14th century
MS843/1
Manuscripts from the dissolved monasteries were put to such uses as bookbindings and wrapping paper. Although we have no conclusive evidence of this fragment’s earlier provenance, the manuscript to which it belonged was the sort of work that could have been a victim of such a fate. The fragment from the second half of the fourteenth century was used to strengthen the binding of Justus Lipsius’s Antiquarum lectionum commentarius (Antwerp, 1575), owned in the seventeenth century by an Englishman, John Spencer. It contains part of a scholastic commentary on Psalm 101, with phrases from the psalm underlined in red: scholasticism was a mediaeval form of theology and philosophy based on the early church fathers, Aristotelean logic, emphasising tradition and dogma. From the Renaissance until the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘scholasticism’ was a term of opprobrium.