Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas
The principal early life of Thomas Aquinas, written by the Dominican who promoted his canonization. It was composed more than forty years after Thomas’s death from the memories of those who had known him.
William of Tocco was a Dominican of the province of Naples. The editor of the canonization process records that in 1317 and 1318 he gathered the dossier for Thomas’s canonization, including a life of the saint, and carried it to Pope John XXII at Avignon. One witness at the Naples inquiry of 1319 says he passed what he knew to “brother William of Tocco”.
The Life is therefore a work written to prove sanctity. It collects the family traditions of the house of Aquino, stories told in Dominican convents and reports of visions and miracles, and it gives few dates before the year of Thomas’s death. Its account of his studies and of his books is the fullest that survives from so near his time, but it stands two generations from his youth, and it marks the story of Albert’s prophecy with the words “it is reported”.
Cited in
- about 1265 to 1273, estimated date