The relatively clear-cut distinction between the subjective and objective meanings of ᾄτη which appears in Aeschylean tragedy tends to disappear in Sophocles' extant work. The use and meaning of ᾄτη in Sophocles, rather, is marked by ambiguity. He shows himself conscious of the differences in meaning which Aeschylus had so sharply emphasized, but in a brilliant extension of his propensity for dramatic irony Sophocles most often employs ᾄτη in contexts where it carries the overtones of both blindness' and ‘ruin.’ This is, of course, quite consonant with so much else in Sophocles' dramatic style and way of thought.

Between 1994 and 1997, William Newman published three articles in which, for the first time, a profound connection between Roger Bacon's doctrine and Ps.-Avicenna's alchemical De anima was pointed out. These studies were a major step in understanding Roger Bacon's elemental physics, alchemy, and alchemical medicine, as well as his prolongatio vitae theory. By a thorough study of the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrine of the Jābirian treatises via Ps.-Avicenna's De anima, in comparison with Bacon's texts, I will continue the work initiated by Newman and draw some new conclusions. I will specifically focus on some principal differences between Roger Bacon and his favorite alchemical source, which allow us to understand the originality and innovation of the Franciscan. In addition to the De anima, a specific aspect of the alchemy of the Ps.-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum will also be studied here, being another of Bacon's major sources.

A most pernicious problem contributing to the economic woes of English monasteries in the early-fourteenth century was mismanagement. This condition was usually, if not almost universally, present and derived in part from the fact that the administrators of religious houses, especially the small ones, were not well trained for the complexities of their tasks. The official records of the royal chancery abound with notices that monasteries suffered from this malady, and the entries in these records follow a pattern, repeating time and time again a variety of standard charges. Having perhaps endured internal dissension that had contributed to the economic difficulty, monasteries became impoverished by indiscreet rule, their goods were wasted, and they experienced mismanagement. In addition, the documents assert that these troubled monasteries suffered from indebtedness, that lax discipline prevailed, and that lands of religious corporations were alienated illegally. Finally, the entries maintain that the ill-advised sale of corodies, and the unwarranted grants of pensions contributed to a depressed monastic economy. To illustrate these observations upon defective monastic administration, reference to specific examples is needed.

In the mid-1390s, a group of Oxford scholars caused the authorities some concern because of their Lollard sympathies, and for propagating heretical teachings at the university. Among them was Robert Lychlade, singled out by name in the following royal directive to the chancellor of Oxford dated 18 July 1395:

John Keats was one of the last English poets to lyricize a venerable tradition when, in his “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” the narrator describes

Although William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to his death in 1249, criticized Avicenna severely, he also adopted many philosophical positions of Avicenna. In a recently published article, I emphasized William's considerable debt to the philosophy of Avicenna, and in a still-to-be-published article I pointed out how William was indebted to Avicenna for his view of what it is to be a human being, and especially for his view of the spirituality of the human soul. For much of his lengthy work, De anima, William follows Avicenna's philosophy as he found it in the great Islamic thinker's Liber de anima, seu sextus de naturalibus; not, of course, without serious criticism on many points. In chapter 5, however, of his De anima, William rather abruptly introduces a historical concept of human nature, which is closer to that of Augustine than of Avicenna or Aristotle, in place of the philosophical concept of human nature, which he derived largely from Avicenna, whom he often confused with the real Aristotle. In introducing such a historical concept of human nature or of the nature of the human soul, William raises several rather intriguing problems, which I want to discuss in this paper. First, he raises a question about how the various historical states of human nature are to be conceived and how they are to be combined with the philosophical concept of nature that he derives from Avicenna. Second, he raises a question about how he can, while claiming to proceed exclusively by means of philosophical proofs, introduce such topics as the original state in which Adam and Eve were created, the original sin by which they fell and which they passed on to the rest of the human race, and Christian baptism by which the harm stemming from their sin can be undone. Finally, William speaks about the soul's state of natural happiness as opposed to the state of glory, and though his treatment of these states is rather brief, it raises a further question about how William envisaged these states and their relationship to each other. Hence, the paper will have three parts: the first on the present and past states of human nature of which William speaks and on their relationship to the philosophical concept of human nature, the second on how William introduces into what he claimed was strictly philosophical such apparently theological topics, and the third on how William understands the relation between the soul's state of natural happiness and the state of glory.

El objetivo del presente artículo es poner de manifiesto algunas fuentes hasta ahora no señaladas del libro 1 del Chronicon Mundi de Lucas de Tuy. Esta obra es la primera de las grandes obras historiográficas hispanolatinas del s. XIII. La comienza a redactar su autor a partir de 1230 y la concluye hacia 1237. Sólo nueve años más tarde, y tomándola ya de fuente para muchos de sus capítulos, el arzobispo de Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada concluye su De rebus Hispanie, la segunda de las grandes historias escritas en el siglo XIII. Lucas de Tuy, nacido en León posiblemente y a finales del s. XII, fue diácono del monasterio San Isidoro de Léon y posteriormente canónigo. Viajó a lo largo de su vida por muchos lugares, París, Roma, Grecia e incluso Constantinopla y los Santos Lugares. En 1239 fue nombrado obispo de Tuy, junto al río Miño, en la frontera con Portugal, de donde el gentilicio de Tudense. De su mano salieron el mencionado Chronicon Mundi y otras dos obras más: el De altera vita, conocido también como Adversus albigensium errores libri III, pero que en realidad más que ir contra posibles albigenses leoneses, en realidad versa sobre un conjunto de filósofos de León autoproclamados “filosofos naturales,” cuyos nombres nos resultan desconocidos y seguidores del averroísmo más avanzado, y ello mucho antes del apogeo del averroísmo en Europa; y el De miraculis sancti Isidori, obra sobre los milagros del santo obispo de Sevilla, en razón de la cual se le han atribuido la Historia translationis sancti Isidori y una Vita sancti Isidori. Pero su obra fundamental, al menos por lo que a la historiografía se refiere, es el Chronicon Mundi.

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.

Medieval canon law recognized detrusion (detrusio in monasterium) as a sentence for women convicted of adultery. Civil law had made adultery a capital crime, so that detrusio was a milder action. This article traces the history of detrusio in canon law, especially in the thirteenth century, and treats further questions that detrusio raised. Detrusio was originally a pastoral provision, meant to provide a woman rejected by her husband for adultery an opportunity to enter religious life. But in the hands of the jurists detrusio became a coercive ecclesiastical penalty for adultery. The practice raised further concerns, for example: how the woman's property was to be treated; whether the woman sentenced to detrusio became a religious; whether a monastery should be a site of confinement for the laity; and, under what conditions a husband could take his adulterous wife back. The case was also raised of a man who accused his wife of adultery so that he could dissolve his marriage and enter a monastery.

The superior learning of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–704) was acknowledged in both Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic contemporary sources by such renowned scholars as Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Adomnán of Iona, Stephen of Ripon, and Alcuin of York. Both Aldhelm and Adomnán knew him personally, and texts composed by these two scholars and presented to Aldfrith help delineate the breadth of his educational background. He was educated among the Gaels, and their records described him as sapiens. By examining texts of other seventh-century Gaelic sapientes, and the comments of Aldhelm and Bede about Gaelic intellectual life and educational opportunities, we can expand our purview of the scope of his education. The nature of seventh-century schooling was peripatetic, and Aldfrith's dual heritage requires a broad search for locations. Many scholars accept Iona as the likely source of his learned background, but this essay will argue that, among other likely locations in Britain and Ireland, Bangor in Northern Ireland is best supported by surviving evidence. His benign reign is placed at the end of the first century of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, but his education benefited the kingdom of Northumbria through generations of Gaelic scholarship, as exemplified by peregrini such as Columba and Columbanus, and sapientes like Laidcenn mac Baíth, Cummíne of Clonfert, Ailerán of Clonard, Cenn Fáelad mac Ailello, and Banbán of Kildare. Aldfrith's rule ushered in a period of cultural florescence in Northumbria that saw the first hagiography and earliest illuminated manuscripts produced in Anglo-Saxon England and that culminated in the extensive library authored by Bede (d. 735).

Despite its rarity, hermaphroditism is often discussed in medieval texts in theoretical and practical contexts by canonists, theologians, and natural philosophers. For the canonist or theologian, hermaphroditism raised questions concerning baptism, marriage, entry to clerical orders, and legal status. For the natural philosopher, the hermaphrodite seemed to violate the strict dichotomy of male and female. Here I examine Albert the Great's natural-philosophical treatment of hermaphroditism. Albert rejects the view that hermaphrodites constitute a “third sex” and instead invokes Aristotle's authority to show that hermaphrodites are a “monstrous” flaw in nature. He carefully investigates the manner in which nature produces hermaphrodites in the womb and introduces a discussion of the generative capacity of hermaphrodites themselves. He concludes that they are incapable of reproducing in and of themselves (i.e., they are incapable of auto-fecundation) although they seem able to generate in another individual through coition.

“The Twenty-five Joys of Our Lady” is a study, examination, and critical edition of an unpublished fifteenth-century Middle English prose devotion preserved in Bodleian Library MS Don. d. 85. It is here associated with twenty-five “Joys of Our Lady” and presented as a vernacular Marian rosary, the first such to be identified in the period. The introduction to the edition considers early liturgical influences upon what became the tradition of Our Lady's Joys, their late-medieval development both across Europe and across England, and the circumstances that usually indicated fewer in number than is present in the devotion printed here. The introduction also concerns itself with the presence and practice of the rosary itself in late-medieval England and elsewhere and the limited evidence that has come down to us for its presence and circulation in England, including woodcut evidence in Caxton and allusions in other Latin devotions. It further indicates an ambiguity in this devotion's treatment of Christ's passion and concludes by considering the role and importance of joy as a pervasive, if often ignored, Christian attitude present in late-medieval English devotion.

Despite scholarly attention on its later medieval popularity, the feast of Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, first appeared in the West in twelfth-century England. The earliest surviving liturgical texts for the feast were composed in the 1130s by Osbert of Clare, prior of Westminster, for Worcester Cathedral. They attest to the novelty of the celebration and the process by which a saintly identity was constructed for Anne, an apocryphal figure. To understand why Anne began to be celebrated at this time and how her liturgy was crafted, this article explores Osbert's texts in their devotional context. A lively monastic cult of the Virgin Mary in England provides an important backdrop to the emergence of the celebration of Anne. Debates about the Anglo-Saxon feast of Mary's Conception were especially influential, and a comparison between the liturgical texts for the feast of the Conception and the feast of Anne yields striking parallels. This suggests that the liturgy for Anne both drew on and supported the contentious feast of the Conception. At the same time, Anne was presented as a monastic role model, a virtuous and chaste woman with special appeal for nuns. The history and identity of Anne were therefore deeply embedded in trends of monastic devotion to Mary as Anne was shaped into a deserving mother of her illustrious offspring but also as a worthy saint in her own right.

El códice Roma, Biblioteca Casanatense, 641, conserva, en su Sector II (del s. x y procedente de la catedral de Benevento) un tratado sin título sobre el destino del alma humana después de la muerte del cuerpo, conocido tradicionalmente como Vtrum animae de humanis corporibus exeuntes mox deducantur ad gloriam uel ad poenam an exspectent diem iudicii sine gloria et poena (CPL 1263), aunque en este artículo es denominado Serpens ille ueternosus. Esta obra sólo ha conocido una edición completa, publicada por Angelo Mai en 1833, quien, sin embargo, no consultó el manuscrito de la Casanatense, sino que trabajó sobre los materiales inéditos de Lorenzo Alessandro Zaccagni († 1712), prefecto de la Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Una parte de la crítica ha querido identificar esta obra con el perdido Libellus de remediis blasphemiae del obispo Julián de Toledo (680–690). El estudio interno del texto lleva a pensar, no obstante, tal y como sugirió José Madoz, que se trata de un escrito redactado en el noroeste de la Península Ibérica hacia el último tercio del s. viii. El presente artículo revisa los distintos argumentos sobre la autoría y la datación del tratado Serpens ille ueternosus, estudia sus fuentes y el testimonio de Alcuino sobre una hejería similar a la criticada en el citado tratado, y ofrece la primera edición crítica del texto junto con su traducción.

Several scholars have studied meanings attributed to the lion in the western European Middle Ages, but their accounts have tended to be partial and fragmentary. A balanced, coherent interpretive history of the medieval lion has yet to be written. This article seeks to promote and initiate the process of composing such a history by briefly reviewing previous research, by proposing a thematic and chronological framework on which work on the lion might reliably be based, and by itself discussing numerous textual examples, not least from German, Latin, and French literature. The five categories of lion symbolism covered are, respectively, the threatening lion, the Christian lion, the noble lion, the sinful lion, and the clement lion. These meanings are shown successively to have constituted regnant fashions that at various times profoundly shaped people's understanding of the lion; but it is demonstrated also that they existed alongside, and in a state of creative tension with, a “ground bass” of lion meanings that changed relatively little. Lions nearly always, for example, represented important, imposing things and people (for example, kings); and the New Testament's polarized presentation of the lion as either Christ or the devil proved enormously influential both throughout and beyond the Middle Ages. As such any cultural history of the lion — and indeed of many other natural phenomena — must be continually sensitive to the co-existence and interaction of tradition and innovation, stability and dynamism.

The importance of the commentaries on Aristotle's works in late medieval philosophy cannot be overestimated; they are in many cases the only witnesses to contemporary debates on philosophical topics. They are nonetheless very difficult to use: not only have different versions of the same commentary sometimes been preserved but also different commentaries on the same works, such as the different lecturae of some of Buridan's commentaries. There is also the highly standardized form of the commentaries themselves, where the same questions on a given Aristotelian work are often discussed in the same order. This uniformity is not limited to the titles of the questiones but affects the arguments too, which gives rise to doubts about the originality of the authors. It is easy to think of them as slavishly following an established tradition and so to fail to appreciate the real importance of their commentaries.

When, in the first canto of Purgatorio, Vergil requests permission to ascend through the Mountain's seven kingdoms, Cato issues instructions for the requisite purification. Vergil complies, descending with Dante to the base of the island, where he applies the morning dew to remove dirt and tears from Dante's eyes and cheeks, and girds Dante with a smooth rush. This brief drama, said to restore the color to Dante's face and to prepare for a meeting with the primo ministro (98–99) of paradise, is both the most densely ritualized moment of transition between the first two canticas and the thematic centerpiece of Purgatorio 1.

Toutes les lettres de Jean Chrysostome qui nous sont parvenues datent de la fin de sa vie; elles s’échelonnent entre l'année 404 où il fut exilé et l'année 407 où il mourut. On en compte deux cent trente-six, parmi lesquelles dix-sept sont adressées à Olympias, diaconesse de Constantinople. C'est sur le texte de ces lettres, exclusivement, que portera notre étude.

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.