Richard Fishacre was born in the diocese of Exeter, in the south of England, of Norman ancestry. As a young man, he went to the schools at Oxford, where he entered the Order of Preachers. Subsequently, he came under the tutelage of Friar Robert Bacon, the first Dominican master in theology at the fledgling university. We have no record of when Fishacre incepted in theology, but the best estimate is about 1240. There is persuasive evidence that his major work, a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Books of Sentences, the first such work composed at Oxford, was the work of a master. Though commenting on Lombard’s Sentences eventually was set as a requirement for the degree and hence the exclusive province of bachelors, Fishacre’s Commentary is the work of a mature scholar and was composed between the years 1241 and 1245 (Long and O’Carroll 1999:15-26).
Nicolas Trivet, writing two decades later, testifies that Fishacre lectured in theology along with Bacon, but it is not clear which of the two was magister regens, a term not in use among the Dominicans. Whatever the case, death came for Fishacre in 1248, when he was approximately 40 years of age (Long and O’Carroll 1999: 26-29).
His rather brief life did not afford Fishacre the time to write much. In addition to his Sentences Commentary, comparable in size and scope to the one being composed during the same decade at Paris by Albert the Great, he is credited with a commentary or postillae on the Psalms, but if this work survived the dissolution, it has not been identified. However, we do have in addition to several sermons a single copy of a treatise on heresies and also on the Ascension of Christ, both of which have been edited (see Long 1978, 1993). Lastly, we possess four quaestiones disputatae (on the subject of light, the nature of the heavens, the eternal duration of the world, and the waters above the firmament), written after the completion of his Commentary and inserted into later copies of that work (see Long 2010:315-63).
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