JOHN MAJOR AS A POSSIBLE LINK BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SCHOLASTICS

Although we have now seen that numerous late medieval authors had occasion to express an opinion on extracosmic void, few considered it within the theological context developed in the last chapter. This situation changed dramatically during the sixteenth century, when the relationship of God and a possible infinite void space came to be discussed at great length by numerous scholastic authors of major and minor significance. That the problem was a legacy of the late Middle Ages can scarcely be doubted. And yet the names of Bradwardine, De Ripa, and Oresme, who accepted the possibility or actuality of an infinite void space associated with God's immensity, go unmentioned in the great debates that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite the publication of Bradwardine's De causa Dei by Henry Savile in 1618, it played no apparent role in the sixteenth century, and no citation of it in the seventeenth has yet come to light. But the ideas that Bradwardine, De Ripa, and Oresme expressed are much in evidence and may plausibly be assumed to form the ultimate basis for the elaborate and detailed discussions of the later period. But by whom were their ideas transmitted?