Archbishop Pecham and an Annotated Fragment of Peter Lombard’s <i>Commentarius in Psalmos Davidicos</i> at Tulane University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, the Special Collections Department of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University acquired from Bernard Quaritch a parchment bifolium, formerly used as a pastedown, from a thirteenth-century copy of Peter Lombard’s Commentarius in Psalmos Davidicos, written c.1148. The bifolium contains three annotations that shed new light on a momentous event in medieval Oxford—the 1286 condemnation by Archbishop John Pecham of several heresies, as he called them, related to the teaching of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Pecham’s condemnation restated an earlier one by his predecessor, Robert Kilwardby, in 1277. His rhetoric, however, was much stronger than Kilwardby’s and contributed to the hardening of opposition to Aquinas’s philosophy in England. Most of the documents associated with the condemnation have been known and published for some time: Pecham’s own register at Lambeth Palace; the annals of Oseney Abbey, where the archbishop convened a meeting with Oxford’s masters of theology before issuing his condemnation; and the annals of Dunstable Priory, which record the condemnation and its unfortunate sequel, the death by suicide of one of Pecham’s opponents. The Tulane bifolium is a new contribution to the archive that illustrates how an unprepossessing fragment can alter our knowledge of a major event in late medieval intellectual history. This article describes the bifolium, correcting significant errors in the Quaritch catalogue description, provides editions of the annotations, traces their sources, and discusses their wider intellectual context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.051 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".