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Prosper of Reggio Emilia (theologian)

Rubric identifying the start of Prosper's commentary in Vat. lat. 1086

Prosper of Reggio Emilia (died 1332/1333) was an Augustinian hermit and scholar.[1]

Prosper was born in the 1270s. He was sent by his order to study theology at the University of Paris. He served the order as a lector at Milan before returning to Paris to complete his studies. He became a Master of Theology in March 1316. In 1318, he was appointed examiner of the Augustinian schools in Italy.[2] By 1321, he was the regent of the Augustinian studium generale in Bologna, where he taught until his death in 1332 or 1333.[3]

Prosper's notebook survives in the Vatican Library, where it has been bound together with his extensive but incomplete commentary on the Sentences as Vat. lat. 1086. Marginal notes were added later in the 14th century.[4] A citation of his commentary is also found in Thomas of Strasbourg's commentary.[5] His notebook contains reports (reportationes) of various quodlibeta, including his own.[6]

Like Durand of Saint-Pourçain, Prosper attacked the then reigning theory of cognitive habits.[7] Rather than see such habits as entities in the intellect, he views them as products of the "imaginative" or "ostensive" power of the soul to "show" things to the intellect.[8]

  1. ^ Courtenay 2007, p. 345.
  2. ^ Courtenay 2007, pp. 345–346.
  3. ^ Courtenay 2007, pp. 345–346. Schabel & Courtenay 2007, pp. 554–555, have a slightly different chronology. They place Prosper in Bologna in 1318–1323.
  4. ^ Courtenay 2007, pp. 346–347.
  5. ^ Schabel & Courtenay 2007, pp. 554–555.
  6. ^ Courtenay 2007, pp. 345, 357.
  7. ^ Hartman 2018, p. 229, defines "cognitive habits" in this way: "Once [someone] has thought some proposition or about some object, he comes to acquire something such that he is then able to think that proposition or about that object when he wants, and he can, all other things being equal, do this with more ease than he could before. This 'something' that he comes to acquire medieval philosophers called a cognitive habit."
  8. ^ Hartman 2018, pp. 230, 232.

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