Robert Fland, or Elandus Dialecticus?

Abstract

In the late 1970s, Paul Spade edited three treatises, on Consequences, Insolubles and Obligations, which he attributed to an otherwise unknown fourteenth-century logician whom he named as Robert Fland. We question this reading of the name and argue that his real name was Robert Eland. Moreover, we suggest that he should be identified with Eland the dialectician, whose Sophismata is mentioned in an account book at Merton College in 1367, and whose renown as a logician was disdainfully recorded some two hundred years later by the bibliographer John Bale.