The friar Richard Fishacre deserves serious attention because he was the first among the Dominicans at Oxford who left behind a substantial body of writings. More important, he was the first to have composed a commentary on the Libri Quatuor Sententiarum (Four Books of Sentences, 1157-1158), by the twelfth-century bishop of Paris Peter Lombard. Lombard's work had become at Paris and would subsequently become at Oxford a required text for anyone proceeding to a degree in theology. Given this privileged status, it was widely commented on, developing into the preeminent locus for speculative theologizing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As the first commentator, Fishacre set the tone for much of the Oxonian theological and philosophical speculation that was to follow and exerted an influence on his successors that is only now beginning to be properly assessed.

Fishacre seems never to have ventured from his native England. The...