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G. R. Evans, Works of St Bonaventure, vol. 7: Commentary on Ecclesiastes. Edited by Robert J. Karris, OFM and Campion Murray, OFM. Pp. 461. Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005. isbn 1 57659 197 2. Paper n.p, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 353–354, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj027
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Extract
One of the challenges for the modern translator is to make not only the Latin text but its intellectual context accessible to the reader. This is not an easy task where the author is, like Bonaventure, writing within a framework of complex contemporary research and controversy. For medieval academe was every bit as high-spirited as its modern counterpart. Karris and Murray are very much aware of this need, and although he does not seem altogether familiar with the methodologies of the wider scholasticism of Bonaventure's day, Karris does a fair job of explaining the framework of the commentary.
In commenting on Ecclesiastes, as in his commentary on John, though not in his commentary on Luke, Bonaventure uses the ‘quaestio’. This was an era when the now established Glossa ordinaria was being developed and experimented with. It would have been helpful to have a franker grappling with the questions of genre which Bonaventure's choices raise. There are also questions about his method of allowing one passage of Scripture to illuminate another, as Bonaventure interprets Scripture by Scripture. When it came to the use of other authorities, Bonaventure, like most medieval authors, had the habit of deriving his quotations not directly from the source he identifies but through intermediary collections; others were using them too, and the capping of quotations can be one of the important features of the debate.
