Near-complete single leaf, with double column of 47 lines of a thin university hand, paraph marks in blue or red, capitals touched in red, recovered from reuse in a binding and hence margins trimmed back to edges of text at top and vertical sides, and with loss of few mm. from the outer edge of one outer column on each side, stains, small holes, overall in good condition, 210 by 50mm.; with a leaf from a theological compendium, drawing on and apparently paraphrasing from various Christian texts and authors, including Robert Grosseteste, written in single column of 38 lines, red paraphs, contemporary foliation '34' in red at head of recto, recovered from reuse in a binding and hence with scuffs, stains and tears to edges, overall fair condition, 145 by 95mm
While Ancient Greece, like the modern West, used the term 'sophism' to mean a clever fallacy, in medieval philosophy it had a quite different meaning and was employed to describe a proposition that raises a difficulty for logic or grammar, with a truth that is hard to determine as it is ambiguous, puzzling or simply complicated to perceive. Such sophismata were mainly used to test the limits of a theory, or approach a concept from an uncommon direction. The format of: presentation of a problematic proposition, followed by a proof, a disproof, and a solution, sometimes accompanied by a response to the opposing arguments, must have grown out of disputational practices in medieval universities, and discussions of sophismata can be found in university treatises of the twelfth century onwards. Study of them, and the literature they produced, bloomed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but was set aside by the humanists as part of their rejection of traditional forms of university teaching. The standard works on the subject are M. Grabmann, Die Sophismatenliteratur des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts mit Textausgabe eines Sophisma des Boetius von Dacien, 1940, and S. Ebbesen and F. Goubier, A Catalogue of 13th-Century Sophismata, 2010, but much remains to be studied and many texts are still to be edited
