John Ridewall
English Franciscan friar and mythographer
John Ridewall (fl. 1331–1340), also known as John of Musca, was the 54th regent master of the Franciscans at Oxford. He received his doctorate in theology around 1331 and was regent in 1331–1332. He was still living in October 1340, when he was in Basel. His known writings are:
Commentarius super Fulgencium, his most popular work, a commentary on the Mitologiae of Fulgentius
Lectura super Apocalypsi, a commentary on Revelation surviving only in excerpts and quotations in Robert Holcot
A commentary on Augustine of Hippos' De civitate Dei, of which only books 1–3 and 6–7 survive
The Commentarius super Fulgencium, better known as Fulgentius metaforalis, has been edited at least twice, firstly by Hans Liebeschuetz in 1926 and more recently and completely by Ralph Hanna in 2023. It was designed to offer material to preachers by giving a moralizing treatment of classical mythology. It is found both as a marginal text surrounding the text of Fulgentius, a format common for commentaries, and as an independent treatise unaccompanied by Fulgentius' text. It is preserved in nine manuscripts, but nowhere complete. A majority of the manuscripts are of German origin. Some manuscripts contain an anonymous short continuation on the four virtues, De quattuor virtutibus, ascribed to a nameless "chancellor of Paris".
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This entry incorporates text from “John Ridewall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.