Die weitausholende und verheissungsvolle internationale Zusammenarbeit zur Erforschung und Ausgabe der Werke der klassischen Kanonistik lässt es wunschenswert erscheinen, dass die handschriftlichen Bestände an noch nicht oder nur unbefriedigend ediertem Material immer luckenloser und im einzelnen genauer erfasst werden. Viel ist diesbezüglich schon geleistet worden. Manches bleibt aber noch zu tun.

In a recent article on the medieval dogma of transubstantiation, Gary Macy builds upon the works of Hans Jorissen and James F. McCue to question the validity of Jaroslav Pelikan's claim that “at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist achieved its definitive formulation in the dogma of transubstantiation.” Macy demonstrates that through most of the thirteenth century, the majority of theologians did not, in fact, consider Lateran IV's decree the final word on eucharistic theology. The debate over precisely how the real presence of Christ occurred in the eucharist was far from closed.

The question of Hildegard's influence and reputation in the centuries following her death is an elusive and vexing one for scholars. We do know that the medieval prophetic tradition is one of the few spheres in which her writings and her reputation sustained anything like their original high profile. To a large extent this popularity was the direct result of two things: first of all, a compilation of extracts from her prophecies made by Gebeno of Eberbach around the year 1220; and secondly, the association of Hildegard's name and a few of her genuine writings with the tradition of anti-mendicant propaganda. These two survivals give us a different but not unrelated view of how Hildegard was known to the later Middle Ages, and in particular what she was best known for: that is, for her prediction of a coming chastisement of the clergy to be brought about partly through the agency of a group of pseudo-prophets. The testimony of Gebeno in his prologue to his compilation of her prophetic works and the testimony of various contemporary chroniclers all agree on one thing: Hildegard had succeeded in scaring the wits out of the local clergy, and even decades after her death they feared the chastisement she had predicted.

In a preceding article, we have tried to show that important features of the relationship between St. Augustine and Plotinus still call for some investigation: that, in fact, one of the latter's most telling treatises (Ennead VI 4–5) had hitherto virtually escaped the notice of those interested in tracing his influence on Augustine's thought. To one possible implication of that study we alluded only briefly, but its importance for the history of Christian spirituality impels our returning to it now. Augustine, we suggested, from his earliest extant writings up to and including the Confessions, may well have been thinking in terms of a Plotinian fall of the soul into the body.

The Collectio ex opusculis sancti Augustini in epistulas Pauli apostoli is an exegetical commentary on the Pauline letters that consists of 457 fragments from the works of Augustine of Hippo. The Collectio was compiled by the Northumbrian scholar Beda Venerabilis (672/73–735), whose biblical commentaries heavily rely on patristic exegesis and theology, and, as such, function as an important mediator between patristic and medieval exegesis and theology. Though many scholars have stressed the importance of the Collectio for the study of the transmission and reception of Augustine's writings and thinking in Anglo-Saxon England, the commentary has never been edited nor have its contents been thoroughly studied. The following contribution offers the first detailed study of the Collectio’s contents by analysing the ways in which Bede presents Augustine's Pauline exegesis in his own commentary on Paul's letters. Specifically, this article will study Bede's compilation methods by means of a close analysis of one of the Collectio’s fragments, fr. 315, which offers an exegetical commentary of Eph. 3:17–18. By studying the textual channels through which Bede had access to Augustine's writings as well as by considering other passages in Bede's biblical commentaries that discuss Eph. 3:17–18, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how Bede uses, adapts, and presents Augustine's exegesis of this pericope.

The Prague Sacramentary is the only complete example of this important early-medieval liturgical book to survive from eighth-century Bavaria. But, as the name implies, its present home is in the Czech Republic. The manuscript (Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituli, O. LXXXIII) was acquired in 1776 for the old metropolitan chapter library in Prague from a Czech private library, and nothing certain is known about its earlier location. That volume contains three works: the Sacramentary itself (fols. 1–120) together with an abridged lectionary (121–30), to which an incomplete penitential (131–45) in a different hand was added at an early date, almost certainly before autumn, 792. The page size is 247 × 165 mm (9.75 × 6.5 inches), and the gatherings of the volume vary between three and five sheets with four sheets predominating. The first 84 folios are written in a single column of 21 lines across the entire page, but folios 85–120 are written in two columns also of 21 lines each with marginal bounding lines drawn in an arrangement that is characteristic of Bavarian scriptoria in the Carolingian period. Four folios are now missing from the Sacramentary, three from the lectionary, and two from the penitential.

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in his Diatessaron — as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.

The manuscript sources of the Mozarabic or Old Hispanic liturgy have been thoroughly described and analyzed, with the exception of an early-eleventh-century book of saints' offices that has been considered missing since the late nineteenth century from the Cathedral Archive of Toledo. In October 2001, I identified this lost book as manuscript B2916 in the library of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, where it has been since its acquisition by the Society's founder, Archer Huntington. HSA MS B2916 is the only codex of the Old Hispanic liturgy preserved outside Europe. This manuscript is a curious book, comprising the offices for the feasts of Saint Martin (November 11), Saint Emilianus or Millán (November 12), and the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15). The matins lessons of the first two offices consist of the entirety of, respectively, the Vitae of Martin by Sulpicius Severus and of San Millán by Braulio of Saragossa. Because the manuscript was in a private collection and has remained uncatalogued, it has gone unnoticed for the last century, a period that saw the maturation of modern study of the Mozarabic rite. The contents of the book were not unknown during this time, however, because some specialists have consulted the copy (today in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid) made in 1752 by the polymath Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel. Indeed, it was Clyde Brockett's remarkably accurate handmade copy of the Burriel copy that made the identification of the manuscript possible, even at two removes. While the Burriel copy is useful, many important aspects of the original manuscript deserve notice.

In 634, the freshly consecrated bishop Birinus, having promised Pope Honorius that he would spread the faith in “the remotest. regions of England,” arrived in the territory of the West Saxons (or the Gewisse, as they were then still known). He found them so thoroughly pagan (“paganissimas”) that he opted to remain there to preach the gospel. The following year he baptized Cynegils, the first of the West Saxon kings to accept Christianity. The Brytenwalda, Oswald of Northumbria, stood sponsor. Together, the two kings endowed Birinus with the civitas of Dorchester-on-Thames as his see. Over the next few years, both Cynegils's son Cwichelm and his grandson Cuthred were baptized, the latter in 639 by Birinus in Dorchester. It would have been in or near this year that Aldhelm was born,” though his native area was said by William of Malmesbury to have been Sherborne, in the southwest of Wessex, on the border with the British kingdom of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall) and, thus, far from Birinus's episcopal seat in the upper Thames valley. Would this be an indication of the rapid spread of Christianity in the West Saxon kingdom? Notably, well within a generation a West Saxon became the first native-born archbishop of Canterbury when Deusdedit was consecrated in 655 (his Anglo-Saxon name was remembered as Friduwine).” But where Deusdedit received his ecclesiastical training is unknown; Bede can tell us only that he was a “West Saxon by race” (“de gente Occidentalium Saxonum”).” Or was Aldhelm's being Christian due to his royal status? It may be that another of Cynegils's sons, Centwine, who became king in Wessex in 676, was Aldhelm's father.” By this time, Aldhelm was a senior cleric in the West Saxon church.

The twentieth century witnessed an efflorescence of interest in medieval exegesis, sparked by scholars across a wide spectrum of intellectual, methodological, and confessional commitments. Thanks in large measure to the work of Beryl Smalley (1905–1984) and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), to name only two major exponents, the modern study of medieval exegesis achieved a depth and significance that fittingly complements the attention earlier generations had paid to scholastic theology.

This article offers a new perspective on the anonymous Liber beati et laudabilis viri Gregorii. The oldest extant life of Pope Gregory the Great, the Liber was composed at the double monastery of Strænæshalch, conventionally known as Whitby, under Abbess Ælfflæd probably between ca. 704 and 714. A principal concern of my article is the function, within the Liber, of its report of Gregory's encounter with a group of Deiran Angles in Rome, and that story's relation to the emphasis throughout the Liber on orality: the transmission of knowledge miraculously from heaven and through earthly channels by means of speech and other sounds. The Liber survives in an early ninth-century redaction, part of St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 567 (pp. 75–110). After discussing some issues that pertain to the modern edition and translation made by Bertram Colgrave from this manuscript, I compare the legend of Gregory and the Deirans in the Liber with the version in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. I then review the larger hagiographical narrative in which the Whitby author frames this episode, and I examine the story and other distinctive thematic as well as stylistic aspects of the Liber in the light of the following circumstances: seventh- to eighth-century regional developments that affected Whitby; conditions of teaching at this monastery, a major early English educational center; the documented interest at Whitby under Ælfflæd, as under her predecessor Hild, in heaven-inspired or miraculous forms of oratory; and liturgy and commemoration of the dead. Of interest for analyzing all these topics, but especially the last two mentioned, is Whitby's status as a female-led institution.

The discovery of a copy (in Lincoln MS 230) of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Sentences in three books (starting with the hexameral discussion that follows the treatise on the angels in the four-book version edited by Brady) makes possible for the first time investigating the development of the Lombard's theological teaching during his Parisian teaching career and the fortuna of that teaching outside of Paris. The fact that the Lombard began his early-career lectures on the Sentences in precisely the same place as he began his lectures on Genesis means that all of his teaching originated with Scripture. Moreover, the fact that Lincoln MS 230 is one of many early copies of the Lombard's Parisian teaching found in English cathedral libraries — Lincoln's Cathedral Library has another manuscript containing another copy of the Sentences, Lincoln MS 31, this one on four books, almost certainly copied within the Lombard's lifetime — has revealed the inadequacy of Brady's edition for scholarly understanding of the Lombard's career and teaching. Until now, no scholar paid much attention to the fact that Brady's choice of manuscripts was largely arbitrary and that his edition reflected the state of the Lombard's text around the time of Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus this discovery makes clear that the Sentences, like Gratian's Decretum and Comestor's History, developed over time. The Sentences were not, as so long assumed, a book written by the Lombard late in his career but rather the product of lectures delivered over the course of his career. The discovery of a treasure trove of English manuscripts preserving the Lombard's earliest extant Parisian teaching will enable scholars for the first time to trace the origins and development of the institutional practices of the cathedral school of Paris right up to the time of its transformation into the University of Paris.

The early expansion of Islam led in time to widespread conversions of Christians in conquered territories. In the later eleventh century, however, western Christendom was in turn launching offensives against Islam on several fronts. Territorial gains were made in various Mediterranean regions and, although by the end of the thirteenth century the Holy Land had been lost again, Sicily remained in Christian hands, and in the second half of the thirteenth century in the Iberian peninsula only Granada remained under Muslim control: the whole peninsula was under Christian rule before the end of the fifteenth century. This expansion was accompanied, especially in the thirteenth century, by attempts to convert Muslims and other non-Christians. Yet in the period from the late eleventh until the later fifteenth century some western Christians converted to Islam. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the situations that prompted the adoption of Islam, and the reasons for such conversions, although the evidence is usually insufficient to indicate exactly why a particular Christian became a Muslim: the preconceived ideas voiced in western sources about forced conversions can be misleading and, although a crude distinction might be made between conversions from conviction and those based on worldly considerations, motives did not necessarily always fit neatly into just one of these two categories. But obviously not all converts would have had an equal understanding of the nature of Islamic beliefs and practices. The response of western ecclesiastical and secular authorities to renegades will also be considered. Further conversions of Christian peoples who had already for centuries been living under Muslim rule will not be examined, but only the adoption of Islam by those whose origins lay in western Christian countries or who were normally resident in these, and by westerners whose lands were newly conquered by Muslim powers after the eleventh century; and the focus will be mainly, though not exclusively, on the crusader states and the Iberian peninsula.

When Christian Friedrich Kling published Berthold des Franziskaners deutsche Predigten in 1824, he opened the study of the great thirteenth-century preacher to theologians, historians, and Germanists alike. Although Berthold had never been completely forgotten, was his fame rather than his actual sermons that were recorded by poet and chronicler. The sermons themselves remained, as most of them do still today, in manuscripts accessible to only a few scholars.

This article investigates how and why medieval ecclesiastical writers thought and wrote about experiences of grief in human history. It examines the works of three late twelfth-century Latin writers from England: a foundation history of Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales's autobiographical and travel writing alongside his De principis instructione. Drawing on biblical, literary, theological, and iconographic models for grief and suffering in the western Christian tradition, the article situates these works in the exegetical and philosophical ideas they shared, and explains what is original and significant about their approaches to each instance of grief. It argues that the central problem these writers pondered in their narratives was the relationship between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving, they thought, had three key qualities: it impelled a desire to act; it could not be meaningfully measured; and it persisted in time. In prioritizing the experience of grief over its function, meaning, or morality, these writers considered the emotion rational, natural, and honest. The value these writers placed on human family or family-like relationships provides the context for understanding their priorities in thinking about responses to loss. Interest in grief's endurance, rather than its resolution in consolation, has been understood as more typical of secular, not sacred, thought. By showing how these writers’ ideas about grief's nature lived alongside and within other ideas of Christian thought, this article illuminates a greater range of medieval ecclesiastical ideas about the dignity of human history and emotion.

This paper provides an up-to-date inventory of the works of Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320–1382). For each text, we present the incipit and the explicit, its (approximate) date, the list of manuscripts, and, whenever possible, editions and translations. We also inventory self-references contained in Oresme's writings and discuss specific problems concerning their titles, attributions, and textual transmission. Oresme's works are classified into nine groups, for each of which we offer preliminary remarks to situate the group in the context of Oresme's career. The two appendices provide detailed information about two texts of possible Oresmian attribution.