SOURCE: Dickens, A. G. “The Medieval Sources of Catholic Revival.” In The Counter Reformation, pp. 19-28. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

In the following essay, first published in 1968, Dickens discusses some of the prominent fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers of the Catholic Reformation.

The period of decline in medieval Catholicism nourished many of the seedlings of Catholic Reformation. Among the features of the latter stands a notable revival of scholastic philosophy and especially of Thomism. Yet this revival had in fact begun among the Dominicans over half a century before the birth of its greatest figure Francisco de Suarez (1548-1617). Thomas de Vio, later famous as Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534), composed his treatise on the De Ente et Essentia of Aquinas while teaching at Padua in 1494-7. His famous commentaries on the Summa Theologica followed between 1507 and 1522: the first great monument of this neo-Thomism, they remain among the classics of...