Gregory of Rimini, a member of the Augustinian friars and one of the foremost thinkers of the fourteenth century, was born in Italy and died in Vienna, where he spent the last eighteen months of his life as general of the Augustinian order. A large part of his active career was spent at Paris, where he studied from 1323 to 1329. After teaching in Italy, he returned to Paris in 1341 and remained there for ten years. During this second sojourn in Paris he wrote his main work, a Commentary on the Sentences. None of the other writings ascribed to him, ranging from biblical commentaries to a treatise on the remission and intensification of forms, has survived.

Gregory's system was a reassertion of St. Augustine's teachings in fourteenth-century terms. He shared the contemporary awareness of the radical contingency of the created order and...