The amount of research and publication on the problem of Herodotus' historicity has been gigantic. Recently Jameson's publcation of the newly discovered ‘Themistocles Decree’ has added a new phase to this ever vital controversy. The present paper, however, will evaluate another incident in the Histories and in the history of the Histories: the debate preceding the accession of Darius the Great to the Persian throne in 522 B.C.

(Barcelona, El Escorial, Gerona, Huesca, Lérida, Madrid, Montserrat, Pamplona, Poblet, Seo de Urgel, Silos, Tarazona, Toledo, Tortosa, Vallbona de las Monjas, Vich)

This article is mainly concerned with Office Books, but does not include books for the Mozarabic rite. A few books for the Mass etc. were included as a result of earlier incorrect descriptions; these were inspected and eliminated without further investigation.

Like the Preacher, son of David, Nicholas of Cusa knew that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness and he gave his heart to search it out. In phrases reminiscent of the classical definition of philosophy, the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and medieval venery, he pictured his intellectual life as a venatio sapientiae and himself as a keen and pious hunter. Virtually all his important philosophical and theological works, from the De docta ignorantia of 1440 to the De venatione sapientiae of 1463, document the chase. Wisdom is the principal subject of the dialogues Idiota de sapientia. And when the Pseudo-Petrarch incorporated most of the first of these two dialogues in his De vera sapientia (put together around 1470 and printed in all the collected editions of Petrarch's works), his definition of wisdom was given added publicity and authority.

The metropolitans of Seleucia-Ctesiphon for the fourth century comprise Papa, Simeon bar Sabbae, Shahdost, Barbashmin followed by a long vacancy, Tomarsa, Qayuma, and Isaac. The parallel Sassanids were Sapor II (309-379), Ardashir II (379-83), Sapor III (383-88), Bahram IV (388-99) and Yezdegerd I (399-420).

The list of catholici is preserved in a number of different writers: PsEN (c. s. x), ChrS (c. 1036), Mari (c. 1150), PsED (c. 1260), BarH (1286), Amri (c. 1350), Sliba (c. 1350), and others.

The chronology has already been studied by G. Westphal in connection with his investigation of the sources and reliability of Mari, Amri and Sliba. He bases his dates principally on the Syriac acts of the Persian martyrs, but, as the present paper attempts to prove, this cannot be done: we must work the other way around, settle first the succession of the catholici and then turn to the acts. Furthermore, since the publication of his excellent work, the very valuable ChrS has been discovered and a critical edition of PsEN has appeared.

English grammatical miscellanies, of which numerous examples survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are a major source of the history of education in later medieval England. We mean, by miscellanies, collections of treatises and exercises relating to the study and teaching of Latin. Works of this kind were compiled for their use by university scholars, members of the religious orders, and the masters and pupils of ordinary grammar schools. The study of such works today, most of whose contents have yet to be printed, adds greatly to our knowledge of medieval English life and thought. The Latin treatises on grammar which they contain reveal the history of the study and usage of Latin in England. They make it possible to reconstruct the grammar curriculum of the English schools and universities, for which other evidence is rarely available. They contain the earliest grammatical treatments of the English language, too, in the form of English glosses and translations of Latin grammatical works, long before the publication of the first definitive grammar of English in 1586. Of wider interest still, the miscellanies contain numerous school exercises which aimed to teach Latin to pupils through references to the speech, activities, and surroundings of everyday life. Such texts are especially valuable, since they preserve many illuminating details of English social history that have not survived elsewhere.

It is now almost three hundred years since Dom Garet published as part of the complete works of Cassiodorus the last printed edition of Cassiodorus' treatise On the Soul. The present edition is intended to offer a critical text of the work based on a study of the manuscript evidence. The restrictions of this publication make it impossible to give an explanation of the entire history of the text transmission. The apparatus criticus does, however, represent the readings of the best specimens of the various manuscript families which constitute the major evidence for the text. It is my hope that it will be possible at some future time for me to defend in greater detail my choice of the MSS used here, and to outline the history of the transmission from the ninth through the twelfth century.

In a recent article on the Florentine synodal constitutions of 1327, I took note of the rubric de testamentis et ultimis uoluntatibus, which ordered executors to pay directly to the bishop one-third of all legacies left indistincte ad pias causas seu pro anima. Another third of such bequests was to be paid directly to the testator's parish rector, while the remainder supposedly was to be distributed by the executors to pious causes. Under pressure from the commune, this mandate was struck in 1330. I stated the reasons for communal opposition, and made a limited attempt to show the canonical background of the bishop's unsuccessful ordinance. Citing the European-wide use by the secular clergy of the decretal Super cathedram (1300) to recoup income lost to the friars, the article concluded that Florence's demand for direct payment of a third on indistincte was an extreme — but not unique — formulation of a trend within one contemporary school of jurisprudence to amplify the testamentary rights of the secular clergy. The bishop's attempt was bad law, and even the lawyers whose opinions had encouraged the bishop in his formulation — before all, the great canonist Giovanni d'Andrea — crushed such attempts on indistincte with strong and decisive consilia.

Chaucer's Summoner tells the tale of a corrupt friar who, while trying to obtain a donation from his bedridden and irate patron Thomas, demonstrates his hypocrisy by giving Thomas's wife a very specific dinner order and immediately following it up with a long sermon on the importance of fasting. Like most medieval preachers, Friar John appeals to biblical exempla:

“Habent sua fata libelli.” This often-quoted line from the work of the North African grammarian Terentianus Maurus can safely be applied to two biographies of St. Augustine written by two men outstanding in the literary world of their age. They are Jordanus of Saxony (1300–1380 ca.) and John Capgrave (1393–1464).

In the second century, A.D. (c. 177), the Christian philosopher and apologist, Athenagoras, inveighing against the pagans for immoralities forbidden by their own codes, incorporated in his harangue an expression which was to have a long and interesting history in Christian literature.1 These are his words:

Montfaucon's edition of St. John Chrysostom and Migne's Patrologia after him put among the dubia six sermons De fato et providentia (Πεϱὶ εἱμαϱμένης τε ϰαὶ πϱονοίας). In the Admonitio we read: ‘Et vero cum de fato Chrysostomus disserit, alio orationis utitur modo: unde forte nascatur quaedam νοθείας suspicio.’ Henry Savile, in his edition (1612), rejected the view of Fronton du Duc, who had written of these orations: ‘Videntur concionum a Chrysostomo habitarum ἀπανθίσματα potius et florilegia, seu morales digressiones, quam integrae homiliae: necdum tamen areolae et loca unde sunt decerptae, nobis occurrerunt.’ Savile's rejection reads: ‘Non assentior Frontoni Ducaeo has πεϱί πϱονοίας orationes ἀπανθίσματα esse: neque enim memini ea quae hic afferuntur alibi apud hunc nostrum legisse eodem modo dicta.’

The Carolingians regarded much of Italy as a military frontier following their overthrow of the Lombard kingdom in 776. Although there was little national Lombard resistance to Frankish rule, other factors — which will be noted later — forced the Franks to keep up their military establishment in Italy. In some ways this military establishment followed the pattern of Carolingian arrangements in other conquered territories, in other ways the Italian situation was quite unique. Since the Carolingian failure to solve the problem of Italian unity was in at least a degree due to the Carolingian failure to meet the challenge of the Italian military frontier, the study of this problem throws some interesting light on the turbulent conditions in northern and central Italy before and after its incorporation in the German Holy Roman Empire.

The human face has the capacity to generate expressions associated with a wide range of affective states. Despite the fact that there are few words to describe human facial behaviors, the facial muscles allow for more than a thousand different facial appearances. Some examples of feelings that can be expressed are anger, concentration, contempt, excitement, nervousness, and surprise. Regardless of culture or language, the same expressions are associated with the same emotions and vary only in intensity. Using modern psychological analyses as a point of departure, this essay examines descriptions of human facial expressions as well as such bodily “symptoms” as flushing, turning pale, and weeping in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The aim is to analyze the manner in which facial signs are used as a means of non-verbal communication to convey the impression of an individual's internal state to observers. More specifically, this essay seeks to determine when and why characters in these works are described as expressing particular facial emotions and, especially, the range of emotions expressed. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders are in the forefront of the analysis and yield well over one hundred references to human facial expression and color. The examples show that through gaze, smiling, weeping, brows that are raised or knitted, and coloration, the Sagas and þættir of Icelanders tell of happiness or amusement, pleasant and unpleasant surprise, fear, anger, rage, sadness, interest, concern, and even mixed emotions for which language has no words. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders may be reticent in talking about emotions and poor in emotional vocabulary, but this poverty is compensated for by making facial expressions signifiers of emotion. This essay makes clear that the works are less emotionally barren than often supposed. It also shows that our understanding of Old Norse-Icelandic “somatic semiotics” may well depend on the universality of facial expressions and that culture-specific “display rules” or “elicitors” are virtually nonexistent.

Modern scholars of medieval philosophy have had access to the work of Abū Ḥâmid Muhammad al-Ghāzalī (1058–1111) since 1933, when Joseph T. Muckle published an edition of the great Muslim theologian's Maqāsid al-falāsifa (“The Opinions of the Philosophers”). In this work, al-Ghāzalī (known to the West as Algazel) summarized ideas proposed by Avicenna (940–1036) in his Danesh Nameh. Algazel's Maqāsid al-falāsifa was composed of three parts, the Metaphysics, Physics, and Logic; medieval authors read and referred to Algazel's work accordingly, as three separate works.

The Moralia is an unfortunate term for the writings that have come down to us under the name of Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. A.D. 50–120). They discuss rhetorical topics and general philosophical issues. A few are expressedly devoted to medical themes, for example, the tract entitled De sanitate tuenda praecepta (Mor. 122B–137E). But the medical material is sadly scattered throughout the extensive oeuvre, and it is difficult to gain a clear perspective.

An assiduous interest in the plain sense of Scripture and shared interpretations of particular biblical passages can be observed in certain twelfth-century Jewish and Christian commentaries composed in northern France. While Hugh of Saint Victor and Rashbam engaged in independent endeavors to shed light on the sensus literalis and the peshat of Scripture, Andrew of Saint Victor attributed his knowledge of particular rabbinic interpretations to encounters with contemporary Jews. Yet points of convergence in Jewish and Christian exegesis can be observed even before the work of the Victorines and Rashi's disciples. The purpose of this study is to examine the midrashic interpretations transmitted in northern France around the beginning of the twelfth century in both the Glossa Ordinaria and Rashi's biblical commentaries. Interpretations are found in both corpora on occasions when their late-antique sources, such as Midrash Genesis Rabba and Jerome's Hebrew Questions on Genesis, themselves transmit similar insights. By analyzing an exposition found in both Rashi and the Gloss, the narrative of Abraham in the fiery furnace, this study seeks to clarify the nature and extent of this relationship. It thereby enables a more detailed understanding of the ways that midrash reached twelfth-century Jews and Christians and of how Rashi and the Gloss ensured the wide dissemination of these interpretations.

Critical approaches to alliterative poetry can and do include all the approaches imposed on literature in general. But to these must be added approaches particular to the fact that we confront a body of literature defined by a distinctive, some would say peculiar, metrical form. Alliterative poetry has been accorded a separate status precisely because it is alliterative, flourished in a relatively short time-frame, and is associated with a geographic region. For most of this century, the Alliterative Revival has reigned as an historical fact — a nationalistic metrical response, fostered by the North West Midlands baronial families, to the increasing power of the Court in the East Midlands and the pernicious influence of foreign, mainly French fashions, particularly poetic. In the last fifteen years, and at a galloping pace in the last ten, we have seen one of the massive certainties of literary history first quietly mined by the late Elizabeth Salter, and then besieged, assaulted, and overrun by an increasing band of scholarly invaders numbering among them Norman Blake, Derek Pearsall, T. Turville-Petre, and David Lawton. The Theory of the Alliterative Revival, once a Castle of Truth, now lies in ruins, picked over by its destroyers for useful material with which to build a new Tower on a Tofte. While the orthodox view of the alliterative revival has been disestablished, and no single creed has yet emerged as an authoritative substitute, there is currently underway a major re-assessment of alliterative poetry, which has both been caused by and also generated a substantial increase in scholarly knowledge of the field. The questions that have been posed and continue to be explored are mainly of the following kind: Was there a revival or simply a continuation? How and where was this revival/continuation generated and located? Should we distinguish sub-groups of alliterative poetry according to metrical variants? How do we scan alliterative verse? What are the origins of or influences on the metres and rhythms of the great alliterative works of the late fourteenth century?

The barbarian invasions of the fifth century have been studied in great detail, and the major participants in these invasions — the Franks, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns — have rightly received the bulk of scholarly attention. Smaller groups of invaders such as the Alans, several bands of which settled in Gaul, have not received notice commensurate with their importance. While most of the better histories of the late empire mention the Alans, no adequate study has been made of their settlement in Gaul. In this paper an attempt will be made to ascertain the role played by the Alans in Gaul during the fifth century.