Aldhelm of Malmesbury (ca. 640–709/710) conceived and practiced an idiosyncratic style of Latin prose called “hermeneutic,” which was characterized mainly by lexical peculiarities: neologisms, graecisms, archaisms, poeticisms, distributive numerals, and other varieties of contrived or recherché diction. The principal model of the hermeneutic prose style was, of course, Aldhelm's treatise on virginity, the Prosa de virginitate (hereafter Pdv). Aldhelm probably wrote the work in the 670s. Partly — if not mainly — because of this influential treatise, hermeneutic Latin became a vogue in seventh- and eighth-century England, and practitioners of it flourished on the continent, too. Alas, ninth-century Viking incursions put an end not only to hermeneutic latinity but also to native literature. Not until the 920s would interest in hermeneutic Latin be renewed, and after a few more decades Aldhelm's prose work became one of the most intensively studied books in Anglo-Saxon England. In fact, the complexity of Aldhelm's prose led to copious glossing.

For nearly a century, scholars have ascribed a short treatise known as the De octo quaesiionibus to the Venerable Bede. In this work they have found unusual and important information about Bede and Anglo-Saxon England. It may preserve an exegetical teaching of Theodore of Canterbury, the seventh-century archbishop who figures so largely in Bede's Hisioria Ecclesiasiica. It includes a description of an illustration in an early manuscript of Paul's epistles. Yet another passage has interested historians of liturgy. All of this is in addition to the information that the treatise is considered to provide about Bede's thought and exegetical methods. As scholars have discovered and digested this material, the De octo quaestionibus has become a work of growing importance for the study of Bede.

In his discussion of the Third Commandment, the author of Dives and Pauper raises the question, “Why wolde God makyn þe world mor in þe numbre of sexe dayys þan in ony oþer numbre of dayys?” Like many commentators in the hexameral tradition, he answers the question by referring to one of the mathematical properties of the number six:

Historians concerned with the eleventh and twelfth centuries have for long been intrigued by the problem of the ‘Capetian miracle.’ By this is meant the process whereby the Capetian dynasty maintained itself, despite many obstacles and weaknesses, and converted its feeble hold upon the tottering throne of France into the powerful kingship of Philip Augustus and the awe-inspiring monarchy of St. Louis. The early Capetians were not men of outstanding ability. No great warriors or legal innovators appeared in the family for several centuries. A list of the great secular figures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries would not contain any of their names. But against this dreary picture the warning given by Robert Fawtier must be remembered: ‘It is tempting but rash to conclude that they were men of no significance. For they accomplished a difficult task which was yet indispensable for the future of the monarchy. They lasted.’

Although the theological problem of doctrinal development had to await the historical perspectives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to receive extensive consideration and more precise formulation, it was not entirely neglected up to that time. In the twelfth century Anselm of Havelberg († 1158) undertook a remarkable discussion of the question, and other medievals, such as Abelard and Saint Thomas, indicated a certain awareness of it. Augustin Renaudet has called attention to Erasmus' efforts to come to grips with the idea of evolution or mutation in doctrine and discipline; and a recent book has described in some detail the form which the question took among the scholastics of Salamanca. Both of these studies focus our gaze upon the sixteenth century and suggest that in that period the problem intruded with some insistence upon the consciousness of Christian thinkers, although in a problematic different from that of our day. The purpose of this article is the presentation of a text of the humanist and reformer, Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532), which explicitly engages the topic and articulates it in a way which deserves notice.

MS Chapel Hill 522, fols. 159r-202r, contains a hitherto unidentified manuscript of the Latin Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, a medieval astronomical almanac known to and used by Chaucer. Sigmund Eisner has already identified fifteen MSS of the Kalendarium, none of them complete, and has published an edition for the New Chaucer Society. Although Chapel Hill's manuscript is also incomplete, it does contain important materials missing from Eisner's base text, MS Oxford, Bodleian Laud. Misc. 662 — namely, all the lunar eclipse figures and the tables of ascensions and equations of houses for Aries and Taurus. In this paper I provide a brief introduction to Nicholas of Lynn and medieval kalendaria, followed by a summary description of CH 522, fols. 159r–202r, which contains a list of the other astronomical and mathematical texts bound with Nicholas of Lynn's Kalendarium in the book. Then I present my reasons for believing that CH 522 was an early MS, perhaps one intended for use as an exemplar. Finally, I add two plates from the MS and a full list of textual variants for CH 522, collated against Eisner's edition.

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.

A manuscript which was once thought to have belonged to Petrarch and which is now owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia, currently catalogued as MS Lewis European 53, contains several items of interest to historians of philosophy and science. Included among the twelve mostly anonymous treatises in the codex (see below) are three hitherto unnoticed witnesses to the Aristotle commentaries of the Oxford master of arts, Adam of Buckfield. The sixth item in the collection is one of six surviving copies of Adam's commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, four already having been listed in Charles Lohr's inventory published in this journal and the fifth, in a Munich manuscript, having recently been brought to my attention by the same scholar. The ninth item is a copy of the first recension of Adam's commentary on the De sensu et sensato and the tenth item a copy of the first recension of the same master's commentary on the De generatione et corruptione. None of these works has been edited.

The Summa Prima primi and the Summa Quamvis leges seculares were described by Kuttner and Rathbone in 1951 as two intimately related works of the Anglo-Norman school which were deserving of closer examination in future studies. These summae were significant, it was pointed out, as introducing a new stage in the literary output of the English schools, a stage marked by the reception of Bernard of Pavia's Breviarium and by a close dependence on Huguccio as the principal guide for the interpretation of the Decretum. The texts of the two summae have now been transcribed and collated in preparation for an eventual edition. This work makes it possible to explain their relationship to one another and to Huguccio. It also opens up a fresh set of problems concerning the connection between the Summa Prima primi and a little-known Summa Duacensis in MS Douai 649, fol. 96ra-140vb (D).

Heymericus de Campo (Heymeric van de Velde) (ca. 1395–1460), Professor der Theologie in Köln und in Löwen, Vertreter der Kölner Universität auf dem Konzil von Basel, gehört zu den bedeutenderen Philosophen und Theologen des 15. Jahrhunderts. Sein besonders von Albert dem Großen und Raimundus Lullus geprägtes neuplatonisches Denken beeinflußte nachhaltig Nikolaus von Kues. Leider sind von Heymerics zahlreichen Schriften bisher nur wenige ediert. Zwei wichtige Handschriften mit meist unedierten Werken Heymerics befinden sich in der Bibliothek des Cusanus-Hospitals in Kues; es sind die Codices 105 und 106. Der letztere, der Codex Cusanus 106, hat bei den Cusanus-Forschern viel Aufmerksamkeit erregt; enthält er doch Schriften Heymerics aus der Kölner und Basler Zeit, die Nikolaus von Kues mit zahlreichen Bemerkungen versehen hat. Weniger Beachtung hat bisher der Codex 105 gefunden, der keine Spuren einer Benutzung durch Cusanus aufweist; er enthält einen Summarius dominice passionis epilogus sowie eine Stellungnahme Heymerics aus dem Jahre 1458 zu dem interessanten Phänomen der Kinderwallfahrten zum Mont St. Michel.

Early medieval Irish society was highly stratified, possessing a formalized ranking structure, and ritual played an important part in legitimizing the possession of rank and office, especially kingship. Power was ultimately dependent on physical force, but was maintained through the control of land, agricultural production, exchange, and—in particular—livestock. The basis of power, however, was inherently unstable. Although some kingdoms and dynasties exhibited powerful centralizing tendencies, political power was essentially transitory, a product of the pattern of royal succession and the segmentary nature of royal dynasties. According to Ó Corráin, “great overkingdoms are dismantled by fission and segmentation, and are built up again by later dynastic expansion and reconquest.”

The Libre de Evast e Blanquerna of Ramon Lull (1232/34–1316) is a Utopian novel, pleading for the reform of various social and religious classes. The work was written between about 1274 and 1289. It is made up of five books in the last of which one can distinguish three mutually independent parts: (1) the De vida ermitana, in which Blanquerna renounces the papacy and withdraws as a hermit to a mountain not far from Rome, (2) the Libre de amic e amat, a collection of mystical utterances, and (3) the Art de contemplació, an introduction to the art of mystical contemplation.

L'idée de la nécessité pour un missionnaire de connaître la langue de ceux qu'il évangélise nous apparaît aujourd'hui comme une évidence. En fait, cette idée ne s'est imposée que tardivement. En Occident, l'évangélisation a d'abord suivi les cadres géographiques de la domination romaine et a, par suite, bénéficié de la langue du pouvoir. Seules les tentatives — d'ailleurs fructueuses — des moines irlandais dans le monde germanique constituaient une approche d'un monde totalement nouveau, quoique déjà pénétré d'influences méditerranéennes. L'Empire d'Occident et le triomphe de la Papauté au IXe siècle imposent l'idée d'une ‘Chrétienlé’ souveraine. En Méditerranée orientale, nous voyons les Byzanlins partagés entre le complexe de supériorité des Grecs envers tout ce qui est ‘barbare’ et le désir de convertir les hordes slaves, désir qui aboutira à la formalion de l'alphabet cyrillique et à tout un effort de traduction de textes d'abord, d'adaptation musicale ensuite, etc. Mais, ce faisant, les Byzantins se sont liés à tout un mécanisme politique d'influence et de prédominance entre Églises sœurs mais rivales. L'idée d'ouverture aux non-chrétiens comme tels ne sera reprise qu'au XIVe siècle par des moines russes suivant la colonisation du Nord-Est, notamment avec la formation d'une ériture ziriane par Saint Étienne de Perm.

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.

In the course of a detailed investigation of the sources of the extensive Old English Martyrology (saec. ix), Latin passiones in early manuscripts have had to be consulted, since there are still comparatively few modern collated editions apart from those in the very latest volumes of Acta Sanctorum, in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, and in individual works in books and periodicals. For the discussion of the martyrology, not only are variant texts of known versions of passiones to be distinguished and considered, but, on some occasions, distinctive versions are to be identified.

Le Parisinus gr. 657 est un beau manuscrit de 310 × 240 mm. Il contient 257 ff. écrits sur deux colonnes de trente lignes. Il est daté du xiie siècle. Il se présente actuellement sous une reliure de cuir rouge aux armes de Henri IV et contient uniquement des œuvres de Jean Chrysostome: ff. 1–182 le commentaire sur les psaumes 119 à 150; ff. 183–257 la collection complète des dixsept lettres à Olympias.

“One can only grant the theological faculty the arrogant claim that the philosophical faculty is its maidservant (leaving aside the question of whether the latter bears the torch before, or carries the train after her mistress) on the condition that she is not banished or gagged.” Thus wrote Immanuel Kant, paraphrasing Peter Damian, in his Der Streit der Fakultäten of 1798, shortly after being freed from a ban on writing about religion. Kant argued that the role of the philosophy faculty in universities was to lay down the truth for the use of the more practically orientated higher faculties, including that of theology. It could only perform this function if it was totally free.

If a diary of a prominent late-medieval religious figure were to be discovered that revealed his thoughts about the present and the future, such a discovery would seem to be too good to be true. But if labeled differently, such a document does exist: not a diary, but a prophetic commentary. The commentary by the fourteenth-century Augustinian friar Gentile of Foligno on the prophecy “Ve mundo in centum annis,” has never been the subject of sustained attention. Consequently the following presentation aims to examine it carefully within the context of the author's career and to show how it reveals some intriguing working habits as well as Gentile's firm hopes for the advent of angelic popes and ecclesiastical renewal.