Nicole Oresme, Traitié de l’espere: A Critical Edition (Ronald B. Thomson, ed.). Textes Vernaculaires du Moyen Âge, 35. Turnhout: Brepols, 2025, 196 pp.

There has been a bit of a renaissance – if one can forgive the term’s application to such a renowned medieval scholar – in Nicole Oresme studies over the past two decades, as new editions and/or translations of his works on meteorology, optics, and physics have been published to complement the series of volumes covering his writings on mathematics and astronomy that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ronald Thomson’s edition of the Traitié de l’espere is a welcome addition to this recent revival, even as the nature of the text it introduces is somewhat distinct from these earlier volumes in representing a shorter vernacular work aimed at a courtly audience rather than a longer technical commentary more oriented toward a scholarly community. In this work, we encounter Oresme (ca. 1320–1382) as neither the Latin virtuoso in mathematics and physics nor the vernacular philosopher who famously assessed the merits and weaknesses of arguments in favor of the Earth’s rotation in his lengthy commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo, but rather as a didactic pedagogue who crisply surveys contemporary understanding of the celestial bodies and how their arrangements relate to terrestrial affairs, on the grounds that such material is “appropriate for the knowledge of every man who is of free status and of excellent intelligence” (pp. 3 and again 23).