CALLUS, DANIEL ANGELO PHILIP

Dominican medievalist; b. Malta, Jan. 20, 1888, the son of Paul Callus-Azopardi and Theodora, née Vella; d. Malta, May 26, 1965. He joined the order as a young man and studied at Malta, Fiesole, and Florence, where he took the degree of lector in theology and philosophy and followed university courses in palaeography, history of arts, and Semitic languages. He was ordained and did postgraduate work at the Angelicum in Rome, after which he taught as professor of theology at the Theological College of Malta from 1914 to 1921. Then came his first visit to England, where he was to make his home. He taught at the Dominican House of Studies at Hawkesyard, Staffordshire, from 1921 to 1923 and returned in 1931. He spent the intervening years as regent of studies, first at Viterbo and then in Malta. He took his degree as master of theology in 1924. In 1932 he settled permanently at the Oxford Blackfriars. Father Bede Jarrett, OP, had planned to make Blackfriars a center of scholarship that would be closely linked to the university; in Callus he found the man to realize his hopes. Callus worked under the super-vision of the late Sir Maurice Powicke, then Regius Professor of Modern History, and himself became the center of a group of colleagues and pupils interested in medieval thought and learning. He received the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1938. Henceforward he regularly lectured, supervised, and examined and attended faculty meetings in the university; in addition he held the regency of studies at Blackfriars from 1942 to 1954. He read papers at many international congresses, made lecture tours in the U.S., and was visiting lecturer at the Angelicum for the last few years of his life. His researches into the history of early scholasticism took him to libraries all over Europe. The University of Malta honored him with a degree. His busy life as priest and teacher did not prevent him from publishing extensively from 1917 onward. He was the acknowledged expert on the early history of the Oxford schools, especially of Aristotelian studies and of Thomism there. A bibliography of his published work up to 1963, with an appreciation of his life and writings, is to be found in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus [Oxford Historical Society, New Series 16 (Oxford 1964)].

[b. smalley]