Upon entering a cathedral, our eyes are drawn to the soaring pillars, the sweep of the ceiling, and the richly adorned windows. Yet we overlook many details which play an essential part in determining the finished product, for instance, the composition of the stone and the structure of the foundation. Likewise, as we turn to the era from which grew Augustine's Contessiones, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, and Wolfram's Parzival, we may easily overlook a humble type of illustrative story, which was a vital expression of the Christian faith, namely, the medieval exemplum. Accordingly, this paper proposes to indicate in briefest outline the fortunes of the exemplum, which, bound up as they are with the history of their time, clearly reflect significant developments in medieval religion.

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Lat. 2342 begins with a list of works by an anonymous monk of the abbey of Bec, in Normandy, who seems to have lived there during the first half of the twelfth century. Dom André Wilmart, who first published this list, characterized the author of these works as a writer “de troisième rang,” who nevertheless possessed a kind of encyclopedic knowledge. Approximately two thirds of the works mentioned in the list are preserved in the same manuscript. Among the works now lost must be counted:

Professor Hanfmann's publication of the season sarcophagus of Dumbarton Oaks is also a monograph on season sarcophagi in general and on the symbolism of the Horae and seasons in literature and art. The appearance of two important reviews by Professor Doro Levi and by Miss Marion Lawrence affords this writer an opportunity of re-evaluating his first impression of the book in the light of criticism by others.

Nous étudierons ici la tradition manuscrite, en grec, du texte Οἶδα μὲν ὅτι τοῖς παχνχέϱοις que les catalogues désignent sous la rubrique Quod nemo laeditur.

In the preparation of a text-critical edition of the De anima of Cassiodorus, I have made and here offer to the public a list of the extant manuscripts known to me. These number approximately 160 and the oldest date from the ninth century. I hope shortly to publish the text and with it an adequate description and classification of the codices. Since it is too much to expect that my present list is without errors or omissions, I would be most grateful to any reader who might supply me with additional information.

Marsilio Ficino is one of those scholars of whose habits and methods we can now form a fairly complete picture, thanks to the increasing accessibility of library materials. Besides autograph copies of his own work, we possess a great many books he used, and in most cases annotated extensively. The number of Greek manuscripts known to have been handled by him rose from seven in 1937 (Kristeller's Supplementum Ficinianum) to sixteen in 1962, when M. Sicherl reported on the state of the question in Scriptorium. Prof. Sicherl is continuing his research and preparing a comprehensive study of the subject; the present article, a by-product of my occupation with the text of Olympiodorus and Damascius, is concerned only with Ficino's marginalia to the commentaries on Plato's Phaedo and Philebus in Riccardianus gr. 37. For a correct understanding of the character of these texts and the relationship between them, a short outline of their history will be useful.

In the recent massive sweep of in-depth research on the hymns and prayers to St. Mary Magdalen, one little Middle English poem of the second half of the fourteenth century has been overlooked. It should now be added to the total European corpus as the English representative, the sole versified prayer to this saint before 1500. The poem is written as prose on a blank page (fol. 100v) in Harley MS 667, a collection of over eighty Latin (and French) statutes and charters, local as well as national, like Custume de Gavelkynde (fol. 84r, in French), Tractates de Bastardia (fol. 213r), Statutum de Scaccario (fol. 248r), or Officium Senescalli sive Ballivi (fol. 275v), and is followed by a Latin collect and a Latin rubric for a pardon.

In 1245 King Henry III undertook the reconstruction of Westminster Abbey. In addition to transforming the Romanesque basilica of Edward the Confessor and erecting an octagonal chapter house, he provided for a mosaic pavement in the sanctuary. The pavement is centrally located within the church (Fig. 1). It lies in the first bay east of the crossing, occupying nearly the entire length and rather less of the bay's width. Directly before it, now separated by a pair of steps, is the high altar. A detail of the northeast corner reveals its present state of preservation (Fig. 2). In spite of frequent restoration numerous mosaic tesserae are either missing or damaged; and the solitary letter E in the border is one of the last survivors from the extensive verse inscription that once accompanied the pavement. To appreciate the pavement's former splendor, one must turn to older depictions, in particular an early nineteenth-century aquatint by J. White (Fig. 3). Although mosaic patterns are occasionally simplified and the remaining bronze letters of the inscription omitted, the engraving provides a reasonable impression of the overall design. A large central disk is surrounded by four intertwining circles. These are in turn inscribed in a square whose sides devolve into another set of four circles. A second square, with its sides rather than its corners now facing the cardinal points, encloses the configuration. The guilloche which appears along three sides of the square originally enframed the entire composition. The missing portion of the eastern side was destroyed in 1706 when the altar designed for the Royal Chapel in the Palace at Whitehall was installed in the Abbey choir and only later restored around 1866 by George Gilbert Scott. Although the pavement is today the mere shadow of its former self, no one can doubt that originally it was an extraordinary creation. Its richness of design and prominence of position alone suggest that it held an important place in the king's plans for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey. It is therefore surprising to find that the sanctuary pavement and its inscription have not yet been subjected to a thorough analytical examination.

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.

The insurrections of peasants in Gaul and Spain who were collectively known as the Bagaudae ≃ Bacaudae constitute one of the more intriguing yet obscure conflicts in the Later Roman Empire. The meaning and origin of the word Bagauda ≃ Bacauda are equally obscure and have been unresolved since the Middle Ages.

The following study has a threefold aim: (1) to give an historically exact interpretation of the frequently misunderstood teaching of Ockham on the notitia intuitiva as regards non-existents; (2) to substantiate this interpretation by a revised edition of one key text; (3) to prepare the ground for this edition by a short critical study of the text of the Reportatio Ockham.

In a century of steady expansion of medieval studies, interest in the Donation of Constantine (more correctly Constitutum Constantini) has waxed and waned. At this point, scholarly judgment has settled on a number of positions which may be said to be canonized or have passed into an opinio communis of medievalists. This body of received data has been sifted most recently by Wolfgang Gericke, who, after judicious summary of the important preceeding literature, has invited us to consider a new thesis to explain the genesis and development of this most contentious document.

In his Studien zum Psalterium Romanum in England und zu seinen Glossierungen, Karl Wildhagen writes of the Blickling Psalter (MS Pierpont Morgan Library m.776): ‘Dass es gegen Schluss des 10. oder Anfang des 11. Jahrhunderts im Süden und zwar in der bischöflichen (über Canterbury?) oder königliehen Kanzlei zu Winchester gewesen sein muss, beweisen die zahlreichen in ihm befindlichen jüngeren ae. Glossierungen aus dieser Zeit, die durchaus mit der damals in Winchester befindlichen Regius-Glosse übereinstimmen und z. T. sicher aus ihr kopiert sind.’ Helmut Gneuss reiterates Wildhagen's claim for the direct dependence of Blickling (M) upon Regius (D) in his description of the psalter in Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen: ‘Die spätws. Glossen sind vorwiegend und wohl direkt von Ms. D. abhängig.’ Kenneth and Celia Sisam, in their edition of the Salisbury Psalter, significantly qualify the suppositions of Wildhagen and Gneuss on the relationship between the Old English glosses of M and D: ‘Nearly all these later glosses are of type D; those that are not are either commonplace or, like 118.139 tyrging = “zelus” and 129.3 hwa acymϷ = “quis sustinebit,” they are found earlier in the psalms in D. There seems to be no means of defining the exact relation of this derivative to the extant D.’ All three of these statements are unsupported by a systematic and detailed examination of the Old English glosses in M and D to determine whether the later glosses in M derive directly from D or from an indeterminate D-type gloss.

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.

Egyptian days were one of the most enduring forms of calendrical prognostication in the ancient and medieval worlds. The Romans called these calendrical omens evil, dark, or ominous days (dies ægri, atri, mali, maledicti, ominosi, infortunati, and tenebrosi), and dies aegyptiaci at least by the fourth century C.E. There were twenty-four Egyptian days, two each month, recurring annually. In time, each day was paired with a particular hour viewed as dangerous, suspect, or inauspicious (hora suspecta, aegra, mala, timenda, or even unica). People who feared Egyptian days were bowing to the weight of tradition, much as someone today might have a superstitious fear of Friday the 13th. This article will focus on the role of cultural memory in providing a rationale for a belief in Egyptian days, and on mnemonic aids that were used to remember where they would fall during the calendar year. Special attention will be devoted to an obscure set of mnemonic verses with the incipit Armis gunfe, which the astronomer Johannes de Sacrobosco (Sacro Busto) (ca. 1195–ca. 1256?) disseminated in Paris around 1235. We will consider how these verses circulated in writing and were applied in practice.

Much is known about processions within the Roman liturgy, but the processions of the Old Hispanic rite practiced in most of Christian Iberia until ca. 1080 have not been studied. Explicit evidence about Old Hispanic processional characteristics and liturgical contexts is preserved in manuscript rubrics. Processions happened around or during Mass (for example, on Palm Sunday), at the end of Vespers or Matutinum (for example, the consecration of a basilica), or outside the usual daily liturgy (for example, votive ordos). We have collated all of the extant Old Hispanic rubrics pertaining to liturgical movement. Some of these unquestionably refer to processions, while others describe ceremonies that might better be described more informally as “liturgy in motion.” We focus primarily on the processional rubrics, while also engaging with other liturgical movement. We identify the chant genres associated with processions and outline the processional practices attested in the rubrics.

This article offers a retrospective on the last thirty years of scholarship on medieval mystics. After surveying some recent resources, such as Bernard McGinn's multivolume history, the Companions to Christian Mysticism, and the journal Spiritus, it discusses the varied approaches of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century work, notably the material turn and the linguistic turn. The former, embracing studies of the body and gender, emotions and eroticism, art and material objects, reacts against earlier conceptions of mysticism as concerned exclusively with the timeless, invisible, and transcendent dimension of human existence. Feminist scholarship, queer theory, history of the emotions, and the study of visual culture have all figured prominently, while the relationship between mysticism and political activism is identified as an area ripe for further study. Complementing the material turn, the linguistic turn has brought new interest in apophatic theology in the wake of Derridean deconstruction, but also entails fresh work on vernacular mystics and the role of vernacularity in disseminating spiritual wisdom. The essay closes with an account of imaginative theology and a call for more reading across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as the artificial boundary between sacred and secular writing.

The taking of vows in a military order, as in other religious foundations, created a lifelong obligation. The phrase stabilitas loci, which is encountered in some documents relating to these orders, did not imply an undertaking to stay permanently in the same convent, but signified that those who had made their profession should remain in the same order for life. This requirement found expression especially in papal decrees, although orders' regulations give information about the punishment of apostates. As in other religious establishments, a transfer to another order provided the sole permitted exception, but this was allowed only under certain conditions.

This article identifies, details, and contextualizes three stages in the development of the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots in liturgical books produced for bishops in England from 900 to 1200. It shows how these rites, through the prayers recited, insignia bestowed, chants sung, and bodily gestures performed, sought to articulate and impress the normative ideals of monastic leadership on those who were elected to exercise it and how liturgists variously altered these rites in response to changing ecclesiastical pressures. Most significantly, for much of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots were the same, but, over the course of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the rites were split along gender lines with the dissemination, adoption, and adaptation of the ordines found in episcopal books affiliated with the tradition commonly identified by scholars as the Pontifical Romano-Germanique. In sharp contrast to their predecessors, the new rites envisioned dramatically different spiritual and temporal authorities for abbesses and abbots, clearly subordinating the former's office to the latter's by thoroughly feminizing its exemplary form. Yet, as close study of the material remains from communities of women religious during this period reveals, the consecration rite for abbesses was limited in its effect on how they actually fashioned and displayed their own authorities.