The old and the new responses

The obligations-literature appears to have entered a new phase with the Oxford Calculators, centred at Merton College in the 1320s and 1330s. Although the Mertonian Thomas Bradwardine seems to have contributed little to the development of obligations, his contemporary Richard Kilvington was more innovative in this regard, in ways described in Part A of this Chapter.

We are in a somewhat better position to assess the contribution of Roger Swineshead to obligations. Swineshead certainly appears to have been part of the intellectual circle with which Kilvington and Bradwardine are associated, and he may well have studied with them. Probably sometime after 1330 and before 1335, Swineshead wrote his pair of treatises on obligations and insolubles. There is reason to speculate that some of the most characteristic features of Swineshead's Insolubilia grew out of reflection on Kilvington's Sophismata. It is possible that this is true of Swineshead's Obligationes as well, but that remains to be established.

Swineshead's Obligationes is markedly different from earlier treatises in the genre. So true is this that Robert Fland, writing some time between 1335 and 1370, distinguishes two separate traditions in the obligations-literature. One of these traditions he calls the ‘old response’ (antiqua responsio); it conforms to the views of Burley, to those of the treatise attributed to William of Sherwood, and to those found in most if not all of the other early treatises. The second tradition Fland calls the ‘new response’ (nova responsio); it appears to have originated with Swineshead.