John Pecham c. 1230 – 1292

John Pecham was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic theologian, and natural philosopher, and from 1279 archbishop of Canterbury. After studies at Paris and Oxford and a long teaching career as a Franciscan master, he produced his influential Perspectiva Communis, a textbook of geometrical optics that synthesized the work of Alhazen, Roger Bacon, and earlier Western writers and remained a standard introduction to the science of vision into the seventeenth century. As archbishop he defended an Augustinian-Bonaventurean theology of divine illumination against the rising Aristotelianism associated with Thomas Aquinas, condemning a list of Thomistic propositions at Oxford in 1284.