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The Future of the Past

When I joined the Dominican Order in Ireland in 1943 at the age of twenty, I knew nothing of mediaeval studies. Any thoughts I had of an academic future were in terms of biblical archaeology, in which I spent most of my leisure time reading. All of that soon changed. I chanced in 1945 on an article by Pierre Mandonnet on the Dominicans and the University of Paris in the middle ages, became fascinated by it, and in the next year published my first, and now long-forgotten, article on a mediaeval topic in the language I wrote best at that time, Gaelic. A result was that when I asked my superiors toward the middle of 1947 what were the chances of going into biblical archaeology, I was told that there were none, and that in fact I was being sent to Oxford to study under the distinguished Dominican mediaevalist, Fr Daniel Callus, then Regent of Studies. I arrived in Oxford in late 1947 to live and study in the large and vigorous Dominican community at Blackfriars, in the centre of the city. There I remained for eight years, the first four of which were spent completing my theological studies, at the end of which I presented a thesis of no distinction whatever on an Oxford Dominican theologian and controversialist of the late