J.P. Osmond

This article announces the identification of the manuscript fragment London, Senate House Library, MS 1029, which contains material from the fifth part of the prologue to John Duns Scotus’s Ordinatio, his revised Sentences commentary. The first section of the article examines at length the philosophical content of the text of MS 1029, namely Scotus’s discussion of the concept of a practical science in the Aristotelian sense, which is nested inside the more specific question of whether theology qualifies as such a practical science. The second section discusses the problems raised by the manuscript tradition of the Ordinatio and the controversial ratio edendi adopted by the Vatican editors in light of these problems. On the basis of the editorial investigation into the Ordinatio’s manuscript tradition, the third section sets out the stemmatological status quaestionis. The fourth section builds upon this with an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the text of MS 1029 – with reference to the collation data found in the apparatus of the Vatican edition – to offer several conclusions, the most significant of which is that MS 1029 bears an especially close relation to a single Oxonian manuscript (Oxford, Merton College, MS 66). The fifth section provides a full transcription of MS 1029 along with an apparatus indicating divergences from the text of the Vatican edition, as well as photographs of the manuscript.