SOURCE: Nederman, Cary J., and Arlene Feldwick. “To the Court and back again: The Origins and Dating of the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum of John of Salisbury.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21, no. 1 (spring 1991): 129-45.

In the following essay, Nederman and Feldwick examine the circumstances of the creation of the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum and propose a new date for its composition.

I

John of Salisbury's 1852-line satirical and philosophical poem, the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum (or Entheticus Maior) must surely rank among the most closely studied texts in recent scholarship on the twelfth century. No fewer than six critical editions of this work were produced in the period from 1954 to 1987, the latest and definitive version consisting of three volumes of text, critical apparatus, commentary, and translation.¹ One might assume that such careful attention would have generated a great amount of knowledge about the nature of the...