Ralph Strode

Who was Ralph Strode?

Ralph Strode, English schoolman, was probably a native of the West Midlands.

He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, before 1360, and famous as a teacher of logic and philosophy and a writer on educational subjects. He belonged, like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, to that "School of the Middle" which mediated between realists and nominalists.

Besides his Logica, he wrote Consequentiae, a treatise on the syllogism, and Obligationes or Scholastica militia, a series of "formal exercises in scholastic dialectics." He had some not unfriendly controversy with his colleague John Wyclif, against whom he defended the possession of wealth by the clergy, and held that in the Church abuses were better than disturbance. He also attacked Wyclif's doctrine of predestination. His positions are gathered from Wyclif's Responsiones ad Rodolphum Strodum.

Chaucer dedicates his poem Troilus and Criseyde to the contemporary poet John Gower and to Strode:

"O moral Gower, this book I directe

To the, and to the, philosophical Strode,

To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte,

Of youre benignités and zeles goode.

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