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Document Details :

Title: Le pouvoir fascinant de l'imagination
Subtitle: Retour sur Lynn Thorndike et l'anonyme du Vatican (Ms. Vat. Lat. 1121)
Author(s): DELAURENTI, Béatrice
Journal: Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales
Volume: 83    Issue: 2   Date: 2016   
Pages: 385-421
DOI: 10.2143/RTPM.83.2.3194386

Abstract :
The article contains an edition, French translation, and study of a text discovered in 1964 by Lynn Thorndike in the manuscript Vat. lat. 1121. The text is an unfinished, anonymous, and undated question that addresses the power that the imagination has on external bodies. The study of the question’s sources and argumentation sheds light on the profile of the anonymous author, his intellectual environment, and his period of activity. It can be shown that the text was written after the late-thirteenth-century debates, among Franciscans and Dominicans, about the relations between soul and body, after Peter of Abano’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Problemata (1310), and after the Council of Vienne (1313). Thus, this text is a good example of the scholastic literature on the power of fascinatio. Nevertheless, contrary to Thorndike’s suggestion, its author is unlikely to have been Nicole Oresme.

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