Vatican edition

The Vatican edition is a modern critical edition of the two commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard written by Bl. John Duns Scotus. It was prepared to a very high standard by the Scotistic Commission, making use of Assisi MS 137, a sort of medieval critical edition of the Ordinatio. The Ordinatio is the commentary that Scotus began preparing for publication in 1300, and had not finished when he died in 1308.

The Lectura is the text he prepared for his lectures. Afterwards, it served as a starting point for the preparation of the Ordinatio. Because of its importance in determining the original text of the Ordinatio, work on a critical edition of the Lectura proceeded in parallel with the Ordinatio. The Lectura is of special importance where Scotus did not produce a distinction of the Ordinatio. The biggest gap is book III, distinctions 18–25: here the Lectura is the only expression we have of Scotus’s thought. Nevertheless, it does not have the more definitive character of a text prepared for publication.

The division of the text of the Ordinatio at the level of questions (sometimes) and paragraph numbers (always) differs from that of the Wadding edition. The new division better reflects the structure of the commentary as Scotus appears to have conceived it. Each volume of the Ordinatio contains a concordance of the division into questions of the portion it contains. The first index volume (XV.1) contains a concordance for the entire Ordinatio. Wherever it differs, the Wadding division of the text is printed in the margins. None of this is an issue for the Lectura, which had never been published before.

Peter L. P. Simpson has translated the entire Ordinatio into English from the Vatican edition. The translation is freely available.

List of volumes

Most of the volumes can be borrowed for an hour at a time from the Internet Archive (IA). All of them can be purchased from the Quaracchi editors.