In one of the very few essays in English on Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, Eleanor Shipley Duckett calls him a prince of the Church, a statesman, an administrator, a scholar who rises far above the other figures she surveys and who stands out in the company of Charles the Great and Pope Nicholas I in the historical records of the ninth century. His long life, from his birth in northern France in 806, his entry into the monastery of St. Denis in 814, his consecration as archbishop in 845, to his death in 882 at Epernay while fleeing from the Danish invasion, was one long series of combats calling for a variety of talents. He revealed a deep knowledge of canon law in his various ecclesiastical disputes with recalcitrant clergy and laity, an astute diplomatic talent in his attempts to knit together the rapidly unraveling unity of the empire, a broad but unoriginal scholarship in his theological controversies over predestination and the Trinity which brought him to grips with the leading thinkers of the Carolingian renaissance, especially the redoubtable Saxon Gottschalk, monk of Orbais. It is with this last controversy that this paper will be concerned.

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

The end of the fifteenth century witnessed the dissolution of the medieval kingdom of Georgia. The three kingdoms — of Georgia proper (Iberia= K'art'li), of Imeretia (Abasgia), and of Kakhetia — and the five sovereign principalities, into which that ancient and once powerful realm had found itself divided, were ill prepared now to face the onslaught of the Islamic imperialism of the Osmans and the Safawis or, finally, to prevent the nearest Christian empire, to which they had turned for aid, from absorbing them.

Many years ago Hans Bekker-Nielsen charted the influence of Caesarius of Aries on Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian religious prose in a series of groundbreaking articles. Professor Bekker-Nielsen was quick to acknowledge his debt to Dom Germain Morin, whose lifelong study of the works of Caesarius, culminating in the monumental edition of his sermons, restored to their true author a vast number of misattributed ‘pseudo-Augustinian’ homilies. In Bekker-Nielsen's words, ‘Morin's edition has restored to us an important corpus of ecclesiastical writings, and … it is our duty to tidy up the mess of references to Augustine or pseudo-Augustine in the scholarly literature wherever Caesarius is the genuine author.’ It goes without saying that, following Bekker-Nielsen's example, we should endeavour to do the same whenever someone else can be named as the genuine author of a ‘pseudo-Augustinian’ text. In this paper I should like to draw attention to two further examples of the use by medieval Icelandic authors of Latin sources mistakenly attributed to Augustine.

The later Middle Ages was the high moment of the popular, vernacular sermon, yet relatively few examples of extraliturgical sermons can be recovered from the written evidence. Latin collections of sermon cycles—those preached in the context of the mass liturgy and saints' days—were produced in large quantities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, functioning more or less directly as exemplars for the actual sermons that would then be preached in the local vernaculars of western Europe. In England, such Latin sermon collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often include some vernacular materials, especially lyrics, and many treatises are extant that provide priests with the materials to make sermons on a wide range of topics and for an indefinite number of occasions. Of the relatively few English sermons and sermon collections extant from the period, however, by far the greatest number are, like the Latin cycles, those keyed to the cycle of Sunday texts and to saints' days, whose very formality militates against a sense of them as representative of the most common forms and themes of vernacular sermons, particularly those earnestly preached on the occasions like that which Chaucer satirically describes in the Summoner's Tale, when “ther wente a lymytour aboute / To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doubte” (3.1711–1712). With so few examples of non-liturgical sermons extant, our sense both of the reality and of the satire is incomplete.

The romanesque façade of the abbey church of St.-Gilles in the diocese of Nlmes has been a subject of debate among art historians for many years. This controversy has been centered on the design of the church's façade [Fig. 1]. In addition to a series of colonnettes supporting archivolts that surround the tympana over its three western doorways, the St.-Gilles façade also possesses two free-standing columns flanking the central doorway that support nothing, a peculiarity which has led scholars to conclude that the plan of the façade was changed during the remodeling of the church in the twelfth century. The debate has focused on the dating of this change. A number of dates have been suggested, based on the façade's sculptural style, on dated inscriptions in the crypt, and on documents dealing with the church fabric. The art historians of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries dated the redesigning of the façade between 1116 and the middle of the thirteenth century, though the tendency of more recent scholarship has been to narrow the range of dates to between 1116 and the 1140s.

L'Epitome in philosophiam fut publié pour la première fois par B. Hauréau, en 1859, conjointement au De contemplatione et eius speciebus en appendice à son ouvrage Hugues de Saint-Victor. Nouvel examen de l'édition de ses oeuvres. Mais la présentation n'était qu'une simple indication et ignorait apparat critique et historique aussi bien qu'étude du texte. Au demeurant, quatre manuscrits seulement — de Paris — étaient signalés, deux autres — de Douai et d'Oxford — devant être découverts ensuite. Ce sont ces six manuscrits que nous aurons à étudier: les quatre de Paris, trois de la Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS lat. 15.315, 14.506, 14.659, un de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS lat. 717; le manuscrit de Douai, MS lat. 366; le manuscrit d'Oxford, Balliol College, MS lat. 296, et nous nous demanderons comment se présente la question de l'authenticité hugonienne de l'Epitome et quelles sont les caractéristiques des manuscrits qui nous en présentent le texte.

The authenticity of the service book known to scholars as the Gregorian Sacramentary or simply the Gregorianum has long been a matter of discussion. From the mid-eighth century to the end of the ninth we find a strong external tradition assigning its authorship to St. Gregory the Great. Doubts on this point were first expressed by George Baron d'Eckhart in 1729, and the controversy flared up once more in 1890, when the traditional view was vigorously defended by Dom G. Morin.

In the latter part of the twelfth century, a significant change of emphasis occurred in the art of preaching, which in turn had a profound influence on the transmission of knowledge and moral values. Whereas, in an earlier era, preachers had addressed themselves largely to clerical audiences, at this time popular audiences came to receive greater attention. Parisian masters and doctors were in the vanguard of this influential movement whose ideal, the vita apostolica, became a rallying cry to those who sought to restore the Church and its clergy to an earlier purity.

The Somnium of John of Legnano, the great Bolognese lawyer of the fourteenth century, was first properly brought to the attention of scholars by G. W. Coopland in 1926. Professor Coopland's chief concern was with the relationship between this work and the much more famous Somnium Viridarii, composed about 1375 at the court of King Charles V of France, whose author made some substantial borrowings from John's slightly earlier work. Though he supplied a synopsis of its content, Coopland gave it as his opinion that John's work was not in itself of any great interest, apart from the section in it which is devoted to a defence of papal monarchy, a section which, as the author makes clear, incorporates into the Somnium a tract on this matter which he had composed previously. This probably is the most interesting part of John's much larger and more ambitious work, which seems to have been written in 1372, but our opinion is that the other sections have rather more in them to reward the reader than Coopland suggested. This is the justification for an attempt to describe the work in more detail than he did and to discuss briefly some parts of its content and arguments.

A Byzantinist today would not attempt to investigate any area of the Byzantine landscape without a thorough consideration of the hagiographic evidence. And yet, hagiography, which admittedly does not always make for entertainment, is not as well plowed a field as one might hope. We may point, by way of example, to the manuscript of the Vita Euthymii Sardensis, Bodleianus Laudianus Graecus 69, fol. 306v-324v, written by the monk Metrophanes. The text has been entirely ignored and neglected, although Krumbacher had noted some seventy years ago that it was easily accessible in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Of course, the neglect may be due to the unwarranted assumption that the text's value is meagre if not wholly negligible. And yet, Euthymius' personality should certainly have aroused the interest of historians.

Sidonius Apollinaris needs no introduction as by far our best informant for the history of Roman Gaul in the late fifth century and as one of the most accomplished practitioners of the complicated literary style so admired in his age and so often contemned in ours. Because his poems and letters provide abundant evidence for political and social history, most historians have until recently tended to see him as a predominantly secular figure. That impression is heightened by the literary genres he chose for his writings and whose accepted rules and forms he meticulously followed. However, a handful of studies since mid-century, and recently a political biography, have drawn attention to one or another neglected religious dimension of his life. Gradually a hidden Sidonius has been emerging from between the lines of reluctant sources that are not autobiographical by nature or by his intent.

We know the events of only five or six years in the life of Severian of Gabala, from A.D. 398 or 399 to 404. We are told that Severian was Syrian by birth and spoke Greek with a Syriac accent. His brother bishop and friend Antiochus of Ptolemais went to Constantinople, probably very soon after Chrysostom's episcopal consecration on 15 December 397 or 26 February 398, and earned a great deal of money preaching. Severian decided to follow his friend's example and went to the imperial capital in 398 or 399 to make his fortune. He was well received by Chrysostom; his preaching was evidently a great success, and he became known to many in high office as well as to the emperor Arcadius and the empress Eudoxia.

In an essay entitled “Church History and the Bible,” Karlfried Froehlich once distinguished between the many biblical texts that have had a history and the few which have really made history. His point was that, in the history of their effects, the different books and even individual verses of the Bible have had a very uneven influence. Some have been relatively neutral or unproductive in their visible historical impact. Others can almost be said to have brought into being whole movements, institutions, ideas, and conflicts.

Michael Scot was a central figure both for the transmission of Arabic philosophy to the Latin West and for the development of medieval science and astrology, yet much still remains unknown about his life and career. In part of a longer article dedicated to teasing out some of the strands of Michael Scot's influences and impact, Charles Burnett poses intriguing questions about the importance of his early sojourn in Toledo. He shows that Michael, along with Salio of Padua and Mark of Toledo, continued the translating activity begun in the twelfth century in Toledo, and he wonders whether Michael — like the twelfth-century translators Dominicus Gundissalinus, Gerard of Cremona, and John Hispanus — was closely associated with the cathedral of Toledo. Burnett hypothesizes that Toledo could have been the place where Michael first came across the works of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes that he is credited with translating from the Arabic, and he notes that many of Michael's sources for his astrological treatise, the Liber introductorius (hereafter LI), were available in Toledo. Burnett suggests that by Michael's final departure from Spain to Italy, around 1220, he may have already made considerable headway in both his translating and astrological activities.

Vor einiger Zeit machte Carlos Steel auf einige neue Proclus-Fragmente aufmerksam. 1m dritten Band der Ausgabe der Tria Opuscula von Daniel Isaac, erschienen 1982, stellte er drei griechische Fragmente aus De decem dubitationibus circa providentiam und eines aus De providentia vor. Diese Fragmente hatte er in einer Handschrift der Loci communes des Ps.-Maximus gefunden, dem Kodex aus der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover mit der Signatur IV 546, dessen Abschrift am 7. Mai 1311 von Eugenios Choumnos beendet wurde. Eine neuerliche Durchsicht der Handschrift ergab, daß, neben einem Fragment aus De providentia, sich nicht drei sondern acht Fragmente aus De decem dubitaiionibus circa providentiam hierin befinden.

El importante trabajo realizado durante los últimos decenios en el dominio de los textos médicos latinos y la renovada atención al estudio de las fuentes manuscritas han ido generando la convicción de que resulta imprescindible revisar un buen número de ediciones al uso, realizadas con medios limitados o con criterios ecdóticos hoy ampliamente superados. Tal retractación viene exigida de ordinario por el descubrimiento de nuevo material manuscrito, pero también por la peculiar orientación que en el pasado presidió no pocos trabajos de edición de textos médicos latinos, que interesaban más por su contenido que por su forma, o bien eran traídos a colación secundariamente, por su condición de testigos de un texto en otra lengua. Es la necesidad de reorientar esta perspectiva, situando el texto latino como objeto de estudio en sí mismo, la que subyace detrás del presente trabajo, que pretende corregir las deficiencias de un pequeño fragmento publicado hace algunos años por H. J. De Vriend dentro de un libro sobre el corpus de recetarios del anglosajón. El editor acompaña cada capítulo del texto anglosajón de su correspondiente paralelo latino, que transcribe a partir de un único manuscrito, dotándolo de una puntuación elemental.

Ipsa autem, bonorum temporalium liberalissima ac spiritualium avida beneficiorum …

— 1293 charter of Oxford University, describing Ela Longespee

In 1293, the elderly and twice-widowed Ela Longespee, countess of Warwick, or someone acting on her behalf, gathered together eighteen charters that had been issued to her over the past dozen years and sent them to the bishop of Lincoln, to be confirmed and copied into a single roll. The original charters have long since vanished, but the enrolled copy survives in The National Archives at Kew. Its component documents, all of them detailed grants to Ela by religious institutions in the Oxford area, are highly unusual; even when compared to the few surviving parallels, they stand out for their specific content. The roll itself, comprising eighteen such documents in a private archive created for a thirteenth-century laywoman, is unique. And when it is examined along with other surviving evidence of Ela's religious activities, it provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the reciprocal nature of religious patronage at this time. What is especially unusual about Ela's case is that we know much more about what the religious promised to Ela than what she granted to them. Thus Ela Longespee's records tell us the side of the story that is seldom told when we look at records of religious patronage; they reveal the return that donors expected in the late thirteenth century, with increasing precision and urgency. Using a chronological framework, this essay will examine the surviving documents, tell the story of Ela's life, and explore the most interesting dimension of that story: her startlingly explicit reciprocal relationships with religious institutions.

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.