Robert Holkot [Holcot] was the most significant Dominican theologian of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He received his doctorate at Oxford, lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences, the main theology textbook, in the years 1331–1333, and served as regent master there, most likely from 1336–1338. He spent time in London as a clerk for Richard of Bury, the bishop of Durham, and probably lectured on the biblical Book of Wisdom at Cambridge from 1340–1342. From 1343 to his death from the plague in 1349, he resided at the Dominican priory in Northampton.

The Condemnations of 1277 and the arguments of John Duns Scotus at the turn of the fourteenth century established the view that no absolute necessity governs creation: God has always had the power to do other than he does and to create a reality other than this one. The working out of the implications for philosophy and theology of...