the problem of the text

Peter the Chanter's Verbum Abbreviatum, the Summa de Sacramentis and the De Tropis Loquendi present almost insuperable problems to the editor. Like his commentaries on the Bible and the Summa Abel, they were all delivered in the first instance as lectures. They all survive in several forms, at least one of which is probably based directly on the reportatio. This method of composition, where the master worked from notes made by a student at his own request, revising and polishing, lent itself to an almost organic process of growth and development in the work. The author himself might make repeated modifications, especially if he gave the same lecture-course more than once. Copyists of the ‘published’ version (or versions) too, seem to have felt free to make their own adaptations and abbreviations, omitting or inserting examples as they chose.

Not only is it difficult to establish a text which we can be reasonably confident that Peter himself would have approved, but it is hard to say what status should be accorded to the other versions of each treatise. In a parallel case – that of Peter of Poitiers' Distinctiones super Psalterium – P. S. Moore concludes that it is likely that the longer version is closer to the lectures, and that the abbreviation came later. It has been suggested that Peter the Chanter, too, began to abbreviate his works, or at least to re-edit them, towards the end of his life, but in some passages of the shorter version the abbreviation has been made so unintelligently that it is difficult to believe that it can be Peter's work as it stands.