The history of Christianity shows roughly two ways of remembering the apostles: as a collegium of twelve and as individual authorities or saints. In the earliest centuries, the reference to Christ's disciples as a group predominates. Both in the visual arts and in writing, “the twelve” are undiscriminated, forming a collective representation of testimony to Christian teaching. Prescriptive writings from the first four centuries dealing with matters of ecclesiastical organization, doctrine, and worship may serve as an example, such as the first-century document entitled “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles,” better known as Didache, and the second- to fourth-century related sources Doctrina apostolorum, Didascalia apostolorum, and Constitutiones apostolicae.

In the following pages the Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages, begun in Traditio 31 (1975) 99–126 and continued in succeeding issues, concludes with a number of brief tracts. These are for the most part spurious, but they circulated under the name of Hippocrates of Cos and appear to have reflected aspects of the Hippocratic tradition. They comprise: XLVI. Regimen sanitatis (salutis); XLVII. Secreta (Practicae) de curis universalibus totius corporis humani; XLVIII. Secreta (Signa sanitatis et signa mortis); XLIX. De septimanis; L. De situ regionum; LI. De minis; LII. De victus ratione; LIII. De visitatione infirmorum; LIV. De vita; and LV. De vulneribus capitis.

One of the last shades whom the pilgrim Dante encounters in Hell is the pitifully nostalgic and vengeful Master Adam. By his own admission, the lute-shaped grotesque has been burnt at the stake for counterfeiting the gold florin and rained into the tenth bolgia along with the swinish impersonators, the reeking liars, and the leprous alchemists stacked against each other like pans. Although various historical models for the now immobile, water-logged sinner have been suggested, he is most commonly identified as the shade of Adam of Brescia, a false coiner employed by the Counts of Romena to debase the monetary standard of the Florentines. This deduction corresponds well with the evidence of the text, for Master Adam both names the wretched souls for whose sake he has left his body burnt and locates the place where he sinned amid the cool green hills of the Casentino. Yet Dante's portrayal of the hydroptic contains elements which seem to allude to a context larger than that defined by the historical Adam of Brescia whose counterfeiting of coins led him to the stake. For as probable as the historical and geographical identification may be, it does not fully account for the counterfeiter's metamorphosis into a water-filled lute, for his nostalgic fixation on his pleasant homeland, or even for his eternal confinement with the deformed shades of the falsifiers of the body, the word, and the goods of nature. When these and other details of the passage are studied against the bodies of extra-literary knowledge available to Dante, however, they reveal that the Master Adam encountered by the pilgrim is not only the shade of an historical counterfeiter, but also a type of the unredeemed and unredeemable Old Adam.

The grammatical allegory of Piers Plowman C, Passus 3, has aptly been designated ‘the ugly duckling of the C revision.’ Since Skeat's day the passage has been described as ‘tedious and puerile,’ ‘irrelevant,’ ‘unintelligible and barren of all interest.’ More recently, John Alford's admirable article on the history of grammatical metaphor has situated the passage in a long literary tradition, and thus opened the way for an appreciation of its virtues, however strange they may seem to moderns. From the goliardic song to the sermon, from venality-satire to the Donatus moralizatus, authors throughout the Middle Ages built wordplays and metaphors, sometimes extended ones, on the technical terms of Latin grammar. For the medieval preacher, various kinds of pride go before a casus, or fall: pride of name (nominative), pride of descent (genitive), pride of wealth and munificence (dative), and so on; for the goliard, one becomes genitivus as a result of too much bedroom conjugation For Langland's grammatical allegory, though, critics have had less success explaining the use of grammatical terms and doctrines. Alford gives a brief five-page treatment to the passage, focusing mainly on the analogy between grammatical rules and the rule of law; although he aptly notes the punning use of terms such as ‘kynde’ for the Incarnation and ‘case’ for a legal suit, he does not address the use of ‘relacion rect and indirect’ or ‘adiectyf and sustantyf’ around which the passage is built. On the other hand, the article which gives the most detailed explanation of Langland's grammatical doctrines still has trouble relating them to the exempla of husband and wife, master and laborer, and son and servant, and even to the key notions of meed and mercede, confessing in places that ‘Conscience's precise intentions must remain a mystery.’

In a recently published article, V. L. Kennedy discusses the career and writings of a medieval theologian who, after the excellent spade work done by Hauréau in 1884, has not received much attention on the part of modern scholars: Peter of Roissy, chancellor of Chartres in the early thirteenth century, one time a renowned preacher in Paris, and author of scriptural glosses, of sermons, and of a Manuale de mysteriis ecclesiae (or Speculum ecclesiae). Father Kennedy brings to light new documents bearing on the life of Peter and presents us in particular with a careful analysis of his main work, the Manuale. After listing the manuscripts and establishing the chief differences between the two redactions of the treatise—notably, the three parts of the first edition were rearranged into four and enlarged by a fifth part, De sacramentis, when Peter revised and re-issued his book—Kennedy goes on to examine some of its characteristic features, to discuss its literary and canonical sources, to publish a sample edition of its section on Extreme Unction, and finally adds a complete index of its hundreds of rubrics.

Great disagreement over the plot of Sophocles' Philoctetes makes the terrain of critical discussion very slippery. Some critics argue that Odysseus knows from the beginning that both Philoctetes and his bow are the object of the voyage to Lemnos, while Neoptolemus realizes this fact only later; others, however, believe that Odysseus never realizes the need for Philoctetes himself but that Neoptolemus eventually does. A few argue that the audience understands clearly, from the beginning and throughout the play, that Odysseus and Neoptolemus are both aware of the need for Philoctetes as well as his bow. Different perceptions of the plot may lead to very different interpretations of the play. For instance, the critics who believe that Neoptolemus at first thinks he must bring only the bow to Troy often concentrate on Neoptolemus' alleged realization that Philoctetes is necessary, too, while those who believe that Neoptolemus is aware all along of the need for Philoctetes obviously center their analyses elsewhere. Some critics even try to make a virtue out of the confusion over the plot, though in different ways: believing that we cannot determine until late in the play what Neoptolemus and Odysseus perceive their mission to be, a few argue that the question must be irrelevant to understanding Sophocles' purposes; another finds the moral lesson of the play in the fact that a muddle exists.

Studies about Christian perceptions of Islam and other non-Christian cultures in the Middle Ages in recent years have tended to focus on individual authors and their works. New research in the field of manuscript philology, particularly its focus on the idea of the “whole book,” however, suggests some new interpretive vistas that can sharpen our understanding of how medieval readers engaged with, and responded to, texts about the non-Christian Other. This article takes as its subject a twelfth-century miscellany manuscript from the Westfalian monastery of Grafschaft that constitutes a remarkable dossier of hagiographical and exegetical texts relating to Muslims, pagans, and holy war. This codex, Darmstadt Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Cod. 749, offers a window onto how works dealing with these subjects were read not only on their own terms, but in dynamic relationship to one another. Focusing on the associative resonances between the different works in a single manuscript allows us to understand how one monastic community in northern Germany sought to place the twelfth-century Crusades in a broader historical and theological context. The results of such an approach complicate the traditional Christian-Muslim binary we usually encounter in studies of Crusading or medieval views of non-Christians, underscoring how one community of medieval readers thought about the problem of religious conflict in several temporal, geographic, and conceptual dimensions.

Plautus' Trinummus has won much praise from those who seek a strong ethical line in comedy and believe that, in the rare instance of this Plautine play, they have found it. Such critics classify it as an exception from the usual irreverence of the playwright, along with the Captivi. More than 200 years ago, Lessing extolled the Captivi as the finest play, not just of Plautus, but of antiquity. The Trinummus came a close second in his estimation, and he demonstrated his affection for both plays by translating and commenting on the Captivi, and by adapting the Trinummus for the German stage in 1750, at the youthful age of twenty-one. Ritschl chose the Trinummus as the first Plautine work to bring out in a careful critical edition, and his edition elicited one of the finest reviews of Theodor Bergk in 1848. The apparently noble ethics of this play encouraged E. P. Morris to edit it for American school and college students, at the end of the nineteenth century. In this century, affection for pronounced ethics has somewhat declined. Therefore, although critics continue to perceive the same emphasis, they are less willing to extol the play as a masterpiece. E. F. Watling, in his Penguin translation of 1964, rather tepidly summarizes the Trin. as ‘a cool leisurely comedy, which offers an agreeably convincing, if partial, picture of Graeco-Roman family problems.’ A decade later, Erich Segal provocatively labeled it as Plautus' only boring play, precisely because of its unusual ethical contents.

Treatises de modis significandi are known to have been a favorite genre of scholastic literature. One of them, by Martinus de Dacia, has lately been made the subject of a thorough study by Father Heinrich Roos, S.J., and will be briefly discussed in these pages. The text of this treatise, and commentaries on it, are found in a fairly large number of manuscripts, of which Fr. Roos presents a list, and which he endeavors to determine in their mutual relation in order to lay the groundwork for a future edition, apparently — as much as any one not himself familiar with the manuscripts can judge — with thoroughness and reliablity (chs. I, II). In some of the manuscripts and in certain other sources the treatise is ascribed to one Martinus de Dacia (Denmark). Very convincingly Fr. Roos demonstrates (ch. III) that this bit of information is correct and that the author was identical with a high-ranking Danish cleric of that name, who at one time was the chancellor of King Eric VI Menved. It is likely that Martinus composed his treatise while he was a professor in the Liberal Arts Faculty of the University of Paris, probably around 1250. The treatise seems to have enjoyed a great reputation, which would be accounted for if Fr. Roos is right in assuming that Martinus set the model for the entire type. In the last two chapters (IV, V) Fr. Roos describes the character and basic ideas of the tractate against the background of the development of scholarship and higher education during the Middle Ages. This historical outline is very interesting and instructive indeed. Nevertheless it provokes criticism regarding two interrelated points, namely, the characterization of scholastic grammar and its position in the history of linguistic studies.

This paper reassesses the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. Through wide-ranging comparative analysis, it identifies probable departures from the antecedent tradition and argues that these departures are best understood not in impersonal terms, as Christian reactions to a pagan tradition, but in terms of a singular poet's sense of decorum, which was not possessed by all Christian authors throughout the Middle Ages. Focusing on interpretive controversies related to matters such as slavery, kin-slaying, the posthumous fate of pagans, and violence orchestrated by women, this paper argues that a series of ostensibly unrelated problems in the poem's critical literature could be resolved with a single coherent explanation: namely, that Beowulf was composed by a poet who sought to preserve as much as possible from the antecedent tradition, while not hesitating to obscure indecorous features and to express value judgments alien to the inherited material. The Beowulf poet's sense of decorum is shown herein to be idiosyncratic yet coherent and pervasive, responsible for various minor departures from tradition and for the selection of the untraditional protagonist around which the poem is structured.

Canonical bigamy posed a barrier for late medieval men who were or had been married to a widow or unfaithful wife and wanted to retain or be appointed to clerical rank. Western church norms from the twelfth century onward permitted only the papacy to dispense from the obstacle for promotion or readmission to the sacred orders of sub-deacon, deacon, and priest. And yet, papal administrative records from the period indicate that actual dispensations were hardly ever granted to “bigamous” recipients. What accounts for this discrepancy between theoretical freedom and practical restraint? The article discusses the historical evidence and suggests that besides theological reservations the risk of political conflict with lay jurisdictions may have persuaded most of the popes not to make use of their dispensatory power in cases of bigamia.

The medieval sources for the study of the organization and customs of the Spanish military Order of Calatrava have never been published. For information on this matter scholars have relied upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century difiniciones enacted by the general chapters of the Order. With the hope of stimulating interest in a subject which has long awaited analysis, the difiniciones or statutes of Abbot William II of Morimond, given in 1468, are printed here. This is the first in a series of projected editions of all the texts pertinent to the organization and customs of the Order in the Middle Ages. Abbot William's difiniciones, like those of his predecessors, issued during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contain useful details concerning the monastic practices of the knights of Calatrava.

In 1887, on the basis of a Berlin manuscript, a German philologist, Valentin Rose, published the Greek text of the Life of St. David of Thessalonica. Before that date some scholars had conjectured that a Life of this Saint existed; but their expectations were finally realized only in 1887 when Rose's edition came out.

The purpose of the following reflections is not polemical, in spite of the fact that the criticism of any philosopher of the past may seem prejudiced to his modern disciples. My intention is rather to point out that the traditional interpretation of William of Ockham as a nominalist and as a skeptic is correct. The reason for insisting on such a point at this time is the series of publications which Father Philotheus Boehner has been contributing to the study of Ockham, and in particular the article which appeared in the first volume of Traditio.

A considerable amount of work has been done recently on Malory. This interest in the author of The Tale of King Arthur has been related in part to the advances in Arthurian scholarship which have formed a major portion of medieval studies in this century. In the whole Arthurian field perhaps no area has been so persistently studied as the legend of the holy grail.

This comparative study examines the treatment of named vernacular poets from the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the subsequent literary cultural histories of their traditions. Both societies developed sophisticated bilingual intellectual cultures. After a brief survey of historical poets and anonymous secular texts from both vernacular literatures, this essay examines two accounts that involve vernacular poets from Latin texts written by clerics. Muirchú maccu Machtheni wrote Vita Sancti Patricii (ca. 690) and briefly mentioned the presence of the poets Dubthach maccu Lugair and Fiacc Finn Sléibte at the pagan court of Lóegaire mac Néill in Tara in the fifth century. Bede devoted a full chapter of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (ca. 731) to the poet Cædmon at the monastery of Whitby sometime in the second half of the seventh century. The presence of these three vernacular poets in the works of two clerics suggests their perceived potential contributions to the Church. But their treatment in later cultural history differs markedly between the self-referential Gaelic world and more reticent Anglo-Saxons. In the Gaelic tradition Dubthach and Fiacc are recorded in law tracts, hagiography, martyrologies, genealogies, prose narratives, and poems. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition Cædmon does not exist outside of Bede's account. It is suggested that the legally recognized social rank, formal training, and professional status of poets in Gaelic society helps explain the discrepancy in subsequent cultural acknowledgement.

Es ist eine bekannte Tatsache, dass das Mittelalter zahlreiche, oft weitreichende und den Gang der Geschichte beeinflussende Fälschungen hervorgebracht hat. Die lange Reihe der Falsifikate reicht von den spätantiken Symmachianischen Fälschungen über die Konstantinische Schenkung, die Pseudo-Isidorischen Dekretalen, bis zu den zahllosen gefälschten Urkunden bekannter und unbekannter Verfasser des hohen Mittelalters und den gefälschten Viten zur Erhöhung des Ruhmes einer Kirche oder eines Klosters, Fälschungen, die aus betrügerischen Absichten, aus politischen Erwägungen, aus genealogischen Bestrebungen, aus Nachahmungssucht und dem Wunsche, echte oder falsche Reliquien zu deuten, aber auch aus edleren Motiven erwachsen sind. Das discrimen veri ac falsi ist deshalb zu einer der vornehmsten Aufgaben der kritischen Geschichtswissenschaft geworden und wurde vor allem in der Urkundenlehre zu höchster Feinheit entwickelt.

Sulcard, a monk of Westminster in the eleventh century, is the author of the first history of his monastery, the unprinted Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii. In this brief tract he describes the foundation of Westminster in the days, as he claims, of King Æthelberht of Kent, and the patronage and endowment extended by various benefactors, notably Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury and King Edward the Confessor. Sulcard also records the marvellous dedication of Westminster by St. Peter, patron of the church, and two other miracles worked in Westminster by the prince of the apostles. Another chapter is devoted to King Æthelred II and Alfred the Ætheling. It has nothing to do with Westminster and was obviously inserted to bridge the gap in the history of the monastery between the reigns of Kings Edgar and Edward the Confessor. It does, however, contain some information on Æthelred's siege of Rochester in 986 and a brief reference bearing on the question whether Edward or Alfred was the elder of Æthelred's two sons by Emma. The purpose of this paper is to examine the content of Sulcard's Prologus and to print for the first time the entire text.

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64), the man who succeeded Calixtus III to the apostolic chair in 1458, was destined to become one of the best known pontiffs of the later Middle Ages. His popularity not only rests upon his own extensive literary and historical production, but upon the extensive historical literature subsequently devoted to this fifteenth-century figure. Multiple interpretations and assessments of his character and contributions abound. Caught up in the severe conceptualization of nineteenth-century renaissance scholarship, Aeneas Sylvius emerged as a slightly tarnished dilettante who only partially exemplified the typical Renaissance man with his clear-cut and self-reliant aesthetic and moral characteristics. In this spirit Georg Voigt raised grave suspicions as to Aeneas' integrity in both his private and public life. Jacob Burckhardt, who could only appreciate the pope's multiplicity from the standpoint of the representative artistic types exemplifying Italian humanism, failed to find the ‘whole man’ in the versatile Italian. As historiography moved towards a more diffuse view of the Renaissance and saw it as a shift of balance and change in emphasis rather than an abrupt change, the image of Aeneas Sylvius was gradually freed from such narrow interpretations. The struggle was long and intense for the scholarly tyranny of Voigt, though not always verified by a re-examination of the documents, was argumentatively infectious. Today, a half century of detailed research has added many additional perspectives to our knowledge of Aeneas Sylvius and has clarified many particular problems related to both his earlier life and later pontificate. Future studies will not differ too substantially from this pattern. The inconsistency accompanying the maturation of human character; the conflict between the theological-political values of any one man and the current aspirations of domestic and international ambition; the transitory character of the age—all these factors will continue to hamper assessments of Aeneas Sylvius.

At first sight Aelfric's Vocabulary appears to be a well-ordered word list, topically arranged under appropriate Latin subtitles. In this it differed none from the Nominale, which was really a Latin-English lexicon largely used in England to teach boys Latin during the Middle Ages. The Nominale, or Vocabulary, contained Latin words together with the English meanings topically arranged: names of trades, herbs, plants, animals, etc. There was no alphabetical arrangement except in a few isolated instances. The Glossary differed from the Nominale or Vocabulary in that it was a collection of glosses which originated as marginal or interlinear explanations of words or phrases in the Latin authors. Any schoolboy who writes the meanings of the Latin words between the lines or on the margin of his Caesar or Vergil is perfectly familiar with the glossing process. However, the analogy stops here: the present-day schoolboy employs this gloss but momentarily. Should he forget the meaning of the Latin word when it occurs again, he is not required to go over the glossed portion of his text to find it; he turns instead to the vocabulary at the end of his book, or goes to a dictionary.