out Livy’s concern to provide consolation from the decadence of an age ‘when neither our vices nor their remedies can be endured’. These evils, Trevet explains, are the avarice, lust and luxury which had been introduced by the passage of time (processus temporum) – this is Ovid’s age of iron, characterized by greed, lust for wealth and the luxury caused by sloth. Trevet chooses to expand on the consequences – avarice shortens human life and brings physical and material destruction – and gives Livy’s consolation from present evils a precise historical context: the pernicious and debilitating effects of the civil wars initiated by Caesar and Pompey. He makes this final point with a reference to Statius’s Thebaid, but also to Seneca’s Declamations: in writing about the deeds of the Romans (de gestis Romanorum sive de rebus Romanis), Livy was consciously emulating Sallust.⁴¹

The inference from all these commentaries is clear. Trevet’s literal exposition of Boethius, Seneca and Livy suggests an individual who, when it came to writing a history of his own, might reasonably be expected to have constructed a narrative of exemplary moral and political edification, of consolation for the mutability of temporal prosperity, for the vicissitudes of fortune to which rulers are subject from one generation to the next. This was, after all, the approach taken by Albertino Mussato, Trevet’s exact contemporary in Padua, another scholar in the orbit of Nicholas of Prato and another close reader of Boethius’s Consolation and Seneca’s Tragedies (including Trevet’s own commentary on Hercules furens). Mussato saw the writing of history explicitly in terms of tragedy (he describes himself as istoriographus et tragoedus) and as consolation for the fluctuations of time and fortune. This association made historiography the appropriate vehicle for his narrative of the rise and fall of rulers and led him to write separately on fortune and chance events; Seneca’s Tragedies provided the model for his Ecerinis (1314), in which Ezzelino da Romano serves as exemplary historical commentary on the contemporary threat of Can Grande della Scala.⁴² Mussato, moreover, was himself not just an observer, but an active participant in the political crises he narrated. His missions to Henry VII in 1311 to 1312 prompted a historical account of the emperor’s deeds, the Historia Augusta (1310–13), while imprisonment in 1314 and exile in 1318 resulted in De Gestis Italicorum post mortem Henrici VII Caesaris (1313–21).⁴³ Here it was Mussato’s familiarity with Sallust and Livy (his fellow Paduan historiographer) which left the deepest imprint on his view of history as a means of analysing the corruption and decline of his native city.

Trevet, too, was writing in times of acute crisis – in the aftermath of 1311– 12 (the Ordinances); 1314 (the battle of Bannockburn); and the conflict of 1317–18; in the midst of the civil war of 1321 to 1322 (Thomas of Lancaster); and against a backdrop of famine (1315–22), the flight of the Dominicans from London (1326) and the deposition and death of Edward II (1326–7). And yet tragic narrative is not the approach Trevet chooses for his history. Rather than produce an explanatory narrative of events, Trevet compiles a chronographic record of deeds done. In the Annals, a digest of events in the Angevin kingdom since 1135 is periodically expanded to include material from Capetian, imperial and papal affairs, as well as from Trevet’s own Dominican order, before stopping at Edward I’s death in 1307. While epitaphs, character descriptions, natural phenomena, miracles and official documents are included, these are pared down and subordinated to an annalistic format. In the Chronicles, Trevet limits himself to what he calls annotatio annorum or annotatio temporum, for which his explicit model is the comparative and synchronized chronography of Eusebius, Isidore and Bede. Indeed, Trevet makes a point of quoting criticism of both Livy and Sallust for having exceeded the scope of history (modus historiae) when they included direct discourse composed in their own style. Trevet’s own priority remained the resolution of conflicting chronologies for the events themselves.⁴⁴

Nicholas Trevet – the institution of the Dominican order

Why, then, did Trevet’s historiography express such literary and analytical restraint? The conventional explanation is that Trevet was in his sixties and simply too busy as Dominican lector to do anything more than compile a chronological digest of events.⁴⁵ These same institutional duties may also have demanded this sort of approach. Trevet accepted that differences in aptitude and education meant people would come to the truth in different ways – some through logical demonstration, some through authority and some through fables. Such pedagogic flexibility was, in fact, the reason he had originally turned to Seneca. De disciplina scolarium (a text attributed to Boethius and widely read among English Dominicans) put Seneca first on its list of recommended authors for elementary instruction in grammar on the basis of his ability to handle and transmit his material (traditio).⁴⁶ This is a judgement which Trevet repeats: Seneca adapted his teaching and, for simple minds, this meant instruction though plain and unadorned precepts.⁴⁷ It was the duty of a Dominican lector to accommodate his teaching to the capabilities of his audience; to speak clearly and intelligibly about useful and expedient subjects; to avoid novel opinions; to keep to old and more established ones; and never to talk about what he did not properly understand himself. Leaving aside the multitude of things which could be said about individual passages, the lector should only expound the letter of the text.⁴⁸ Such institutional practice certainly fits Trevet’s approach to his commentaries on Boethius, Seneca and Livy, where his primary concern was always the literal meaning, making sense of the words themselves rather than elucidating their further significance. This was also the case with De civitate Dei, where Trevet’s exposition of allusions to classical history, mythology and poetry is expressly designed to make books I–X and book XVIII easier to read and comprehend.⁴⁹

Applied specifically to historiography, a lector’s pedagogic priorities would certainly be consistent with the production of an updated chronographical handbook. This seems to be the purpose of Trevet’s Computus Hebraeorum, for example, a 1310 treatise on the Jewish calendar which accompanied his commentaries on the Old Testament.⁵⁰ It would also explain why Trevet incorporated so much material from Vincent of Beauvais and Martin of Troppau, viewing his own work as a continuation, adopting the annalistic style and the tabular format of his Dominican predecessors for events after 1277, but ensuring that information about popes and emperors was extended, in his own chronicle, to include deeds of the kings of England and of France.⁵¹ This is an ‘encyclopaedic’ approach to events of the past, in other words, an instrument and resource for Dominican teaching, following an approach which had its roots in Hugh of St Victor and Peter Comestor. Dominicans received such instruction under the heading de tadiumon temporum, a rubric covering the ages of the world, its duration and a chronology which comprised a brief chronicle of biblical history, kings, Christianity and other religions.⁵² Collections of moral exempla might subsequently draw on such historical material – as Humbert of Romans recommended, ‘there are many histories, not only amongst the faithful, but also amongst infideles, which work very well in preaching for edification’.⁵³ Such exemplification, however, was conceived as a separate exercise. Moral instruction may rest on the historical circumstances of person, place and time (and, as Vincent of Beauvais cautioned, res gestae which are presented without the certitude of chronology or regnal years are not to be accepted as history),⁵⁴ but this always constituted a second level of interpretation.

If chronography and chronicles occupied a significant but circumscribed place within Dominican institutional education, Trevet’s approach bears comparison with his contemporary Bernard Gui. In 1304 Gui was commissioned by the general chapter at Toulouse to produce a historical compilation of the deeds and deliberations of the Dominican order, including biographical notices of individual friars and summaries of the proceedings of its chapters. In 1312–13 Gui put together a catalogue of Reges Francorum and began to assemble a universal chronicle from the birth of Christ, collecting and excerpting material from earlier chronicles and gesta, including Vincent of Beauvais, Gerard of Fracheto and Martin of Troppau. These Flores chronicarum were sent, in 1316, to the master-general, Berengar of Landorre, and, in 1319, to Pope John XXII; they were then continuously revised and supplemented until Gui’s own death in 1331. Unlike the explicitly exemplary and didactic purpose of Gui’s Speculum sanctorale (a hagiographical collection undertaken at the request, again, of Berengar and presented, in part, to John XXII in 1324), Gui’s chronicles were deliberately focussed on giving greater precision to the date and order of events. They were also explicitly distinguished from the writing of history. Historiography, Gui explains, concentrates on putting singular events together into a full written account of the history and sequence of gesta; chronography, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with annotating the times and running succinctly through the deeds to be remembered.⁵⁵

Dominican historiography expressed an institutional practice which also went beyond its foundational role in an educational programme. A definitively chronographical approach served as a marked contrast to other forms of historical writing which were being produced at the same time. Orosius’s interpretation of the scourges [plagae] of Egypt as the antetype for ten persecutions of the Church – an interpretation whose presumption had been immediately questioned by Augustine – opened the possibility of reading historical events in the Bible as a programmatic template for the period between the New Testament and the Second Coming.⁵⁶ Correlating the construction, destruction and restoration of the Temple at Jerusalem, for example, with the planting, scourging and reformation of the Church, or the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah with the rise and fall of Christian kingdoms, provided an attractively clear explanation for the vicissitudes of contemporary ecclesiastical and political events. Twelfth-century writers such as Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Gerhoh of Reichersberg and Anselm of Havelberg had all pushed this pattern hard, identifying a specific providential order to events in the sixth age and finding it in the seven gifts of the holy spirit from Isaiah or the seven seals and the seven-headed dragon from Revelation. This approach culminated in Joachim of Fiore’s elaborate concordance of individual events in the Old Testament with individual events in Christian history since the New Testament – a pairing which revealed the imminence of the opening of the sixth seal in the third status of the Holy Spirit and a corresponding age of spiritual renewal.⁵⁷ Bonaventure may have tempered Joachim’s conclusions, but he retained enough of this historicizing perspective to make his approach influential on subsequent Franciscan historiography.⁵⁸ Trevet was not oblivious to the dangers this could pose, since both Nicholas of Prato and Thomas Jorz (provincial prior of the English Dominicans) sat on commissions of inquiry into the work of Peter John Olivi. Apocalyptic frameworks of global history were also not exclusive to spiritual Franciscans: in 1255 Humbert of Romans had issued a joint encyclical with John of Parma which accepted a salvific role for both their orders; in 1300 the Dominican John of Paris responded to Arnaud of Villanova’s anticipation of Antichrist with a treatise which demonstrated familiarity, if not sympathy, with Joachim of Fiore’s historicism; in 1313 Henry of Harclay drew directly on Joachim when discussing whether astrology could be used to calculate the date of the Second Coming.⁵⁹ Placed in this context, it remains a striking emphasis of Trevet’s dedicatory letter to his Chronicles not only that he was completing a work which had broken off after the first three of Augustine’s six ages, but also that Trevet himself thought it was finished once he had reached the end of the fifth age – that is, without moving on to the sixth. A careful reader of Augustine’s De civitate Dei knew providence did things differently there, that interpretation of the significance of events since the resurrection risked crossing the line separating history from prophecy.

Trevet’s approach to historiography as a Dominican lector was shaped, finally, by the insular and provincial context within which he was writing. The immediate sources for his account of the kings of the English in the twelfth century – Robert of Torigni, William of Newburgh and Ralph de Diceto – provided Trevet with clear definitions of, and justifications for, chronicles and chronography (chronographia, id est temporum descriptio),⁶⁰ together with a condemnation of the lies which could be propagated in fabulous and prophetic narratives such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (a text which Trevet also knew at first hand).⁶¹ When Trevet dealt with the kings of the thirteenth century, he made it clear that a major aim of his own Annals was to correct a selective understanding of the previous 120 years. In Trevet’s opinion, historical narratives since the beginning of John’s reign had been skewed, either by negligence or by a popular hostility to kings. Trevet’s appeal to the general utility of his work (communis utilitas) was accordingly more than a bland convention – it had correction of Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris and the Flores historiarum firmly in its sights.⁶² This approach to Angevin historiography derived additional resonance from the institutional ties which bound the English province to the patronage of both Edward I and Edward II. Trevet’s connections here were personal: the body of Piers Gaveston lay in the Oxford convent until its translation to the new Dominican foundation at King’s Langley in 1314; John Lenham, dedicatee of Trevet’s Declamations, was Edward II’s confessor until 1315; John of Drokensford (Droxford), dedicatee of Trevet’s De officii Missae, was master of the wardrobe under Edward I and an important political figure under Edward II.⁶³ Such proximity may well have heightened Trevet’s sensitivity to the abuse of history, therefore, when on 29 December 1314 Henry of Harclay delivered a sermon at Oxford for the feast of Thomas Becket which set out the punishments visited by God upon the second and third generations of those guilty of the archbishop’s murder. Starting with King John, whose conduct towards Stephen Langton had clearly imitated the sins of his father, and invoking the prophecies of Merlin (including one from Joachim of Fiore), Harclay suggested that the English defeat at Bannockburn might indicate a continuation of the same retributive justice.⁶⁴ In 1317 Nicholas of Wisbech, the Dominican confessor to Margaret of Brabant (sister of Edward II and Mary of Woodstock), appears to have persuaded the king that, were Edward to be anointed with the holy oil of Thomas Becket, his prophesied travails as the fifth ruler after Henry II would come to an end.⁶⁵ Viewed from this perspective (Wisbech’s mission to John XXII – for which Edward II wrote a letter to Bernard Gui – was rejected), a historical narrative written by an Oxford Dominican of the deeds of English kings from Henry II to Edward I, let alone a narrative which included prophecies by Merlin, had to negotiate some sensitive political territory.⁶⁶ In covering the deeds of Angevin kings towards Becket, Langton and Winchelsea, as well as the events of 1215, 1258 to 1264 and 1297 to 1298, Trevet’s Annals needed to tread a delicate line. What was said in his historical narrative and, perhaps more significantly, left unsaid, had to be weighed very carefully indeed.⁶⁷

All these institutional considerations, then, may constitute, in themselves, sufficient reason for Trevet to eschew the moralizing approach to history which was invited by his close reading of Boethius, Seneca and Livy and opt, instead, for the annotation of annals and chronography. However, if Trevet’s restraint was shaped by an appreciation of Seneca’s insistence that subtlety should be concealed behind an apparently straightforward, open text,⁶⁸ then it might also serve as an example of a ‘scholastic’ approach to historiography conditioned by Augustinian and Aristotelian strictures on the distinction between history and aetiology, between what is humanly and divinely instituted. Trevet’s self-denial, in other words, also reflected a deliberate, theoretically informed understanding of his subject.

Historiography and causation

Historical causation was an issue Trevet had been compelled to confront by the extended discussion of divine and human causes which he found in the writings of Boethius. In part this derived from a distillation of Cicero’s analysis of intrinsic arguments drawn from circumstance – what happened before, during and after a particular event. Such argumentation concentrated on efficient causes and what they bring about. A knowledge of causes produces a knowledge of effects, but also vice versa: just as the cause shows what has been effected, so the effect demonstrates the cause. This extends to secondary causes – what the Stoics termed ‘fate’ – namely those things (place, time, material, means) which will not, in themselves, produce an effect, but without which that effect cannot be produced. Some of these secondary causes result from nature, some from human will; some are clear, some lie hidden; causes which are clear pertain to human will; causes which are hidden are subject to ‘fortune’, a term which serves as shorthand for causes that are unknown: ‘[S]ince nothing happens without a cause, fortune is simply what is effected by an obscure and hidden cause’.⁶⁹

The exactness which Boethius brought to Cicero’s terminology, and the wider debate about the divine ordering of the universe on which he drew, had a profound impact on how the argumentation of cause and effect was subsequently understood. Boethius glossed Cicero’s use of the word ‘fate’, for example, as ‘a certain intricate interweaving and chain-like connection of antecedent causes and consequent events’.⁷⁰ Like Cicero, Boethius was concerned to reserve freedom for the human will against the necessity of events. He did so by distinguishing between different types of antecedent cause. When discussing Cicero’s use of ‘fortune’, therefore, Boethius proffered a formulation based on Aristotle’s definition of chance (casus):

For Boethius, both fortune and chance were terms which denoted the consequence of some other cause. Either as the unintended consequence of a particular action or as the result of a conjunction of separate causes whose combined consequence may have been unforeseen by the individuals who performed the original actions, casus should be defined in terms of a chain of causes, not a random force.

Boethius provided scholastic writers with a wide theological and philosophical field in which to place their language of causality. Reference to the ‘fluctuations’ of fortune and chance might indicate no more than a comparison of the world to the unpredictable character of the sea. However, using the terms fortune and chance could also mark a recognition that unexpected events can arise from the conjunction of antecedent, secondary and efficient causes. In this respect Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy dovetailed with Plato’s Timaeus, where Calcidius offers a comparable discussion of how a divinely ordained universe operates under providence, fate, human power, fortune and chance. Given that some things are necessary, some are possible and some are contingent (dubium), there is no intrinsic contradiction in distinguishing between a primary or principal cause and a secondary or incidental cause. Human deliberation over contingent subjects expresses a freedom to perform acts of virtue and vice, but the consequences of these actions may themselves interact and produce results which are beyond human control and at variance with their original intention. Fortune is therefore defined as ‘the concurrence of two simultaneously occurring causes that draw their origin from an intention, from which concurrence something happens that occasions surprise independently of what was hoped for’.⁷² This view of causation accommodated, rather than rejected, the epistemological uncertainty which might otherwise characterize a particular course of events. Appealing to providence and fortune, in other words, was not an admission of historiographical defeat; instead, it reflected a coherent scheme which acknowledged, not denied, the interweaving of causes and the temporal ordering of what happens in a world that is ultimately governed by God.

When Trevet commented on Boethius, he drew an explicit comparison with Augustine’s discussion of fate and fortune, noting his acknowledgment that fortune is shorthand for causes which human understanding cannot grasp.⁷³ In explaining the operation of divine providence, Trevet also spelled out how the order of things (ordo rerum) is executed through the mediation of secondary causes, observing that the sequence or arrangement of these subordinate secondary causes is termed ‘fate’. These secondary causes include the actions of free human will, which are entirely consistent with divine foreknowledge. The appearance of disorder in the events of this world, not least the prosperity enjoyed by the wicked, is thus the result of an ignorance of causes (ignorantia causarum), but also of a human inability to judge who is good, who is bad and what might be beneficial for either – all that is evident to human eyes is individual human actions (gesta). Boethius himself had appealed, in this context, to Lucan’s reservations over the providential justice of Caesar’s victory over Pompey, given the latter’s support from the exemplary wisdom and virtue of Cato. Trevet adds Augustine’s similar concerns over the sufferings of the just at the hands of the wicked. The ordo rerum, Trevet concludes, has a dual aspect – natural and providential – and, while humans can chart the former, the latter remains inscrutable (Romans XI: 33).⁷⁴

If Trevet’s reading of Boethius made him familiar with a distinction between primary and secondary causes within the ordo rerum, this was given a still sharper historiographical edge by the discussion of God’s knowledge of future contingents which had been prompted by the propositions condemned at Paris in 1277.⁷⁵ The question of the contingency of future events also had its roots in Boethius’s Consolation, but it extended to consideration of events in the past.⁷⁶ In Augustine’s view, events which have happened in the past cannot be undone (nec infecta fieri possunt). However, if an event is contingent before it occurs, will it become necessary as soon as it has happened or does it retain its original contingency? At Oxford Trevet used his quodlibetic and disputed questions to discuss the precise nature of the causal relationship between providential foreknowledge and human agency. God’s knowledge may be a necessary cause of all things, he concluded, but this efficient cause can co-exist with the secondary and immediate causes of contingent events.⁷⁷ In February 1315 Trevet was signatory to Henry of Harclay’s condemnation of some of the more extreme propositions which had been drawn from the notion of God’s absolute power.⁷⁸ Viewed from this perspective, Trevet’s explicit distinction between a natural order of events, which takes place in time and can be known by humans, and a providential ordering of those same events, which may be unknown or unknowable, provides an important point of departure for his subsequent historiographical restraint in simply annotating the series temporum with a compilation of human gesta.⁷⁹

Trevet’s apprehension of the divine institution of events in the ordo temporum, finally, was matched by an appreciation of the human institution of its narration. This point emerges from his commentary on the Psalms.⁸⁰ Bonaventure’s fourfold distinction between writer, compiler, commentator and author provided an influential framework within which both the form and the content of the Psalter could be discussed. A scriptor does not add or change anything which is written by others; a compilator adds to what is written by others but nothing of his own; a commentator adds his own material to that of others, but only for clarification; an auctor, finally, writes his own material, adding that of others only for support.⁸¹ The particular role of Ezra in the Psalms, compiling historical material whose primary and secondary efficient causes were God and David respectively, naturally invited discussion of the distinction which should be drawn between deeds or events (res gestae) and their subsequent collection and organization. Ezra’s compilation, Trevet observed, replaced the historical order of the Psalms with an artificial order so as to elicit their praise of God.⁸² The act of compilation, in other words, was not a neutral activity; it was itself an interpretative act. Maintaining the temporal sequence of historical deeds (ordo rerum gestarum) reflected a different level of meaning and interpretation from their literary re-presentation or artificial re-ordering. In his own historical writing Trevet was, by this measure, a writer and compiler of human deeds and events, not a commentator or author using them to support an opinion of his own; and, if he was a compiler, then this should not involve rearranging his material from the chronological order instituted by God.

Boethius’s discussion of causes which human understanding may or may not grasp, combined with Augustine’s distinction between the divine and human institution of history, gave Trevet a particular perspective on historiography. Reluctance to claim insight into the divine meaning of events was balanced by a well-developed language of causation and by an awareness of the causes which were more clearly discernible, namely individual human actions (res gestae). When Trevet presents the order of these events and deeds in his Annals and Chronicles, therefore, this was a deliberate acknowledgment of the limits on his own human understanding. This is of a piece with Aristotle’s classification of science, art and the experience of particulars, but also with Augustine’s distinction between history and aetiology. None of this amounted to a lack of interest in causation, be it the primary cause of God’s providence or the secondary cause of human gesta. Far from it. What it represented was a recognition that analysis of efficient and, above all, final causes would take a narrative of events beyond a strict definition of the series temporum, either towards moral instruction or to prophecy. Setting out and compiling the ordo rerum within the divinely instituted sequence of time, the divine institution of history, was one task; commenting on and understanding the providential order of those same events was quite another; using those individual human gesta as particular exempla to instruct a less learned audience in more general truths of ethical conduct, the human institution of history, was different again. In each case, the choice of literary format for the narrative of what was done – chronography, prophecy, poetry, tragedy, maxim, or homily – presupposed a particular explanatory purpose and a particular level of comprehension in an audience. Trevet’s chronography, therefore, indicates a choice, not a failure of historical imagination or a lack of conceptual and methodological sophistication. Reading Augustine, Aristotle and Boethius made Trevet aware of the line he had to tread; reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris and the Flores historiarum – and listening to Henry of Harclay – made him acutely aware of the dangers of getting it wrong.

Historical knowledge as a scholastic discipline

Aristotle’s epistemology presented scholastic historiography with a particular conceptual challenge. Given that the individual, by definition, constituted a unique collection of proper features not to be found elsewhere,⁸³ historical narrative needed to find a means of universalizing or generalizing the accidents of time, place and position so that this experience (experimentum) could become the subject both of knowledge and teaching. Either individual things (res) could be ordered in terms of their causes, or their common features could be identified and abstracted so that an inductive comparison of these particulars produced general principles. Writers of historical deeds (res gestae) accordingly elicited an intellectual order either through chronology or through ethical typology. In the case of moral philosophy, this process yielded truths ‘for the most part’ (ut frequentius),⁸⁴ exemplary paradigms of human conduct, or maxims of political counsel and deliberation. In the case of ordered causation in time, apprehension of the meaning of these individual res depended either on a simultaneous vision of the entirety of history or on prophetic insight; otherwise, knowledge of the co-efficiency of their primary cause (divine providence) and secondary cause (nature, human will) will necessarily be tempered by ignorance. The series temporum, however, was a divinely instituted order which remained accessible to human understanding, even if it needed to be left as an open-ended record of events to be continued by successive generations and even if the sixth age imposed its own limitations on whether its events belonged to an overarching pattern of sacred history. The result, in short, was a bifurcation of historiographical approaches – on the one hand, universalized or exemplified individual human gesta, and, on the other, a sequence of events recorded within a universal chronography – each of which rested on, and expressed, a different understanding of the human experience of time.⁸⁵

Trevet’s formal choice of annals and chronicles marked a deliberate restatement of Augustinian restraint at a time when the same historical material was clearly being deployed by other writers for very different theological and political ends. Trevet was an individual with his own contingent circumstances of time, place and position, moreover, and he intersected with a number of overlapping institutional structures and practices (the Dominican convents at Pisa, Florence, Paris and London; the university at Paris; the papal court at Avignon; the Angevin court in England). These reveal much about his ‘scholastic’ historiography, first and foremost the particular way in which, as a Dominican lector, he read and responded to a range of authoritative scriptural, patristic and classical texts by recovering and expounding the literal meaning which had been intended by their authors. Nor did Trevet have to move outside his Dominican order to become interested in the conjunction of Aristotelian philosophy and classical historiography. If he was sent to northern Italy in the late 1290s as part of the expansion of Dominican studia in the province, the friars with whom he is likely to have come into contact formed, in themselves, a classically learned group. Trevet himself states that he expounded Boethius in response to the entreaties of fellow Dominicans, sending a copy of his commentary to his former teacher and now colleague ‘Paulus’ (possibly Paulo dei Pilastri, prior of Santa Caterina in 1297 to 1298 and Santa Maria Novella in 1298 to 1299).⁸⁶ Tolomeo of Lucca, whose interests extended to Livy, Sallust and Valerius Maximus, was prior of Santa Maria Novella from 1300 to 1302, while Bartolomeo of San Concordio, who commented on Virgil and Seneca’s Tragedies and translated Sallust into Tuscan, was in Florence between 1297 and 1304.⁸⁷ It was not access to, or interest in, classical texts themselves, however, which defined Trevet’s approach to historiography, but the particular Augustinian and Aristotelian perspective from which he did so. Trevet’s institutional practice, in this respect, remained the product of the provincial Dominican studium at Oxford and, in particular, of the pedagogic tradition initiated by Robert Kilwardby.

In expounding De civitate Dei, Trevet reveals that he followed the chapter divisions created by Kilwardby in order to facilitate the teaching and studying of Augustine’s text.⁸⁸ Kilwardby’s influence extended to De ortu scientiarum, a work which Trevet describes as ‘fascinating and useful’ (curiosus utilisque).⁸⁹ Following his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Kilwardby had analysed how Aristotle’s ‘scientific’ methodology should be applied to both speculative philosophy and the active philosophy of ethics and mechanics, ‘linguistic disciplines’ (scientiae sermocinales) which deal with human actions. It was possible to attain knowledge of the latter, he argued, but only in so far as their singular subject matter is abstracted into the sort of universal that forms the basis of science. Knowledge of universals, he explains, is produced by intellectual reflection on what is common to the multitude of particular sense experiences and to the exclusion of the circumstances of time and place in which they occurred. The ‘sciences’ of ethics and mechanics, in other words, deal with the contingencies of human conduct, but these singulars have to contain a form of the universal in order to become known and be taught. For this last requirement, Kilwardby developed a concept of the ‘vague’ or indefinite singular (singulare vagum vel incertum) which he found in Avicenna: whereas the singular individual is specific to place and time, the vague individual is abstracted from the circumstances which properly individuate it.⁹⁰

For scholastic writers of history, the danger posed by ethical exemplification was that it would become more and more detached from its contingent and individuating historical circumstances until historiography was modelled simply on the Facta et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus.⁹¹ A case in point was John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, a work which, in Trevet’s own summary, persuaded its audience of moral virtue through exempla and fables.⁹² The risk of such detachment was accentuated if historical narrative was also categorized as a form of ethical instruction best suited for those who are less learned and who are therefore moved to action by exempla and enthymemes rather than by demonstrative proofs and syllogisms. Augustine’s view of the human institution of history warned against the presumption of divination, but he paired this category with ‘similar literature’ (et quaequae similes litterae) on the basis of a broader distinction between narrating what has been done (facta) and teaching what should be done (facienda). History may be useful in teaching through examples, in other words, but it becomes something different in the process. Hugh of St Victor picked up on this point when he established clear limits to the scope of historiography. History becomes tropology, he argued, when what has been done (factum) is changed into what should be done (faciendum), as we turn a narrative of someone else’s deeds to our own instruction by conforming to their example of how to live.⁹³ Trevet’s writing of history embodied the same concern. History remained, in essence, the annotatio temporum rather than the institutio morum. It should therefore limit itself to a chronographical ordering of events in which the deeds of individuals express the co-efficiency of the primary cause of divine providence with the secondary cause of human agency. When it came to considering the relationship of these two efficient causes to the final cause, for a writer or compiler of history to accept restrictions on his human understanding might constitute more prudent counsel than his presumption of a prophetic proclamation of God’s will.

This did not mean Trevet was unable to conceive of an alternative approach to the writing of history: his close reading of Boethius, Seneca and Livy gave him a different model for historiography and Albertino Mussato demonstrated the type of narrative which could result. Mussato knew Aristotle’s Metaphysics, including the commentaries by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and his contact with Dominicans extended to a debate over the nature of poetic theology with the lector at Padua, Giovannino of Mantua (1315–16).⁹⁴ Not enough is known about Trevet’s sojourn in northern Italy to say how much he may have been familiar with the Paduan ‘humanism’ initiated by Lovato dei Lovati, and there is no evidence that Trevet visited Padua in person (although the Dominican general chapter did meet there in 1308). Nonetheless, the comparison of Trevet with Mussato reveals one final institutional practice which may, in itself, account for the contrast in their approach to historiography.

If Aristotle was at his most ‘historical’ when setting out the contingent circumstances of individual communities in the Politics, he did so from the perspective of a specific medical diagnosis, namely the avoidance of stasis or mutatio. The efficient cause of political instability was an imbalance in the constituent elements of the body politic. This was a lesson, and an approach, which was taken to heart by Mussato: his understanding of historical causation may have been conditioned by the relationship of human agency to fortune, fate and the divine will, but it extended to considerations of nature, astrology and geography. In particular, Mussato recast his Sallustian and Livian emphasis on the corruption caused by avarice and luxury as a natural process of ‘constitutional’ development, from health to decay. Like Marsilius of Padua, who explicitly distinguished between primary and secondary efficient causation, sought the cause of tranquillity in the healthy disposition of the constituent parts of the political community and identified the hidden cause of illness as the historical gesta behind papal plenitude of power,⁹⁵ Mussato’s approach to historical explanation drew on the epistemological model of medicine. Mussato’s friendship with Marsilius is well attested (Marsilius was the dedicatee of his dialogue on Seneca’s Tragedies in c.1315), but their shared institutional context in the studium at Padua is more suggestive still. Mussato had actively encouraged Marsilius to study medicine; and it is the relationship of both writers to the teaching of Peter of Abano which led them to concentrate on the secondary material and efficient causes of nature – including the history of human gesta.⁹⁶

Viewed from the perspective of the divine and human institution of history, the primary and secondary efficient causation of gesta across time, the difference in emphasis between Trevet and Mussato is marked. In this respect Lorenzo Valla can serve as an illuminating codicil, not so much for his virtuoso deployment of judicial rhetoric on the Donation of Constantine as for his commemoration of the deeds of Ferdinand of Naples. Valla’s prologue to these Gesta emphasizes the utility of history by turning Aristotle’s hierarchy of disciplines on its head. Some philosophers, he writes, not just any but the greatest and most ancient among them, have placed history beneath poetry on the grounds that poetry is closer to philosophy because it deals with what is general and sets down universal precepts on the basis of made-up exempla. Homer actually teaches people to become good and wise, whereas Thucydides merely narrates what Pericles did next. Aristotle, Valla responds, was simply wrong to claim that history does not deal with universal propositions. The second half of Valla’s prologue is then devoted to the task of demonstrating just how difficult history is to write. It requires care, insight and judgement to find out about something when it is the subject of so much disagreement; it is very rare, he points out, for the same action or event to be narrated in the same way by several people, because different individuals have different reasons for demonstrating either ignorance or credulity; it is also hardly possible for one person to perceive with their five senses all the individual circumstances which attend a particular deed. A historian’s investigation of the truth is, in this regard, an activity which requires no less accuracy and wisdom than are shown by a judge or a doctor (aut iudici … aut medico).⁹⁷ Valla’s choice of comparison here is revealing.

For the writing of history to emphasize the particular contingencies of time and place which moral exemplification needed to transcend, and to do so without remaining at the level of experience or incurring the charge of unreflective sophistry, required association with the judicial rhetoric for which appreciation of these individual circumstances was essential to its forensic practice. For the writing of history to concentrate on natural causation rather than voluntary causation, on efficient causes which go beyond the human agency of gesta, required familiarity with an intellectual tradition – medicine and, by extension, astrology – that was more comfortable with drawing reliable causal inferences from individual experience and external effects. This is the aetiology embodied by Galen: establishing causes from external effects and signs, thereby securing the ‘scientific’ nature of medical knowledge against the inductive experience of the empiricists. In neither case was such an approach necessarily or fundamentally incompatible with Augustine’s view of the human institution of history. The phrase fides indicis (trustworthiness of a witness) literally points its finger to one aspect of this equation: the circumstances of time and place which are central to the rhetoric of judicial inquiry. The subsequent history of the term ‘aetiology’, however, indicates the other. As exemplified by Nicholas Trevet and Albertino Mussato, if a ‘scholastic’ approach to the divine and human institution of history was to move away from the chronographical historiography which had been adumbrated by Augustine and reinforced by Aristotle, then such a development would be precipitated, not by the reading or recovery of exemplary historical texts from antiquity, but by the study of law and medicine.

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¹ Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995), p. 107 (ii.28.109). Translations offered in this essay are from the English editions specified in the footnotes, amended where necessary; otherwise, they are the author’s own.

² Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, ed. J. Zycha (CSEL, xxviii.1, Vienna, 1894), p. 461 (ii); De utilitate credendi, ed. J. Zycha (CSEL, xxv, Vienna, 1891), p. 8 (iii.5).

³ Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb (CCSL, xlvii–xlviii, Turnhout, 1955), p. 85 (iii.18).

⁴ Augustine, De vera religione, ed. K.-D. Daur (CCSL, xxxii, Turnhout, 1962), p. 218 (xxvi.49).

⁵ Augustine, Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher (CSEL, xliv, Vienna, 1904), pp. 129–30 (cxxxviii.4–5); De Civitate Dei, p. 337 (xi.18). Cf. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, in Opera theologica selecta (5 vols, Ad Claras Aquas, Florence, 1934–64), v. 1–175, at pp. 8–9 (prol. 2.4).

⁶ Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (6 vols, Oxford, 1969– 80), i. 132 (i. prol.); iv. 228 (viii.16).

⁷ William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. H. C. Hamilton (2 vols, London, 1856), ii. 14 (iv.6).

⁸ Augustine, De civitate Dei, p. 288 (x.14); pp. 865–6 (xxii.30); R. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge, 1970).

⁹ Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, ed. R.-A. Gauthier (Aristoteles Latinus, xxvi.1–3, Leiden and Brussels, 1972–3), pp. 586–7 (x.14).

¹⁰ Aristotle, De arte poetica, ed. L. Minio-Paluello (Aristoteles Latinus, xxxiii, Brussels, 1968), pp. 12–13 (ix).

¹¹ Aristotle, Physica, ed. F. Bossier and J. Brams (Aristoteles Latinus, vii.1.2, Leiden, 1990), p. 7 (i.1); Analytica Posteriora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B. Dod ( Aristoteles Latinus iv.1–4, Bruges and Paris, 1968), p. 294 (i.8).

¹² Aristotle, Metaphysica, ed. G. Vuillemin-Diem ( Aristoteles Latinus, xxv.3.2, Leiden/New York/Cologne, 1995), pp. 14–16 (i.2).

¹³ Aristotle, Ethica, pp. 480–1 (vi.3–4).

¹⁴ [pseudo-]Aristotle, Problematum Aristotelis cum … expositione Petri Aponi (Venice, 1505), fo. 248 (xxx.2) (hereafter Peter of Abano, Expositio Problematum).

¹⁵ Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. and trans. T. Gilby et al. (Blackfriars edn., 61 vols, London, 1964–80), Ia, q. 1. a. 2, ad 2, p. 12; Ia, q. 1, a. 10, ad 2, p. 38.

¹⁶ Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius (Douai, 1624), cols. 13 (prol. 16), 3 (prol. 3: de rebus gestis iuxta seriem temporum suorum ordinate dissererem), 12 (prol.15), 16 (prol. 20).

¹⁷ Peter of Abano, Expositio Problematum, fos. 166v–167 (xviii.3), fo. 169 (xviii.10). Cf. Aristotle, Rhetorica, ed. B. Schneider (Aristoteles Latinus, xxxi.1–2, Leiden, 1978), pp. 298–9 (iii.10.2).

¹⁸ H.-W. Goetz, ‘Die Geschichte im Wissenschaftssystem des Mittelalters’, in Funktion und Formen mittelalterlicher Geschichtsschreibung. Eine Einführung, ed. F.-J. Schmale (Darmstadt, 1985), pp. 165–213.

¹⁹ Giles of Rome, De regimine principum (Venice, 1502), prol.

²⁰ Giles of Rome, De regimine principum, ii.3.20; iii.2.15; G. Bruni, ‘The De Differentia Rhetoricae Ethicae et Politicae of Aegidius Romanus’, The New Scholasticism, vi (1932), 1–18, at p. 8.

²¹ Tacitus, Histories, i.4, ed. C. D. Fisher (Oxford, 1910); Virgil, Georgics, ii.490, ed. F. A. Hirtzel (Oxford, 1900). Cf. Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici, ed. G. Waitz (MGH SRG, xlvi, Hanover, 1884), p. 13 (i.4).

²² Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ed. P. K. Marshall (2 vols, Oxford, 1968), i. 211–12 (v.18). Cf. J. Swanson, John of Wales: a Study of the Works and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 24–8. For the latter’s influence on the Oxford Dominican John of Westerfield, see B. Smalley, ‘Oxford University sermons 1290–1293’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. Alexander and M. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), pp. 307–27, at pp. 322–4.

²³ T. Käppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi (4 vols, Rome, 1970–93), iii. 187–96; iv. 213–15.

²⁴ Trevet, Annales sex regum Angliae, ed. T. Hog (London, 1845). For bk. vi [1272–1307], see F. Mantello, ‘A critical edition of the Gesta Temporum Edwardi Regis Anglorum of Nicholas Trevet OP’ (unpublished University of Toronto PhD thesis, 1977), pp. 230–517.

²⁵ London, British Library, Royal MS. 13 B XVI, fos. 2–334.

²⁶ A. Rutherford, ‘The Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trevet’ (unpublished University of London PhD thesis, 1932). Cf. R. Dean, ‘Nicholas Trevet, historian’, in Alexander and Gibson, Medieval Learning and Literature, pp. 328–52; H. Pagan, ‘Trevet’s Les Cronicles: manuscripts, owners and readers’, in The Prose Brut and Other Late Medieval Chronicles: Books have their Histories. Essays in Honour of Lester M. Matheson, ed. J. Rajsic, E. Kooper and D. Hoche (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 149–64.

²⁷ R. Dean, ‘The dedication of Nicholas Trevet’s commentary on Boethius’, Studies in Philology, lxiii (1966), 593–603; L. Nauta, ‘The Consolation – the Latin commentary tradition 800–1700’, in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. J. Marenbon (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 255–78, at pp. 263–6; L. Nauta, ‘The scholastic context of the Boethius commentary by Nicholas Trevet’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the Consolatio Philosophiae, ed. J. Hoenen and L. Nauta (Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, Leiden, 1997), pp. 41–67.

²⁸ R. Dean, ‘The earliest known commentary on Livy is by Nicholas Trevet’, Medievalia et Humanistica, iii (1945), 86–98; C. Wittlin, Titus Livius Ab urbe condita I.1–9. Ein mittellateinischer Kommentar und sechs romanische Übersetzungen und Kürzungen aus dem Mittelalter (Tübingen, 1970); G. Billanovich, La tradizione del testo di Livio e le origini del’Umanesimo (Padua, 1981), ch. 2; G. Crevatin, ‘Legger Tito Livio – Nicola Trevet, Landolfo Colonna, Francesco Petrarca’, Incontri triestini di filologia classica, vi (2006–7), 67–79.

²⁹ Nicholas of Prato, Epistola, ed. E. Franceschini, in Il commento di Nicola Trevet al Tieste di Seneca (Milan, 1938), pp. 1–2, trans. A. Minnis and A. Scott, in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: the Commentary Tradition, ed. A. Minnis and A. Scott, with D. Wallace (rev. edn., Oxford, 1991), pp. 340–1.

³⁰ R. Dean, ‘Cultural relations in the middle ages – Nicholas Trevet and Nicholas of Prato’, Stud. in Philology, xlv (1948), 541–64. As bishop of Spoleto, Nicholas of Prato was sent by Boniface VIII on a mission to England in 1301; promoted to cardinal-bishop of Ostia in 1303 by Benedict XI (Nicholas of Treviso, Dominican master-general from 1296–99), he was heavily involved in Tuscany and missions to Henry VII, before becoming dean of the College of Cardinals at Avignon from 1312 until his death in 1321. See Niccolò da Prato e i frati predicatori tra Roma e Avignone, ed. M. Benedetti and L. Cinelli (Memorie Domenicane, Florence, 2013), esp. pp. 345–71.

³¹ B. FitzGerald, Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages: Prophets and their Critics from Scholasticism to Humanism (Oxford, 2017), ch. 5.

³² Trevet, Super Boetio De Consolatione, ed. E. Silk <http://campuspress.yale.edu/trevet> [accessed 23 Apr. 2019].

³³ Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. S. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 250 (iii.5).

³⁴ Seneca, On Consolation, in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. J. Basore (3 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1928–35), ii. 359 (i.4).

³⁵ Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia ecclesiastica (PL, xxi), cols. 461–4 (praef.); Orosius, Historiae adversus Paganos, ed. M.-P. Arnaud-Lindet (3 vols, Paris, 1990–1), ii. 8 (iv.praef.1–3); Virgil, Aeneid, i. 203; vi. 377.

³⁶ Nicolai Treveti Expositio Herculis furentis, ed. V. Ussani (Rome, 1959), pp. 3–5 (prol.), trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 345–6.

³⁷ Trevet, Il Commento.

³⁸ Trevet, Il Commento, pp. 5–8. Cf. Isidore, Etymologies, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), viii.7, xviii.45.

³⁹ Trevet, Expositio super decem libros Declamationum (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. MS. G. 186, fos. 1–59). Cf. Seneca the Elder, Declamations, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass., 1974); and Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae, Divisiones, Colores, ed. A. Kiessling (Leipzig, 1872).

⁴⁰ Seneca, Declamations, p. 230 (ix.1.13). Cf.: ‘It is easier for us to learn by example what to imitate and what to avoid’ (p. 260, ix.2.27). For subsequent moralization of Seneca’s text, see N. Palmer, ‘Das “Exempelwerk der englischen Bettelmönche”: Ein Gegenstück zu den Gesta Romanorum?’, in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, ed. W. Haug and B. Wachinger (Tübingen, 1991), pp. 137–72.

⁴¹ Trevet, Expositio super Titum Livium (Lisbon, BN, MSS. Illum. 134–5, fo. 1r–v); Livy, Ab urbe condita, ed. and trans. B. Foster et al. (Loeb Classical Library, 14 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1919–59), i. 2–8 (i.praef.). Cf. Trevet, Super Boetio, pp. 252–3 (ii.5); Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford, 2004), p. 6 (i. 127–50).

⁴² A. Moschetti, ‘Il De lite inter Naturam et Fortunam e il Contra casus fortuitos di Albertino Mussato’, in Miscellanea di studi critici in onore di Vincenzo Crescini (Turin, 1927), pp. 567–99, at pp. 591–9; Humanist Tragedies, ed. and trans. G. R. Grund (I Tatti Renaissance Library, xlv, Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. 2–47.

⁴³ Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. L. Muratori (28 vols, Milan 1723–51), x, cols. 9–568, 571–768.

⁴⁴ R. Dean, ‘The life and works of Nicholas Trevet’ (unpublished University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1938), pp. 446–9, at p. 448; Mantello, ‘Critical edition of the Gesta Temporum Edwardi Regis Anglorum’, appendix I, at p. 523. Cf. Justin, Epitoma historiarum Philippicarum Pompeii Trogi, ed. O. Seel (2nd edn, Stuttgart, 1972), p. 258 (xxxviii.3.11).

⁴⁵ Dean describes Trevet as ‘a collector of data rather than a critic or philosopher’ (‘Earliest known commentary’, pp. 97–8).

⁴⁶ [pseudo-]Boethius, De disciplina scolarium, ed. O. Weijers (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, xii, Leiden, 1976), pp. 95 (i.8), 119–20 (iv.34–35); Trevet, Super decem libros Declamationum, fo. 1. Cf. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, pp. 309–20 (viii.102–36).

⁴⁷ Trevet, Letter to Nicholas of Prato, ed. Franceschini, Il Commento, pp. 2–3; trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 341–2.

⁴⁸ Humbert of Romans, Instructiones de officiis ordinis, in Opera de vita regulari, ed. J. J. Berthier (2 vols, Rome, 1888–9), ii. 254 (xi).

⁴⁹ Trevet, In libros Augustini De civitate Dei (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. 292, fos. 119–48), fo. 119r–v (prol.).

⁵⁰ C. P. E. Nothaft, Medieval Latin Christian Texts on the Jewish Calendar: a Study with Five Editions and Translations (Time, Astronomy, and Calendars, iv, Leiden, 2014), ch. 4.

⁵¹ W.-V. Ikas, ‘Martinus Polonus’ chronicle of the popes and emperors – a medieval bestseller and its neglected influence on medieval English chroniclers’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxvi (2001), 327–41.

⁵² M. M. Mulcahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent in Study’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto, 1998), pp. 204–5, 211.

⁵³ Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, ed. Berthier, ii. 373–484, at pp. 401 (ii.9), 426 (ii.19).

⁵⁴ Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, col. 4 (prol.5), quoting Hugh of Fleury, Historia ecclesiastica (iii.prol.) (PL, clxiii), col. 833.

⁵⁵ L. Deslisle, Notices sur les manuscrits de Bernard Gui (Paris, 1879), pp. 391–4, 421–4. Cf. A.-M. Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui (1261–1331): un historien et sa mé thode (Paris, 2000).

⁵⁶ Orosius, Historiae, iii. 70–4 (vii. 27); Augustine, De civitate Dei, pp. 650–2 (xviii.52).

⁵⁷ M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: a Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969).

⁵⁸ B. McGinn, ‘The significance of Bonaventure’s theology of history’, Jour. Religion, lviii (1978), 64–81; B. Roest, Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions of Franciscan Historiography 1226–c.1350 (Groeningen, 1996).

⁵⁹ F. Pelster, ‘Die Quaestio Heinrichs von Harclay über die zweite Ankunft Christi und die Erwartung des baldigen Weltendes zu Anfang des XIV. Jahrhunderts’, Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà, i (1951), 25–82.

⁶⁰ Robert of Torigni, Chronicle, ed. R. Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, lxxxii, 4 vols, London, 1884– 9), iv. 61 (prol.); Ralph de Diceto, Abbreviationes chronicorum, ed. W. Stubbs, The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, lxviii, 2 vols, London, 1876), i. 3–263, at p.34, quoting Cassiodorus, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937) p. 56 (i.17.2): ‘chronica … quae sunt imagines historiarum brevissimaeque commemorationes temporum’. Cf. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, col. 297 (iii.127).

⁶¹ William of Newburgh, Historia, pp. 3–10 (proem.).

⁶² Trevet, Annales, pp. 1–3 (prol.). For the particular hostility of Westminster to Edward II, see A. Gransden, ‘The continuation of the Flores historiarum from 1265 to 1327’, in A. Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London, 1992), pp. 245–65.

⁶³ C. F. R. Palmer, ‘The king’s confessors’, The Antiquary, xxii (1890), 114–20; Dean, ‘Nicholas Trevet, Historian’, p. 333.

⁶⁴ E. W. Kemp, ‘History and action in the sermons of a medieval archbishop’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 349–65.

⁶⁵ J. Maddicott, ‘Poems of social protest in early fourteenth-century England’, in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 130–44; J. Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, in Ormrod, England in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 189–201.

⁶⁶ For Trevet’s handling of Merlin’s prophecies, see Annales, pp. 197–8, 280, 300.

⁶⁷ Trevet, Annales, pp. 52, 56–7, 67, 70, 78–9, 179–80, 185–6, 192–3, 197, 242, 247–8, 250–66, 333, 353–4, 357–8, 360–2, 366–8, 375–9. Trevet explicitly mentions the confirmation of Magna Carta under Henry III and Edward I; he quotes a Latin text of the Remonstrances in full.

⁶⁸ Seneca, Declamations, pp. 20–2 (i.praef.21).

⁶⁹ Cicero, Topica, ed. T. Reinhardt (Oxford, 2003), pp. 144–8 (58–64).

⁷⁰ Boethius, In Ciceronis Topica (PL, lxiv), col. 1146 (5).

⁷¹ Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 387–9 (v.1), quoting Aristotle, Physica, ii. 4–6; Trevet, Super Boetio, pp. 673–5.

⁷² Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. J. Magee (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, xli, Cambridge, Mass., 2016), p. 376 (159).

⁷³ Augustine, Retractationes ed. A. Mutzenbecher (CCSL, lvii, Turnhout, 1984), p. 7 (i.1.2); Trevet, Super Boetio, pp. 605–6, 632 (iv.6).

⁷⁴ Trevet, Super Boetio, pp. 610–13, 622, 625–6, 632, 637 (iv.6). Cf. Lucan, Pharsalia, ed. A. E. Housman (Oxford, 1926), pp. 3, 5–6 (i.67, i.126-8)

⁷⁵ R. Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 Articles Condamnés à Paris le 7 Mars 1277 (Louvain, 1977), pp. 39–43. Cf. C. Schabel, R. Friedman and I. Balcoyiannopoulou, ‘Peter of Palude and the Parisian reaction to Durand of St. Pourçain on future contingents’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, lxxi (2001), 183–300.

⁷⁶ Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 426–35 (v.6); Aristotle, Ethica, p. 480 (vi.2); Aristotle, De Interpretatione, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and G. Verbeke (Aristoteles Latinus, ii.1– 2, Bruges, 1965), pp. 13–18, 47–50 (ix). Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 25, a. 4, pp. 166–8.

⁷⁷ Basel University, MS. B. IV, fos. 47a–52a; M. Schmaus, ‘Nicolai Trivet Quaestiones de causalitate scientiae Dei et concursu divino’, Divus Thomas, ix (1932), 185–96. Cf. H. Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford 1300–1350 (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, lxxxi, Leiden and Boston, 2014).

⁷⁸ A. E. Larsen, The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford 1277–1409 (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, xl, Leiden, 2011), ch. 4.

⁷⁹ Cf. Seneca, Declamations, p. 456 (iv.6): ‘I do not know and therefore do not state’.

⁸⁰ A. Kleinhaus, ‘Nicholas Trevet O.P., Psalmorum Interpres’, Angelicum, xx (1943), 219– 36; A. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 85–6, 90–1, 151–2.

⁸¹ Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros Sententiarum (Opera theologica selecta, i–iv), i. 12 (proemium q. 4).; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 94–5.

⁸² FitzGerald, Inspiration and Authority, pp. 69–72.

⁸³ Porphyry, Isagoge, ed. L. Minio-Paluello (Aristoteles Latinus, i.6–7, Bruges and Paris, 1966), pp. 13–14 (vii.22–24).

⁸⁴ Aristotle, Ethica, p. 376 (i.3).

⁸⁵ H.-W. Goetz, ‘The concept of time in the historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. G. Althoff, J. Fried and P. J. Geary (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 139–65.

⁸⁶ E. Panella, ‘Priori di Santa Maria Novella di Firenze 1221–1325’, Memorie Domenicane, xvii (1986), 253–84, at pp. 259–63.

⁸⁷ C. Davis, ‘Ptolemy of Lucca and the Roman Republic’, in C. Davis, Dante’s Italy (Philadelphia, Pa., 1984), pp. 254–89, at p. 267; R. Witt, ‘ In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, lxxiv, Leiden, 2000), pp. 187–8.

⁸⁸ Trevet, In Libros Augustini, fo. 119. Cf. D. A. Callus, ‘The Tabulae Super Originalia Patrum of Robert Kilwardby O.P.’, in Studia mediaevalia in honorem admodum Reverendi Patris Raymundi Josephi Martin, ed. B. L. van Helmond (Bruges, 1948), pp. 243–70. For Kilwardby’s influence on literal exegesis and pedagogic aids at Oxford, see J. I. Catto, ‘Theology and theologians 1220–1320’, in The History of the University of Oxford, i. The Early Oxford Schools, ed. J. I. Catto and R. Evans (Oxford, 1984), pp. 471–517.

⁸⁹ Trevet, Annales, p. 278.

⁹⁰ R. Kilwardby, De Ortu scientiarum, ed. A. G. Judy (Turnhout, 1976), pp. 134–5, 151 (xli.381, xlvii.437–438). Cf. Avicenna Latinus, Liber primus naturalium, ed. S. van Riet (Louvain and Leiden, 1992), pp. 12–14 (i).

⁹¹ B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960).

⁹² Trevet, Annales, p. 95. Cf. P. von Moos, Geschichte als Topik. Das rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die historiae im ‘Policraticus’ Johanns von Salisbury (Hildesheim, 1988).

⁹³ W. M. Green, ‘Hugo of St Victor: De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum’, Speculum, xviii (1943), 484–93, at p. 491.

⁹⁴ FitzGerald, Inspiration and Authority, ch. 6.

⁹⁵ Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. C. W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 3 (i.1.3), 68 (i.15.4), 447 (ii.28.17).

⁹⁶ N. G. Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua: the Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto, 1973), pp. 48–9.

⁹⁷ L. Valla, Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum, ed. O. Besomi (Padua, 1973), pp. 3–8 (proem.). Cf. A. Momigliano, ‘History between medicine and rhetoric’, in A. Momigliano, Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1987), pp. 13–25.