Mark Clark

I am applying for a “Summer Writing and Research Grant” to study the Garvin Papers at Notre Dame, because they are likely to contain information relevant to critical editions of Stephen Langton’s lectures on Genesis delivered over three decades during his Parisian teaching
career (1175-1205). Having already published critical editions and translations of Langton’s prologues introducing Genesis and the Pentateuch (Auctores, 2024), and having since identified not only the actual versions of the Glossed Genesis upon which Langton lectured but also the prologues of Peter Lombard introducing Genesis and the Pentateuch, upon which Langton modeled his own, I am now in a position to edit Langton’s lectures themselves on Genesis. Because, however, those lectures are so enormous – collectively over the course of his thirty-year teaching career Langton’s lectures resulted in many thousands of pages of unedited Latin in the extant manuscripts – the proposed editions, which will proceed from Langton’s earliest to his last lectures, are focused on the first three chapters of Genesis, arguably the richest materials in the entire Old Testament for Christian Philosophy and Theology, perhaps especially for the Scholastic High Middle Ages. For this reason I have edited and translated both the Primitive version of the Glossed Genesis that came to St. Victor from Laon and that served as the sole source for Genesis both for Andrew of St. Victor and Peter Lombard throughout their careers and the Victorine version of the Glossed Genesis that both Peter Comestor and Stephen Langton used for their teaching.

I have long known about the Garvin Papers, ever since Stephen Brown funded and trained me (in medieval philosophy and theology and in working with manuscripts and critically editing Scholastic works) while still a graduate student at Columbia at his Institute for the Study of Medieval Philosophy and Theology. I was already working on Langton for my dissertation, and Steve told me that the Garvin Papers contained a wealth of information, including whole transcriptions of various manuscripts, on Langton and that they should be consulted and studied prior to the publication of any relevant critical editions. That was thirty years ago, and I have never forgotten Steve’s advice, repeated many times since and as recently as this past summer when I visited him during the Boston College Colloquium for Historical Theology. A host of discoveries (of three early versions of Peter Lombard’s Sentences and of his biblical prologues to most of the books of the Bible, used by his students and successors at the Cathedral School of Paris, Langton included, and the Victorines, has unlocked the sources Langton used when he began lecturing on theology around 1175. An entire team of young scholars, all with doctorates and well trained, are now working on and preparing editions of works by Peter Lombard, Peter Comestor, and Stephen Langton. The time has come to study the Garvin Papers and to investigate what there is in those transcriptions and notes that could aid us in our collective labors.