This volume contains a complete edition of the rotuli, or benefice supplications, sent to the papacy by masters at the University of Paris in the first half of the fourteenth century. It also contains the letters of provision, in abbreviated form, that resulted from those petitions, along with the letters that resulted from the numerous university supplications that have not survived. This edition represents the largest body of new documentation for the pre-fifteenth century University to appear since the publication of the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis at the end of the nineteenth century.
The edition is prefaced with a long introduction that describes the origin and history of the fourteenth-century innovation of collective supplications by universities, the method of recovering the results of lost rotuli for Paris, and the stages in the process of supplication from Paris, through the papal curia at Avignon, and back to Paris. The book concludes with an index of the names of scholars as well as a place-name index locating the parish and collegiate churches mentioned in the texts. Because the University of Paris submitted rotuli every two to three years, and because the petitions and letters contain abundant personal information, the texts provide a sequential picture of the Parisian professoriate across four decades before the Black Death.