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Ralph Strode

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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RALPH STRODE ( ft. 1350-1400), English schoolman, was probably a native of the West Midlands. He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, before 1360, and famous as a teacher of logic and philosophy and a writer on educational subjects. He belonged, like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, to that "School of the Middle" which mediated between realists and nominalists. Besides his Logica, which has not survived, he wrote Consequentiae, a treatise on the syllogism, and Obligationes or Scholastica militia, a series of "formal exercises in scholastic dialectics." He had some not unfriendly controversy with his colleague John Wyclif, against whom he defended the possession of wealth by the clergy, and held that in the Church abuses were better than disturbance. He also attacked Wyclif's doctrine of predestination. His positions are gathered from Wyclif's Responsiones ad Rodolphum Strodum (MS. 3926, Vienna Imperial Library). Strode is also associated with John Gower in Chaucer's dedication of Troylus and Cryseyde, and Strode himself, according to the 15th-century Vetus catalogus of fellows of Merton, was a "poeta nobilis." Leland and Bale confirm this testimony, and Professor I. Gollancz has suggested the identification of the Phantasma Radulphi attributed to Strode in the Vetus catalogus with the beautiful 14thcentury elegiac poem The Pearl. If this hold good, Strode wrote also Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. From 1375 to 1385 this Strode or another of the same name was common sergeant of the city of London; he died in 1387.

See Prantl, Geschichte der Logik; for an attempt to distinguish between Strode the schoolman and Strode the poet, see J. T. T. Brown, in The Scottish Antiquary (1897), vol. xii.