RALPH STRODE

English scholastic philosopher and logician; dates of birth and death unknown. He was a contemporary at Oxford of John wyclif, with whom he once disputed. From Wyclif's reply (Strode's work is lost), Responsiones ad Rodolphum Strodum, Strode appears to have argued against predestination and to have supported the endowments of the Church. His famed Logica has not survived, but his Consequentiae (on syllogisms) and his Obligationes (on scholastic dialectic) were used in Italy and eventually printed at Padua and Venice. His conjectured authorship of the elegiac poem the pearl is now generally rejected; his identification with a London common sergeant, who lived at Aldersgate and died in 1387, is unlikely, despite A. B. Emden's support. Emden thinks Strode was a fellow of Merton in 1359 and 1360, but the evidence appears inconclusive. Chaucer dedicated his Troylus and Cryseyde jointly to the poet gower and "the philosophical Strode."

Bibliography: i. gollancz, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900, 63 v. (London, 1885–1990) 19:57–59. c. f. brown, "The Author of The Pearl, Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions," Publications of the Modern Language Association N.S. 12 (1904): 115–153. h. b. workman, John Wyclif, 2 v. (Oxford 1926) 2:125–129, 412–414. a. b. emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d. 1500, 3 v. (Oxford 1957–59) 3:1807–1808.

[f. d. blackley]