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 450 REVIEWS OF BOOKS July as late as 1227, or the end of 1226. It is impossible here to go further into the details of Albert's remarkable life, and Father Pelster himself permits us to feel that the above two parts of his book are subservient to the third. The periods of Albert's authorship can be broadly distinguished. In the first we have the De Laudibus Beatae Virginis (written, apparently, before Albert was perfectly sound on the theory of the intellectus agens) and the more important Summa de Creaturis. Parts of this latter work have always been known, but quite recently Grabmann has had the good fortune to discover, at Venice and Vienna, three additional sections, treat- ing respectively of morals, the sacraments, and eschatology. Composed, as it seems, within the first half of the thirteenth century, before the new translations of Aristotle from the Greek (used, e. g., by Aquinas in his Summa) were completed, this book has an important connexion with Vincent of Beauvais. The various parts of Vincent's work, it is true, are full of interpolations not easily dated, but Father Pelster produces good reasons for believing that Vincent himself was responsible for embody- ing in his Speculum Naturale large excerpts from the Summa de Creaturis. This Summa, or part of it, is also closely connected with Albert's com- mentary on the Sentences, a work which gives rise to further problems of chronology. Father Pelster concludes that all the parts of the Summa anciently known preceded the commentary on Sent. II, and were intimately allied with it. The fourth book of the commentary, he thinks, was de- finitely the latest, but the second book was written after the third, and probably at Paris. The hypothesis of a second version of the commentary, written after the full interpretation of Aristotle's writings, Father Pelster refuses to accept. From the Sentences we pass to the commentaries on the pseudo-Dionysius, and thence to Aristotle himself. The opinion, supported by Mandonnet, that the whole gigantic exposition of Aristotle was accomplished between 1248 (or even 1250) and 1257 seems to be quite untenable, especially as during three or four years of this period Albert was too occupied with administrative business to find much leisure for writing. Father Pelster shows that this view rests, in fact, on a mis- interpretation of some words of Albert's relating to an instruction given him by Alexander IV at Anagni in 1256 to write a book against the Averroists. From a mass of evidence too detailed for repetition, Father Pelster infers that the Aristotelian commentaries must be spread over about twenty years, ending not earlier than 1270. Their order has to be determined partly by allusions to external events, but chiefly by refer- ences from one to another, and these are much complicated by dubious readings. Often the change of a single letter (e. g. declaravimus for declara- bimus or ostendimus for ostendemus) is decisive. At every, point Father Pelster reveals a first-hand knowledge of the evidence and persuades us to accept his judgements, even though we are aware that it is impossible adequately to criticize them without examining manuscripts scattered through the libraries of Europe. With regard to one curious passage, however, we must confess to scepticism. In the introduction to his De Principiis Motus Progressivi Albert remarks that he had already written on the subject, but that postea in Campania iuxta Graeciam nobis y