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This article proposes to retrace some of the key stages of the great Thomistic debate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the question of the distinction between essence and supposit, and in particular on the problem of reconciling the teaching of article 3 of quaestio III of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae and the doctrine of Quodlibet II. The aim is to reconstruct a crucial moment in the history of Thomism, and at the same time to show the possible contribution that its study can make to contemporary scholarship, which owes more than it believes or acknowledges to the Thomistic tradition.