As in previous Bulletins, bibliographical references are limited (1) to the first notice given of a manuscript not recorded in the Repertorium, and (2) to significant corrections or amplifications concerning previously known and new manuscripts (such references being preceded by ‘cf.’). Details of descriptions given in the Repertorium are not repeated, and new manuscripts are marked by the symbol *.

It is of course generally recognized that the carvings on medieval misericords, in England as elsewhere, are preponderantly secular in subject, including only a slight sprinkling of biblical and other religious motifs; according to a recent study, ‘only about 4.5 per cent of Britain's almost 8,600 surviving centrepieces and supporters have primarily religious significance, and 1.5 per cent are Scriptural, as compared with over twice that in France.’ To this basic situation we must add that of all medieval art forms, misericords are among those most completely lacking in context, and so are likely to be among the most mute about their own intended meanings. As M. D. Anderson remarks on another of their enigmatic aspects, ‘Between the clearly identifiable subjects and those as clearly not intended to convey any particular meaning lies a mass of work presenting a wide variety of iconographical puzzles’; and while she is referring to the difference between the purely decorative and the iconographically significant in any way, a similar no-man's land must surely be allowed to exist between the clearly non-biblical and the biblical or possibly biblical. An instructive example can be found in a fifteenth-century French misericord now in the church of St.-Cernin, which shows a ‘handsome dancing man with … oriental turban and earrings’ and is identified by its editors — attractively though by no means conclusively — as David dancing before the Lord in 2 Kings (Vulgate) 6.14–16.

The Bedford Hours (British Library MS Additional 18850) has been called one of “the very finest examples of French art of the earlier half of the fifteenth century….” Its lavish use of gold and bright colors, its beautifully conceived calendar pages and large miniatures, its connection with the marriage of John of Lancaster, the duke of Bedford, to Anne of Burgundy, and its fascinating history as a manuscript have received much attention. Scholars, however, have virtually ignored the almost 1,250 marginal illustrations that decorate the manuscript's 289 folios. These tiny pictures are generally woven into the ivy-leaf border, painted within roundels of approximately one inch in diameter. Thematically related, they are usually placed two to a folio side, one within the left or right border, and one within the lower border. The roundels, furthermore, are accompanied by one-line Old French texts. These are always placed together below the lower border and are arranged so that the first text, written in blue, identifies the roundel within the side border, whereas the second text, written in gold, explains the roundel painted within the lower border.

It is difficult to deduce the Aristotelian scientific procedure — to take his abstract statement of the nature of science and to show that his actual method in a particular work is adequately explained by the initial definition. Yet Aristotle's actual method is worth getting at. It provides insight into Aristotle and into Greek thought, and it sheds light on the course of ideas during the centuries which have been scientifically Aristotelian. In the following pages, I have tried to discover and to describe the method at work in a particular scientific treatise. The unit chosen for study is the first book and a half of the De caelo. Here it is that Aristotle develops his highly influential science of the celestial bodies.

In her Radcliffe monograph The Sources of the Parson's Tale, Miss Kate Petersen concluded that the ultimate sources of the Parson's ‘litel tretys’ were two thirteenth-century Latin works: the Summa Casuum Poenitentiae of St. Raymond of Pen afort, from which Chaucer drew the material on penance; and the Summa de Vitiis of Guilielmus Peraldus, from which came the discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins. Because of its highly persuasive parallels and careful construction, Miss Petersen's study has won very general acceptance. In the present writer's opinion, however, there is one aspect of Miss Petersen's work which is perhaps worth some reconsideration, and that is the positiveness of her identifications of the ultimate sources of the tale. Can it be successfully maintained, as Miss Petersen would have us believe, that exactly here and here we may fix the ultimate limits of the sources upon which Chaucer drew in the Parson's Tale?

These pages complete the catalogue of early medieval Hiberno-Latin commentaries on the Bible begun in Traditio 44 (1988) 537–71.

Part One of this Introduction was concerned with the historical background of Caucasian Society; it dealt, accordingly, in some detail with the genesis and structure of that society, more particularly of its creative minority, the nobility, and in especial the spearhead of the nobility, the group of the dynastic princes. That study investigated also the ethos of this important and restricted group, a caste in fact, and its juridical status: the sovereign rights of the Princes, who were, under the presidency of kings, the real rulers of Caucasia; their internationally recognized position of minor kings; the ethno-political self-sufficiency and self-determination of their States, of which Armenia and to a large extent also the other Caucasian countries were little more than federative unions; the dependence of the Princes on other and greater monarchs; and the superadding of feudalistic features, resulting from this dependence, to the fundamentally dynasticist régime of Caucasia. Here, in the present study, it is proposed to consider this group in the concrete: to examine it, that is, as so many individual historical-genealogical-geographical (and often also ethnic) units. The preponderant role of the Caucasian dynastic aristocracy in the history of the formative centuries made, especially in Armenia, of this history, and of that of the following centuries as well, largely the history of these princely houses. This fully justifies our interest in this particular aspect of the Caucasian social development.

Near the end of the twelfth century, the scholar and statesman Peter of Blois felt compelled to bring together the wisdom of ancients and moderns on the subject of love and friendship. He was reluctant to publish his synthesis, for he was afraid that his reliance on other authors would bring charges of fraud. Sure enough, it has. Unfortunately, he relied too heavily on one modern in particular, St. Ailred of Rievaulx; and, like many undergraduate papers, his treatise is a better example of plagiarism than of synthesis.

The hide was a common form of land tenure in pre-Conquest England. Scanty documentation and ambiguous statements in the sources have made it difficult, however, for economic and social historians to understand the evolving meaning of hide in the period from Bede to 1100. The present study attempts to clarify some of the problems surrounding this word by a re-examination of the sources and by an analysis of terminology in land-tenure institutions related to it. The results of the investigation show that revisions in land tenure during the later Anglo-Saxon era prepared the way for the introduction of Norman methods for governing the English countryside.

What was Dante's interpretation of the third Aristotelian disposition of Nicomachean Ethics 7, which he calls ‘la matta bestialitade’ and how does it function in the structure of the Inferno? Correlatively, what range of meaning did Dante assign the second disposition, ‘malizia’? The problem is difficult at best and, from a modern point of view, apparently literarily unrewarding. What is more, after a long tradition of scholarly discussion and dispute a kind of consensus has emerged. With the solution which it proposes most are willing to rest content and indeed many simply take its correctness for granted. It is the thesis of this study that the consensus is based on an improvisation and that the high probability of an alternative solution can be effectively demonstrated. Underlying this is the conviction that this is not a scholarly quibble, of interest only to the ‘experts’ or merely a matter of interest for the history of ideas. Rather it is a problem with profound significance for the total structure of the Inferno both intellectual and literary.

Cardinal Comes of Casate, one of six cardinals who died in the papal vacancy-following the death of Honorius IV in 1287, added a codicil to his will in Rome as the summer pestilence was raging. This document, edited below, adds another example to an isolated first cluster of such cardinals' wills, codicils, and death inventories. The inventory of the estate of Cardinal Geoffrey of Alatri, deacon of S. Giorgio in Velabro (died before 31 May 1287), and the wills or codicils of Cardinals Comes, priest of SS. Marcellino e Pietro (died after 19 July 1287), Hugh of Evesham, priest of S. Lorenzo in Lucina (died before 18 August 1287), Bentivenga dei Bentivenghi, bishop of Albano (died after 25 March 1289), Peter Peregrosso of Milan, successor to the cardinal title of Geoffrey of Alatri (died between 15 and 28 July 1295), and Thomas of Ocra, priest of S. Cecilia (died between 23 May and 4 June 1300), are a remarkable group, not only because they cover a span of only fourteen years, but because they either contain an impressive list of books or refer to a substantial, uninventoried private library.

The unedited Canticum amoris of Richard Rolle is a Latin poem of one hundred fifty-two lines addressed to the Virgin Mary. Written after he had become a hermit and while, it seems, he was still a youth, the work is of considerable interest for itself, for the light it sheds on the author as man and artist, and for a study of the confluence of the currents in the stream of English literature at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The signature, woven into the poem, leaves no doubt about its being a genuine work of one who in England was probably the most influential English writer of the late middle ages. It was listed among the Latin works of Rolle which Horstmann intended to edit, discussed by Miss Hope Emily Allen in her indispensable canon of the hermit's work, and singled out by Mr. Raby as a work that should be published.

Bei den Vorarbeiten für eine Dissertation über die bedingte Eheschliessung im kanonischen Recht, die vor allem die Entwicklung dieses Rechtsinstituts in der Zeit von 1140-1234 aufzeigen wird, hat der Verfasser unter anderem einzelne bisher unbekannte Handschriften verschiedener kanonistischer Werke aufgefunden oder bereits bekannte Handschriften näher identifiziert. Da die Drucklegung der Dissertation wohl noch einige Zeit in Anspruch nehmen wird, möchte der Verfasser die wichtigsten Ergebnisse vorläufig kurz anzeigen. Der Einzelnachweis wird in der genannten Dissertation folgen.

The peculiar piece of late Byzantine legal literature which is known by the strange name of Tipoukeitos, is concerned with the so-called Basilica. It indicates, in a very succinct form, the topics dealt with in the sixty books of Emperor Leo the Philosopher's voluminous codification. It seems that the author of T. used a copy of B. which differed somewhat, particularly in its enumeration of the single texts, from those MSS on which the brothers Heimbach based their edition of B. but, in general, the order of books and titles in T. is the same as in the Heimbachs' edition.

The anonymous compiler of the fourteenth-century Middle English treatise known as The Pore Caitif made extensive use of three works of Richard Rolle. His borrowings are from Emendatio vitae, The Form of Living, and The Commentary on the Canticles, and appear in eight tracts of a special group of ten pieces he calls ‘summe short sentencis exciting men to heuenli desiir’ (fol. 1v). Passages from Rolle's Form of Living were used in PC, ‘Desiir of Ihesu,’ ‘Of Mekenes,’ and ‘Of Actif Liif and Comtemplatif Liif.’ Sections from Emendatio vitae appear in PC, ‘Of Vertuous Pacience,’ ‘ϸe Councel of Christ,’ ‘Of Temptacioun,’ and ‘Desiir of Ihesu.’ A brief section of Rolle's Commentary on the Canticles is the source of the entire PC tract ‘ϸe Name of Ihesu,’ as Hope Emily Allen suggested in her monumental study of Rolle. A portion of this same source served for the first half of PC, ‘Of Mannes Wille,’ as Michael G. Sargent recently pointed out. The purpose of the present article is to suggest that the compiler of The Pore Caitif was indebted to Rolle not only for specific passages, but for the very schema and arrangement of his ten tracts of short sentences. It is my belief that Rolle's Emendatio vitae and The Form of Living, the two works of which the PC compiler made the most substantive use, were the governing influence on the order and arrangement of the ten short sentences.

The fact that the question of war guilt has frequently followed in the wake of major wars has contributed little, if anything, to a clarification of the concept. The perplexing difficulties raised by it are amply illustrated by the unsuccessful attempts, made periodically at various ages and on various levels of civilization, to arrive at criteria permitting a differentiation between the bellum justum and the bellum injustum. States, unlike individuals, are not confronted with simple choices between obeying or violating the law. Determination of the initial violation of existing covenants sheds little, if any, light on the responsibility for commencing war. Nor is such responsibility necessarily incurred by launching the first attack. Nothing could be more futile than to equate this act with aggressive and unjust war. The initial attack may be a legitimate response to an existing situation, and a war of aggression, as St. Augustine already pointed out, a just war; nor is there any reason to assume that the party forced into the defensive is invariably innocent. If war guilt is to be more than a specious pretense for inflicting punishment upon the vanquished, it can be measured only in terms of the alternatives available to a state, and the choice has to be viewed in the light of historical, ethical, and political factors. The assessment of such guilt is a problem of extraordinary complexity. To confine it to formal legal considerations would result not only in gross injustice, but would tend to perpetuate international tensions.

In 343 A. D. the Synod of Sardica, speaking of priests to be sent by the pope e latere suo or, in the equally authoritative Greek version, used a figure of speech which, in its Latin form as a latere or de latere—both variants are already attested in the early transmission of the Sardican canons — became in time an important canonical concept. Although the bishops assembled at Sardica might at first seem to have coined a striking neologism, the phrase employed by them actually echoes certain passages of the Greek and Latin Bibles and the use made of those passages in some of the homilies of the Fathers. As we listen to the biblico-patristical overtones with which the term a latere resounds, the theological source of early canonical language becomes, for this one instance, perceptible again.