 In 1879, Pope Leo XIII called for a revival in the study and teaching of Aquinas. One fruit of this encyclical was the founding of the definitive Leonine edition of Aquinas’s work. Another was a renewal of the old Thomistic picture of Aquinas as standing at the summit of philosophical and theological achievement, leaving subsequent developments—from Scotus to Descartes, Kant and beyond—to be dismissed as just so much decline and decay. Such zeal was hardly likely to be sustained for long, however, and the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of Thomisms of all kinds, in scholars like  Jacques Maritain,  Etienne Gilson,  Elizabeth Anscombe,  and Alasdair MacIntyre. As more recent scholarship has deepened our understanding both of Aquinas and of his successors, we now have a much fuller picture of the richness of later medieval philosophy. Aquinas today, viewed as a philosopher, looks not so much like the culmination of an era, but rather like the brilliant beginning of Europe’s philosophical renaissance.