Richard Billingham and the Oxford Obligationes Texts: Restrictions on positio

Abstract

This paper investigates a series of Oxford Obligationes texts, all of which can be associated with Richard Billingham. My study is based on eleven of the surviving manuscripts and two early printed texts. I focus on one aspect of their discussion, namely the rule for granting the initial positum of an obligational disputation of the type called positio, and the six restrictions that could be placed on that rule. I explain these restrictions with reference to several sophismata that were meant to illustrate the problems that the restrictions were intended to solve, and in particular, I discuss the fifth restriction ‘not inconsistent with the positum’. I also shed light on the final restriction, which has not always been well understood, namely the restriction ‘wherever there is no obligatio relevant to the positum’.