When A. E. Housman edited Lucan, he dealt with the ‘confections’ of his predecessors with such high-handed savagery that his introduction is a delight even to non-classical essay-readers. ‘I touch with reluctance …,’ he says, ‘and dispatch with impatience an idle yet pretentious game in which Lucan's less serious critics find amusement, and which they call Ueber lieferungsgeschichte, because that is a longer and nobler name than fudge.’

The Spanish reconquest was a complex process, consisting of at least two aspects, the military seizure of Muslim territory and the occupation of that land. Although many historians prefer to regard only the military actions as constituting the Reconquista proper, it is possible that the process of resettlement exerted the greater long-term effect on Spanish society. From this point of view the reconquest can be seen as a centuries-long process of internal migration, in which the Christians continually pressed into the depopulated zones that the Muslims vainly attempted to maintain along their frontiers. Military successes or reversals could temporarily accelerate or arrest the process, but the constant tendency of at least some elements of Christian society to seek their fortune along the frontier was a force which the Muslims were unable in the long run to resist.

Some years ago I called attention to these words of the early thirteenth-century decretalist, Vincentius Hispanus, on the powers of the pope and of the prince: ‘… sit voluntas pro ratione.’ What is the meaning? Did Vincentius hold that the supreme authority was arbitrarily absolute, that the voluntas of the monarch must in all circumstances be accepted as reason itself? Must we believe that he advanced a doctrine of unlimited absolutism — of the pope in the Church and of the emperor in the Empire? And that he anticipated a theory of sovereignty as the authority and powers of the ruler subject neither to the law nor to the laws?

The Maitland Memorial Lectures for 1948, delivered at Cambridge University by Dr. Walter Ullmann, were published in 1949, somewhat enlarged, under the title, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London, Methuen & Co., 1949; pp. xiv, 230). In six chapters the author sets forth his views on certain fundamental problems of medieval political history which were given their doctrinal development and practical realization by the canonists jointly with the popes, that is to say, by the legislative authority and the jurisprudence of the medieval Church.

The study of Latin manuscripts has been of vital importance not only to the student of classical and patristic literature but also to every serious scholar interested in the literature, theology, philosophy and science of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. In this field, the manuscripts contain not merely new variants of well-known texts but an often unsuspected amount of new textual material that never got into print but often had as wide a circulation and importance as some of the printed works. This material is by no means easily accessible. If a collection of manuscripts has no printed catalogue, there is no way of investigating its content except by working on the spot. On the other hand, printed catalogues, when available, permit the location of pertinent material from a distance, and hence are a definite scholarly aid and desideratum. Since even the printed catalogues are often inadequate and sometimes rare, it has seemed useful to compile an annotated bibliography of these catalogues, which would serve as a guide to medievalists and Renaissance scholars in general, and in particular to the contributors to 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. The present bibliography was originally compiled for the purposes of that project, and it has been decided to print it, since previous bibliographies of a similar nature were either conceived along narrower lines, like Weinberger's, or were inaccurate, like Richardson's.

One of the most difficult objectives of research into sacred traditions is to reveal their underlying origins. For early periods, about which we have scanty and sporadic information, the scholar must be content with indicating the earliest piece of historical evidence that connects a tradition with a specific site, though the reasons for this connection often remain unexplained. The tradition that locates the tomb of King David on Mount Zion, the southwestern hill of ancient Jerusalem, has often been considered one such case. Nevertheless this case seems to be exceptional. In this study I shall attempt to show that it is possible not only to indicate the connection between a site and a tradition, but also to explain the circumstances of the emergence of this tradition.

Thomas of Hales has long been recognized as the author of a fine Middle English lyric, the ‘Luue Ron.’ He is also known to have written a sermon (or meditation) in Anglo-Norman, and a few manuscripts of a Latin life of the Virgin, Vita Sancte Marie, have also been attributed to him. Modern accounts of his life depend almost entirely on an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Thomas More, humanist, statesman, and martyr, was one of the most prolific apologists for the Catholic Church in the early years of the Reformation. In numerous polemical and apologetic works he ranged widely over the issues raised by the controversy. But if his scope was large, he possessed one sure foundation to which all his arguments inevitably returned. This was the faith of the early Church Fathers, those men who interpreted the life and faith of the Church from the time of the Apostles to the end of the pontificate of Pope Gregory I in 604.

The use of moral stories or cautionary tales in sermons to illustrate and reinforce homiletic doctrine was widely accepted by medieval preachers. While diffusion of suitable narratives for this purpose was sometimes accomplished by oral means, such tales were more commonly transmitted by compendia or encyclopedias of didactic stories. These compilations were circulated throughout medieval Christendom for use as reference books by the homilist composing a sermon or series of sermons to be read by his colleagues or delivered from his pulpit.

The use of the figure ‘Christ the Physician' and of related medical analogies has quite frequently arrested the attention of scholars investigating patristic literature. There is no need of tracing the ultimate origin of this motif, or of documenting its appearance in numerous writings of the Fathers, both Eastern and Western, since recent study has treated both of these aspects in some detail. In spite of this rather specialized research, however, one seeks in vain to locate the name ‘Romanos' in lists of those authors who have pictured Christ as the Divine Physician of body and soul. This article, then, will have as its specific purpose an analysis of the use of the medical motif in the kontakia of Romanos the Melodist (d. 556). Such an addition to the literature on this topic is warranted by the importance of the Romanos corpus in the history of Christian Greek letters and the corresponding importance of the ὁ Χϱιστòς ὁἰατϱóς theme as an illustration of the Melodist's poetic technique.

When, on election to the papacy in 1088, Odo of Ostia selected the name Urban II, he did so in acknowlegment of the clerical reforms then attributed to the obscure Urban I (†. 230). A careful investigation would clearly indicate the association — albeit on spurious grounds — of the memory of this ancient pope with clerical reform and the canons regular during the eleventh century. And the vigorous role of Odo-Urban as patron and reformer of the canons regular is readily documented. However, while they probably are apparent to certain specialists, no historian seems to have indicated the implications of Urban II's name in a detailed and explicit fashion.

The recovery of the work of an author previously known only through citations and references in other manuscripts is always an exciting event. Although rare in any area of medieval studies, such finds broaden our knowledge of the intellectual development and open up new aspects for study. It was through a fortuitous paralleling of citations in Gregory of Rimini with an anonymous Sentences-commentary at the Franciscan convent in Fribourg that Damasus Trapp, a ground-breaker in fourteenth-century scholastic studies, discovered the Sentences-commentary of an English Benedictine still known only as Monachus Niger. More recently Jan Pinborg has connected the fourteenth-century citations to the Magister Abstractionum with a work otherwise known as the Sophismata of Richardus Sophista. The following discovery, although not at present of the same importance to the field, shares one thing in common with Trapp's discovery. It provides us with yet another text from the same period of Oxford thought and may in fact also be by a Benedictine, a group that was numerically strong at Oxford but from which we have had almost no extant work to study.

The origins of Irish Christianity are unknown. Even the history of the Irish Church during the fifth and sixth centuries is somewhat shrouded in obscurity, and leaves a wide scope for speculation. This is particularly true with regard to the careers of the earliest missionaries of Ireland known to us by name—Palladius and Patrick. Contemporary evidence is extremely meagre in the case of Palladius and conflicting in the case of Patrick; and the more eloquent witnesses of later times often contradict either each other or our primary sources. It is not, then, surprising that the relation between these two missionaries and their respective missions was fervently discussed by scholars during the last one hundred and fifty years. Looking back at the vast amount of diligent labour and learned argument devoted to this problem, one is surprised to find the status quaestionis almost the same at the end as at the beginning. Only in recent years has a way been opened which gives hope to attain reasonable certainty on some at least of the disputed points. With Professor T. F. O'Rahilly's pamphlet The Two Patricks (Dublin 1942) the problem has entered its critical phase. By his lucid statement of the principal issue and its implications, based on a firsthand knowledge of the complete evidence, Professor O'Rahilly has put under a lasting obligation even those who, like the present writer, find it impossible to accept his main thesis. If I offer a different solution of the vexed problem, I do so in a spirit of gratitude to the pioneer whose work alone has made the present study possible.

The letters of Francesco Bruni, secretary to three popes, which are printed in the appendix to this article, belong to a largely unexplored collection in the State Archives of Florence, the Carte Del Bene. This important family archive contains business records and private papers of the Del Bene family, a small but prominent mercantile house in Trecento Florence. While the account books are of primary interest to the economic historian, the letters contain valuable information on political and social problems and, in the case of these letters, on aspects of ecclesiastical history. Francesco Bruni was a close friend of the Del Bene, and to this connection we owe the fortunate survival of six of his letters from the papal curia. The sources on the Avignonese papacy are many and varied, but this epistolary collection throws light upon certain features of the curial administration and its personalities which are not well documented by other types of evidence.

These Notes are the result of a protracted study in the course of which the Byzantine synapte has been examined in more than fifty manuscripts, each of which has again and again for this and other purposes been closely scrutinized. The text which precedes the Notes includes a distinctive —and, as far as I know, entirely new — feature, viz., a twofold recension of the synapte which is explained and justified in the Concluding Remarks following Note II. Immediately after the text itself and the brief comments which have appeared desirable or necessary, there is an Excursus on saints' names in the Τῆς παναγίας bidding at the very end of the synapte. This subject is part of a much larger one, viz., lists of saints' names in liturgical prayers. One thinks first of all of the list which appears in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon and of parallel lists in the East. It is interesting to note, however, that whereas the lengthened medieval lists failed to establish themselves permanently within the framework of the Anaphora in the East or of the Canon in the West, they did succeed in maintaining themselves in the East in certain prayers still found in the Euchology and Horologion.

Hrabanus Maurus's De institutione clericorum is a masterpiece of clerical formation, emblematic of the Carolingian Renewal and esteemed by thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. In the third book, Hrabanus juxtaposes Augustine's teachings in De doctrina christiana with Gregory the Great's instruction in the Regula pastoralis to craft an original case for a close connection between wisdom and moral life in priestly training. Hrabanus's effort concretizes long-standing concerns of Carolingian reformers reiterated in landmark reform documents from the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Moreover, throughout his life, Hrabanus periodically returns to his work on priestly formation for words and ideas to undergird subsequent efforts at integrating education with pastoral practice in a variety of genres, including his model sermons, his encyclopedic commentary, and his handbook for missionary conversion. In addition to highlighting Hrabanus's individual genius as one who adroitly applies traditional authorities in novel ways to contemporary problems, this study illumines the crucial role played by monasteries like Fulda as engines for the Carolingian reform.

The Middle English verse “Life of St. Egwine” is one of the many hagiographic poems affiliated with the so-called South English Legendary or Legendaries (SEL), a widely copied collection of vernacular devotional texts whose earliest compilation has been dated to the thirteenth century, and whose latest manuscripts date to the first half of the fifteenth. A minor saint, Ecgwine was the third bishop of Worcester and the founder of the monastic community at Evesham Abbey. One of the most striking features of his early hagiography is that the earliest version of his vita contains the only surviving account of a dispute between a monastery and a tenant to be dated to the Anglo-Saxon period. This is indicative of his cult's close association with the endowed properties of Evesham, an aspect of his hagiographic tradition that is also discernible in the SEL legend.

In the final decades of the fourteenth and first few years of the fifteenth centuries, scions of the second house of Anjou engaged in what can only be described as an obsession with the conquest of the “Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.” The story of this ultimately futile quest provides one of the more colorful chapters in late-medieval political history, cutting across national and religious boundaries in its recounting of transalpine invasions by massive armies, papal plot and counterplot, betrayal, and only momentary glory. For all the French money and lives lost in the enterprise, almost nothing remains today to remind the world of what happened in southern Italy at that time.

The sources for the reign of Leo VI the Wise (886–912) are numerous, but historians have been handicapped by the existence of two virtual Lives of Leo, the Logothete chronicle and the Vita Euthymii† (=VE), for the very natural result of the existence of these two apparent histories of his reign has been to form too exclusively the judgment of posterity on him and it. Both are, for different reasons, excessively restrictive: the Logothete is hostile and eliminates systematically any favorable information. The VE is favorable but, written as it is to justify the ascent of the patriarchal throne by the monk Euthymius, its almost exclusive concern is with Leo's matrimonial misfortunes and the picture it gives of him shows him always grovelling at the feet of Euthymius. The emperor as humble suppliant to the saint is a great theme of the Vita and coincides with the mosaic in St. Sophia usually considered to be his portrait. Actually, emperors were quite prone to demonstrations of humility before monks.