As a good Johnnie, I don’t much like reading more secondary literature than I can help, and I’ve tended throughout graduate school to do primary-literature-heavy projects. This is no exception, as my dissertation involves a large number of primary authors who have a very small amount of secondary literature on them, on a topic which has been very little treated: universal hylomorphism in the late thirteenth century, centering around the Quaestiones Disputatae et de Quodlibet of Gonsalvus Hispanus, a little-known Franciscan flourishing after Thomas Aquinas and before John Duns Scotus.

Much of the groundwork for research into the question was laid in the early twentieth century by a group of enterprising French medievalists, and then abandoned. Figures like Giles of Rome, Richard of Middleton, Matthew of Aquasparta, and so forth, had one or two books written on them and then no one ever thought much about them again, more or less, until now. So, besides the long list of primary sources, a very large percentage of my bibliography consists of French books from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I’ve been digging around in neglected corners of the Catholic University library rooting out what can be found, and no one has looked at these books in a very long time. The top book on the stack I brought home today, for instance, is by one P. Glorieux, entitled Repertoire Des Maitres en Theologie de Paris au XIIIe Siecle. It still has its original loaner’s card, but when I brought it to the circulation desk it had no barcode to scan and I had to wait while they made one up for it. It was published in 1933, but CUA seems not to have acquired it until somewhat later. Between 1947 and 1962—the year of my father’s birth—it was checked out about a dozen times, and then not once until today.

I have to admit that this aspect of scholarship appeals to a certain aesthetic urge in my makeup. There’s less attraction for me in reading the hundredth glossy new book on Aquinas out this year, compared to the Repertoire with the cracked and fading red leather of its spine coming off in flakes on my hand. The more arcane and esoteric crannies of medieval metaphysics, besides being (so I think, anyway) interesting and important in themselves, and worthy of being brought back to light, delight the same part of me that likes reading Borges and Eco, and everything the library symbolizes in their fictions. Before I knew anything about philosophy I used to daydream about this wizardly kind of book-handling as a kid. Opening a book that (it seems) no one’s read in forty-five years, studying a text that perhaps a few dozen people have read in the seven centuries since it was written, makes me feel, I confess, like a (very peculiar kind of) badass.