A working draft. 10 of 61 disputations are online. Everything here may still change, and it should be cited as a draft.
Between 1603 and 1609 Jacob Arminius, professor of theology at Leiden, presided over 61 public disputations. The faculty worked through the whole body of divinity in numbered cycles, each professor presiding in turn, and a student defended printed theses against all comers. By the convention of the faculty the theses were the presiding professor’s. Keith Stanglin makes the case for Arminius’s authorship in The Missing Public Disputations of Jacobus Arminius (Brill, 2010). It is his argument, and this edition cites it rather than repeating it.
Twenty-five of the disputations went into Arminius’s collected works and were translated by James Nichols in 1825. The other thirty-six were not. Stanglin’s edition prints them in the original languages without translation, and as far as we know the English here is the first to be published. This edition starts with those.
The Latin is transcribed from the collected reprint of 1615, the Syntagma disputationum theologicarum (Rotterdam). The disputations were first printed separately, as quartos, in 1604–1609, and Stanglin edits those. The two printings have not yet been collated. Our text is therefore a witness, honestly labelled, and not yet the text. Each disputation’s page says which witness it prints.
Disputation LIV, On the Holy Councils, is different. No copy of its Latin is known. It survives only in a Dutch translation by Johannes Lydius, printed in 1610, and the English here is made from that Dutch. It is two translations removed from what Arminius wrote, and its page says so.
Stanglin’s edition is cited to identify the disputations. Our texts are transcribed from the seventeenth-century printings, not from his.
Each thesis is printed beside its English, one thesis at a time. The translation keeps the scholastic vocabulary strict: a fixed glossary assigns one English rendering to each technical term, so that a reader can follow a word through the corpus. Where the distinction matters (potestas and potentia, both “power”), the Latin is given in brackets.
The printed text is never silently corrected, in the Latin or in the English. Where a misprint reverses the sense, the English translates what is printed, marks it [sic], and a note gives the likely reading.
Each disputation opens with a short headnote on its occasion, its authorship, how its argument is built, and where it was answered. A few theses carry a brief italic note. At the foot of each page, the transcription notes record the working: page references, doubtful readings, and decisions made.
- The remaining disputations not in the Opera, as the original printings are acquired.
- The twenty-five Opera disputations, with the 1629 Latin and Nichols’s English.
- A collation of the 1615 reprint against the original quartos.
- An index of Scripture, and a layer tracing the disputations’ reception, Wesley’s included.
A Wroot Press edition. Corrections are welcome at wilson@wrootlabs.com. For reuse, see Rights.