The Literary Genres: The Quaestio

Inside the commentary genre, the quaestio developed: certain determinate points of the text, of particular difficulty or doctrinal importance, were examined using a procedure which became ever more rigorously structured to the point of reaching a standardized form in university texts of the second half of the 13th c. The topic is presented—in general by the master—in the form of a question (utrum: e.g., ‘whether there exists a science of the soul’) to which two different contrary responses are possible. The same master or baccalaureate (an intermediate grade between student and master) then presents the arguments which show the positive response (quod sic) and the negative (quod non, contra); after a careful examination of all the arguments, the master comes to the final determinatio, or gives an answer that shows his own position on the topic (respondeo); and then generally follows the refutation of contrary arguments. This form of debate, in which it was possible to conduct real philosophic and scientific ‘research’ on a given topic, was a part of curricular teaching. Moreover, two times a year, at Christmas and Easter, ‘quodlibetal’ questions were discussed, in which the master responded to questions on whatever topic (de quolibet) chosen by his interlocutors at that moment: the quodlibetal debates were even a type of spectacle where competition between different schools of thought took place. The collections of quaestiones, thematic or quodlibetal, constitute one of the most diffused genres of scholastic literature, starting from the 13th c.. This structure of the quaestio, in which the ‘scholastic method’ is most clearly apparent, was even used for the drawing up of summae (systematic treatises usually on a general topic; for example, the Summa theologica of St. Thomas), and monographic studies on a given subject. The extreme formalization which the scholastic method reached in the 14th and 15th c. was one of the polemical targets of the humanists, intent on recovering freer forms of discourse: but the expositive rigor of the scholastic quaestio remained the model of scientific discourse even after the Middle Ages, becoming the basic form of university teaching until the 17th c.