In the Commentary of Remigius of Auxerre on the De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae of Martianus Capella, which was written at the end of the ninth century, there occurs an unusual tale of the origin of the seven liberal arts. According to this account, the three sons of Noah, upon learning of the impending destruction of the world, took two columns, one of brick and one of stone, and inscribed upon them the knowledge of the seven liberal arts to preserve it from oblivion. The stone column survived the Flood and long after was found in Egypt by Abraham who was thus enabled to restore the arts. From Egypt the arts were transmitted to Greece. Although this story was not commonly related in the Carolingian period, other tales of the discovery of the arts were current. Generally speaking, Cicero's claim for Mercury as the inventor and even the more prosaic accounts of Egyptian and Greek wise men as the discoverers were being superseded by the account of Hebrew discoverers that had been made popular by Isidore. It is not reasonable to think that Remigius, who in his commentary was constantly cautioning his pupils against taking Martianus' tales literally and pointing out for them the allegorical or poetic significance of the narrative, would accept at its face value any one of the versions of the invention of the arts. Actually, in discussing the origin of the arts he gives a philosophical explanation that would at once negate any account of an inventor. ‘The liberal arts,’ he says, ‘are naturally inherent in the soul and cannot be thought of as coming from elsewhere.’

Although we still lack a critical edition of Caxton's Golden Legend or any modern edition of the Gilte Legende, several scholars have contributed notable studies on the English versions of the Legenda Aurea. As far as Caxton is concerned, these studies have been confined to assessing his personal contributions, to deciding which French and English versions he used, and to discussing how he may have adapted the French, English and Latin texts of the Golden Legend which he had in front of him. It has of course also been recognised that a large section of Caxton's printed edition (corresponding to pp. 105–244 of Ellis's edition) was taken from a non-Legenda source and that much of this section is based ultimately on the Bible. But nothing has been done to examine this section in detail to determine where Caxton got his material and how he arranged it. This paper is devoted to an investigation of some of the problems involved in this part of the Golden Legend in order to provide a basis for further study and also to contribute to our understanding of Caxton's method as editor.

The Life of the Peloponnesian saint, Peter of Argos, which was first published in the original Greek in 1888, is very little known in spite of its historical interest. If I am not mistaken, I was the first among scholars to make use of it, in 1898 in my Russian study, The Slavs in Greece. In 1908 a monograph in Modern Greek came out in Athens on the subject of Peter of Argos, written by Ch. Papaoi-konomos: . This monograph has remained entirely unknown to European scholars; strangely enough, it was mentioned neither in the detailed bibliography of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, nor in the Vizantisky Vremennik, nor in the , where Greek publications are listed with reasonable accuracy. For myself, I was unable to find the book anywhere in America, and it was only recently that I received it directly from Greece. Since 1915 the indefatigable Greek scholar Nikos A. Bees has employed the Life of Peter of Argos in several studies, of which I shall speak later. Up to this time, nothing on the Life of Peter of Argos has been written in English.

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.

Early in the twelfth century Alfonso I ascended the throne of the young Aragonese kingdom. His brother, Pedro (1096–1104), had already established the momentum of the Aragonese reconquest by overpowering the Moorish kingdom of Huesca. With the accession of Alfonso, however, the movement of expansion was greatly accelerated. Although the early years of his reign were marked by a paralyzing conflict with Castile-León, by 1118 his career of conquest was fairly launched. The Moorish kingdom of Zaragoza fell near the end of that year, and its neighbor, Tudela, followed two months later. Calatayud and Daroca were conquered in 1120. During the winter of 1125–1126 Alfonso's troops ranged freely through the Moslem lands of Valencia, Córdoba, and Granada. Near the end of Alfonso's reign, the kingdoms of Lérida and Valencia were menaced by Aragonese arms, and their end appeared imminent. The king's sudden death in 1134 inaugurated a period of confusion in which many of his advances were wiped out, but his activities had already made him a legend and had made Aragón a major power in the Peninsula.

This article offers a study and critical edition of a group of passages (here called the “Schism Extracts”) that were compiled from the apocalyptic prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen and heavily annotated in response to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). The article argues that the Extracts were created by someone with ties to the University of Paris to illuminate a French perspective on the Schism and that they circulated primarily within a Parisian milieu—both among masters at the university and among members of religious houses in and around Paris. The article outlines the main contents and themes of the Extracts and the manuscript contexts in which they are found, including five prophecy collections. While one prophecy collection is known to have been compiled by the Parisian master Simon du Bosc, it is here argued that three of the other collections were produced by Pierre d'Ailly or someone within his circle of associates. Many of the prophetic writings selected for these collections thematically concern the eschatological and reformist role of France and a future holy angelic pope (the pastor angelicus). These include the writings of John of Rupescissa, and parallels between the Extracts and John's reading of Hildegard suggest that the compiler of the text was well-versed in John's apocalyptic thought.

A student of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas once made the comment that if the Summa theologiae is, as its prologue indicates, the book of the pupil, then the Quaestiones disputatae is the book of the master. And with equal enthusiasm another scholar remarked that though he was eighty years old and had been devoted to study from his youth, he had drawn more profit from the three or four years devoted to the study of the Quaestiones disputatae than from the rest of his life. The rich and detailed treatment of the Disputed Questions has not lacked admirers, yet in the history of Thomistic literature that admiration has been tempered by a difficulty in understanding the unity and organization of certain groups of those questions, notably the Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei.

The expression πάθει μάθο (177) and the final words of the parodos (τόδ’. ἕϱϰς) pose problems that have not been solved. At first sight they seem unrelated, but I think they are related through the ‘Hymn to Zeus.’ I also think that we can better understand the way the chorus are using πάθει μάθος by looking at the context of the ‘Hymn to Zeus' and at its structure as a prayer. And since the ending of the parodos echoes several sentiments in the ‘Hymn to Zeus,’ a more exact understanding of the ‘Hymn’ should allow us to try a new approach to understanding the meaning of the end of the parodos.

Mr. Thomas E. Marston, Curator of the Classical Collection in the Yale University Library, having already been the owner of three 15th-century manuscripts of Juvenal and Persius, which he donated in 1936 to the Yale University Library, acquired in 1953 a much older copy of Juvenal alone. This manuscript, having remained for five hundred years in private collections in Italy, first at Osimo, then at Iesi, had never been collated. Now, with Mr. Marston's generous permission, it has at length been studied and it is the findings of this study that this paper presents. It seemed best, inasmuch as the manuscript affords little new light on the tradition of the text, to restrict this report to sample readings, sufficient to establish the character of the manuscript; a complete collation, however, will be deposited for use in the Yale University Library, as well as with Mr. Marston.

Although more and more readers have come to recognize the literary sophistication of some Old English poems, only a very few have discussed Cynewulf's Elene in terms of this sophistication. A few studies have appeared in recent years which argue, in one way or another, for the complexity and richness of the poem, but many assumptions on which the older criticism is based remain to be challenged. Although the earlier commentators usually protested that the poem is no mere versification of its source, the Invention of the Cross-legend, they almost always discussed Cynewulf's achievement in terms of departure from or amplification of his source, and ultimately dismissed the poem as an extremely good versification of the legend.

A spate of recent articles attests to a growing interest in Eve in criticism of Old English literature. However, these same articles demonstrate the narrowness of this interest, as they all focus on Eve in one poem — Genesis B — which is not even an entire poem, but rather a small (albeit significant) interpolation into another poem. Other Old English writings have been little studied: in particular, several prominent occurrences of Eve during the Harrowing of Hell survive in the Old English Martyrology; Blickling Homily 7; a homily De descensu Christi ad inferos in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 121; and the poem Christ and Satan, but have received little comment. In each of these texts Eve supplicates Christ when he descends into hell to free the souls of the biblical patriarchs and prophets after his crucifixion; furthermore, six Old English homilies record Eve's appearance during the Harrowing, although not her active involvement. The Evangelium Nicodemi most fully describes the Harrowing of Hell; Eve's appearance within these texts, however, does not derive from this apocryphon. Moreover, while these episodes incorporate ideas drawn from patristic exegesis, they do not derive directly from patristic writings either; nevertheless, Eve's role in these texts may be an Anglo-Saxon modification of the patristic contrast between Eve and Mary, whereby Eve is portrayed as a type of Mary instead of as her antithesis.

The twelfth-century legal compilation known as the Usatges de Barcelona holds an important place in the history of Catalonia. Recognized as authoritative by kings and parliaments alike from at least the thirteenth century, the Usatges were integrated into the official collection of Catalan law commissioned by the Corts and the new king of Aragón, Fernando de Antequera, in 1412–13. The work of the jurists who carried out this task was eventually fixed in print (in Catalan) in 1495 as the Constitutions y altres drets de Cathalunya, which was reissued in 1588–89 and again in 1704. The Usatges thus formed part of the law of the region for over 500 years, until the suppression of Catalan local law in the Decreto de Nueva Planta of 1716; thereafter, they survived — and still survive — as a focus of Catalan nationalism and regional pride. For medieval historians, the Usatges usefully supplement Catalonia's abundant documentary evidence, evidence unaccompanied before the thirteenth century by significant narrative sources. Individual articles cover such diverse topics as composition payments for injuries, guidelines for judicial proceedings, inheritance rules, military obligation, the status of Jews and Muslims, marriage, rape, treason, and public highways. Drawn from and influenced by a wide variety of sources — including the Visigothic code, Roman law, comital charters, and royal decrees — they provide valuable information about legal traditions and reasoning in Catalonia.

Although interest in the influence of prophecy and eschatology on the crusade movement and on cross-cultural conceptions of righteous conflict has recently revived, to date there has been little consideration of the reception, transmission, and reinterpretation of multifarious prophecies by networks of individuals involved in the promotion of various crusades from roughly 1187 to 1240. This study tracks the circulation, adaptation, and impact of influential prophecies publicized by papal legates, by crusade recruiters trained in Paris, and by their colleagues in the Victorine, Praemonstratensian, and Cistercian orders, culminating in the crusades of Frederick II (1213–1229). Royal, imperial, noble, episcopal, and papal courts, as well as visionaries, regular religious, secular clergy, preachers, and prelates, played key roles in validating and publicizing predictions. The preservation and reinterpretation of prophecies by scholars, clerics, scribes, and historians working across Latin Christendom (and in the wider Mediterranean region and Central Asia) testifies to the cross-cultural transmission and reception of specific prognostications adapted to speak to local needs and concerns and changing circumstances. This article identifies manuscripts of prophecies which circulated both independently and in association with the crusading histories of Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, written during and used for the promotion of Frederick II's crusades. It concludes that prophecies and their promoters played essential roles in facilitating cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations, religious debates and conversion attempts, and in the fostering, contextualization, and commemoration of the act of pious warfare. Functioning as a common language, prophetic and eschatological expectations enabled Muslims, Eastern Christians, Jewish communities, and Latin Christians to justify their theoretical or actual roles on the orbis terrarum and to define and negotiate with other cultures. Moreover, they could be endlessly adapted both to fit and to shape existing past, present, or future circumstances. Prophecy and eschatology were not fringe phenomena or praxes, but presented holistic methods of making sense of and adapting to events and negotiating between one's own and other cultures, methods that both competed with and complemented historical and theological interpretations of the world (and texts) and rational, scientific, and philosophical modes of thought.

The following list is a logical sequel to the bibliography of printed catalogues published some years ago (Traditio VI [1948] 227-317), and it serves the same purpose, namely to facilitate the study of Latin manuscript books, which is important to classical and patristic scholars as well as to historians of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. A continuing exploration of the extant collections still leads to the discovery of unpublished writings, brings to light copies of known texts that are of special interest, or at least gives statistical evidence for the diffusion of certain well known works at the time when the manuscript book was the predecessor or rival of the printed book. Information on the general importance and content of the various manuscript collections proved essential both for the project of ‘Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries,’ which has been undertaken by a group of scholars under the auspices of several learned societies, and for a summary list of philosophical and literary manuscripts of the Renaissance which I am preparing for the Warburg Institute in London. The present list is an outgrowth of these two undertakings, and it was first compiled in a less elaborate fashion for the former project and issued in mimeographed form under its auspices in 1951.

In The Glory of the Martyrs, a collection of miracle stories completed by the early 590s, Bishop Gregory of Tours included a chapter on the Burgundian king Sigismund. A Catholic convert from the Arian Christianity of his father, Sigismund had founded a monastery at Agaune, the present St.-Maurice, Switzerland (Wallis/Valais), in the year 515. After he died in 523, at the hands of Chlodomer, one of the sons of Clovis, his body lay in a well at St.-Péravy-la-Colombe near Orléans (where the Franks had thrown it) until the abbot Venerandus brought it back to St.-Maurice in 535/36 for burial. Over the next fifty years or so, Sigismund gained the reputation as a saint and as a source of healing power over fevers. About Sigismund's posthumous fame, Gregory recorded that “whenever people suffering from chills piously celebrate a mass in his honor and make an offering to God for the king's repose, immediately their tremors cease, their fevers disappear, and they are restored to their earlier health.” Gregory's reference to a mass in honor of Sigismund is as unusual as is the very existence of such a celebration, for the Missa sancti Sigismundi is an early and peculiar example of a new development in the Latin liturgy in late antiquity, the missa votiva or votive mass. Votive masses differed from traditional forms of eucharistic celebration because they could be offered for a particular purpose and at the special request of a member (or members) of a congregation. Unlike the Missa sancti Sigismundi, however, most other early votive masses had generalized titles such as missa votiva or missa pro vivorum et mortuorum. The mass in honor of St. Sigismund is, as far as I can tell, unique in its appeal to the intercession of a particular saint for a specific purpose—the cure of fevers.

Muse of the unique
Historical fact, defending with silence
Some world of yours beholding, a silence
No explosion can conquer, but a lover's yes
Has been known to fill.
W. H. Auden, ‘Homage to Clio’

The Clio and Calliope evoked in the prohemia of Books II and III of Troilus and Criseyde are handily glossed in Chaucer editions as Muses of history and epic poetry respectively, but without citations of sources for these attributions. Stephen A. Barney's notes in The Riverside Chaucer suggest that in both evocations Chaucer is following Statius rather than Dante, and both he and B. A. Windeatt mention the marginal gloss ‘Cleo domina eloquentie’ in MS Harley 2392 of Troilus. Vincent J. DiMarco's note to the name Polymya in Anelida and Arcite identifies her as Muse of ‘sacred song,’ after her name-sense ‘she who is rich in hymns,’ but DiMarco does not elaborate on her pertinence to the context of the poem. There is little in current Chaucer criticism on schemes of attributes for the Muses; and yet without an idea of what values for the Muses Chaucer is drawing upon, it is difficult to appreciate their thematic force in Troilus.

Das Verzeichnis der Römerbriefkommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra war ursprünglich als Anhang einer Dissertation beigegeben worden, die sich mit der mittelalterlichen Exegese von Röm. 13. 1–7 befasst. Das Verzeichnis wurde überarbeitet und ergänzt. Notwendig wird sich auf weite Strecken Übereinstimmung mit dem Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi F. Stegmüllers ergeben, dem ich vor allem für die Handschriften wertvolle Ergänzungen verdanke. Mit einigen Ausnahmen sind hier nur die Autoren aufgenommen worden, deren Kommentare durch Handschriften sicher bezeugt sind, während in dem Repertorium F. Stegmüllers auch alle unsicheren Daten verwertet worden sind. Aus der griechischen Kirche ist der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes verzeichnet, weil er in der Übersetzung Rufins eine bedeutende Rolle in der exegetischen Tradition der lateinischen Kirche spielt. Sofern die behandelten Autoren ausser dem Römerbrief auch andere paulinische Briefe kommentierten, sind die Angaben über Handschriften, Drucke etc. auch auf diese Kommentare ausgedehnt worden. Die Literaturangaben beziehen sich in erster Linie auf Fragen der Paulinenkommentare und der exegetischen Methode. Für die Incipits und Explicits verweise ich auf das Repertorium von F. Stegmüller.

The Thebaid of Statius was one of the most widely read classical texts of the Latin Middle Ages. Commentaries on it however are rather rare. Of some 300 manuscripts of the work described in the files of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, Paris, only about thirty contain glossae, argumenta, or marginalia. The majority of the additions to the original are of a late date: two-thirds fall within the period 1100-1300, while the rest, with only three exceptions, are later. In this census, moreover, there are only three commentaires intégraux, that is, autonomous commentaries which do not consist of glosses on isolated words or phrases. Of the three, one has been attributed by P. Courcelle to Rémi of Auxerre; a second is thought to have been written in the thirteenth century by a certain Martianus de S. Benedicto; and the third has been printed under the authorship of Lactantius Placidus.

In an important study which appeared in 1956, Professor E. A. Thompson discussed imperial policy in southern Gaul during the first half of the fifth century. According to Professor Thompson the purpose of the Romans in settling four groups of barbarians in southern Gaul between the years 418 and 442 was to control the Bacaudae who, he contends, threatened to overthrow the existing social and economic order. By focusing all his attention on the Bacaudae Professor Thompson distorts Roman policy by attributing to it a precision which it lacked. A less selective study of the evidence suggests that Rome's policy in southern Gaul (and probably throughout the Empire as well) was directed toward control of all the potentially and actively hostile elements in the Empire rather than, on balance, being preoccupied exclusively with the activities of the Bacaudae.