The reform of Diocletian did away, as much as possible, with the interference of the government in fiscal matters of the Egyptian metropoleis (poleis after 297). The entire administration of each district was entrusted to the council of the cities and supervision was exercised only through the provincial governors.

Ever since Giorgio Valla printed his edition and commentary of the Satires of Juvenal, for nearly five hundred years now, scholars have realized the importance of large portions of the commentary. Before putting together his notes and publishing them in 1486, Valla combined them with the material he had gleaned from a mutilated MS, which he for some reason believed the work of Probus. After Valla, nobody ever saw his ‘Probus,’ and it is to be assumed that, having taken what he wanted from the MS, Valla saw no objection to destroying it. A hundred years later, Pithou's discovery of his excellent MS, containing both a superior text of the Satires and a full set of scholia, confirmed the value of Valla's ‘Probus,’ but also revealed the fragmentary manner of its preservation, whether because of its condition when found or because of Valla's omissions. Still another witness on behalf of theses good scholia, also full, appeared at St. Gall and was published by Cramer (Hamburg 1823). During the next century, much work was done to establish an edition of the older and more reliable scholia, first of all by study of Pithou's MS (known as P and so referred to hereafter), the MS of St. Gall (S in most editions and so referred to hereafter), and of ’Probus’ (to which I shall hereafter refer without quotation marks) as elicited from the comments of Valla; then by research into the later, contaminated ‘secondary scholia.’ In the excellent edition by Paul Wessner, the labors of many scholars bore fruit.

This preliminary list of incipits grew out of a card-file which I made to help me in the preparation of The Seven Deadly Sins published in 1952. It has been much expanded as a result of study in various libraries abroad and of a systematic search of certain manuscript catalogues and books. It can provide, I think, the nucleus for a complete list of incipits of Latin works on the virtues and vices, although at present it is far from complete or free from errors. Guides of this sort, I know from experience, can be of immense help in the wilderness of medieval manuscripts and through the labyrinth of medieval bibliography. I have no illusions about its state of perfection, but, inasmuch as the final form of this type of work must depend on the labors of many, someone must offer his contribution as a first step.

The Karolinus of Egidius Parisiensis, a twelfth/thirteenth-century poem in five books on the life and virtues of Charlemagne, has attracted the interest of a host of scholars, among them, M. J. J. Brial, Gaston Paris, Joseph Bédier, Paul Lehmann, Gaston Duchet-Suchaux, R. B. C. Huygens, and Paul Beichner. Only excerpts, however, have been printed, even though complete publication has been noted as an urgent desideratum. The full text both of the poem proper and of closely related annexes found in the manuscripts is presented hereunder, together with a study of the author and his work.

Unlike today, when he is mostly remembered for his historical work, the Venerable Bede's renown in the Middle Ages was founded on his biblical exegesis. One reason that his comments on the Bible had such prominence was that Bede referred to both the Latin and Greek texts, and in western Europe outside of Italy during the eighth century; the ability to read Greek marked one as practically unique. Two eighth-century lives remark on Bede's Greek. In the Brevis commemoratio de Venerabili Beda, probably written by a disciple named Antonius, we learn that Bede studied both Latin and Greek: ‘Et cum in Latina erudiretur lingua, Graecae quoque peritiam non mediocriter percepit.’ Also, in an anonymous life, we read: ‘Cumque Latinae aeque ut vernaculae linguae in qua natus est percepisset notitiam, Graecae quoque non parva ex parte attigit scientiam.’ This belief, that Bede was able to read Greek, was uncritically accepted for centuries.

Among the saints celebrated by the major vernacular Anglo-Saxon hagiographer Ælfric of Eynsham, one interesting group that has not received much scholarly attention is his warrior saints. In his lives of these saints Ælfric the monk, who has abjured violence, proclaims the spiritual achievements of men who have been military leaders and of ordinary soldiers serving in the ranks. The most famous of Ælfric's soldiers, St. Martin, was an unwilling one, but others commended by him were not unhappy to embrace the military life, even indeed when serving under pagans. Warrior saints were a distinctive and popular class of saints in the earlier Christian Mediterranean world. In the writings of Ælfric, as in Anglo-Saxon hagiography generally, they are a small group, but they are a group that illustrates strikingly Ælfric's approach to writing about saints, and study of them helps to throw light on the work he intended vernacular hagiography to perform. Part of that work, as argued below, was to provide ideologically suitable spiritual heroes for the faithful. But how should the potentially problematic group of warrior saints be presented, whose lives combine sanctity and violence and whose exploits might have disconcerting associations with the world of secular heroism?

Due especially to the pioneering work of Lottin, philosophers and theologians interested in the medieval discussion of the human conscience are today well aware that the Scholastic debate was framed principally in relation to two words, conscientia and synderesis. In the now classic formulation of the distinction between those two terms by Thomas Aquinas, synderesis is understood as the special habitus of the practical intellect whereby human beings know the basic principles of morality, whereas conscientia is the act whereby the practical reasoning powers of a human being apply the fundamental principles to the particular matter at hand. It is also generally acknowledged by scholars today that the argument about the relationship between conscientia and synderesis began many years prior to Thomas's work, that the medieval debate was originally spurred by the introduction of the strange term synderesis into the conversation, and that the term entered the discussion by means of an enigmatic passage in Jerome's Commentary on Ezekiel. Finally, most scholars acknowledge that the appearance of synderesis in the medieval manuscripts of Jerome's commentary is in all likelihood a corruption of the Greek word syneidēsis, which is the standard correlate in Greek Patristic literature for the Latin conscientia.

Like the undergraduate who read Macbeth twice in high school — ‘once for the truth and once for the beauty’ — modern scholars seem content to restrict their reading of Pearl to an isolated consideration of either its artistry and appeal to emotion or its theology and appeal to the intellect, in spite of impressive efforts of Professors Fletcher and Wellek to resolve the elegy-allegory dispute. Even the poem's most recent editors betray their partisanship: E. V. Gordon, who repeatedly refers to the narrator-dreamer as ‘the father,’ maintains that ‘Without the elegiac basis and the sense of great personal loss which pervades it, Pearl would indeed be the mere theological treatise on a special point, which some critics have called it’; and Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann, in a veiled though determined effort to defend Sister Madeleva's view that Pearl is not a mere pathetic elegy, as some critics have implied, offers a disarmingly literal interpretation—asserting, rightly I believe, that Pearl is ‘an homiletic poem teaching that the soul must not be attached to earthly treasure if it is to attain the Kingdom of God.’ We have returned to the position of Sir Robert Cotton's librarian, who, out of touch with the sensibilities of late nineteenth-century scholars, characterized the first poem in MS. Cotton Nero A. x. as ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum, in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur.’ I will attempt to show that the poet's treatment of ‘many things concerning religion and morals’ is, like Dante's Comedy (never to my knowledge categorized as either a mere theological treatise or a mere elegy for Beatrice), a carefully structured poetic account of a spiritual itinerary culminating in an ecstasy of mystical contemplation.

The mysteries and challenges presented by the Latin poem known as De Sodoma are many and varied. The identity of its author will likely never be known. Date and place of composition can only be expressed in terms of probabilities, and portions of the poem are extremely difficult to read and interpret. I am currently involved in the preparation of a critical edition, with translation and commentary, of both De Sodoma and its shorter, perhaps superior companion-piece De Iona, in the hope that this might pave the way for easier reading. In the present discussion I also address problems of readability, returning to that aspect of the poem which first attracted my attention and which, on balance, seems to offer the greatest help comprehending it: its relation to Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the poet of De Sodoma makes explicit and dramatic reference to the tale of Phaethon as told by Ovid, Ovid's text functions at a yet more basic level. In my view, the defining characteristic of De Sodoma is its structure as an Ovidian episode. This structure sets it apart from earlier Latin Biblical epics, canonical school texts by the time De Sodoma was composed. Read against the backdrop of its Ovidian model, the poem reveals a unity and coherence which has previously not been recognized, and extends our appreciation of the interests of some early medieval audiences and of the learning and artistry of at least one early medieval poet.

Latin palaeography of the pre-Carolingian era must surely rank high among the branches of medieval studies which have made dramatic progress in recent decades, and preeminent among the contributions to that progress is of course Codices Latini Antiquiores by E. A. Lowe, of which nine volumes have already appeared and the final two are well under way. But Dr. Lowe is not the kind of scholar who is content merely to compile a corpus which is a model of usefulness and filled with intriguing discoveries; fortunately for us he is also moved from time to time to offer essays in which he gives a broader historical interpretation. Such a book is English Uncial, which the Clarendon Press of Oxford published in 1960, including a substantial introduction, a series of comments on specific manuscripts, and 40 excellent plates. Here the author returns to a phenomenon he has examined several times before, the use of the most calligraphic of classical book hands, scriptura uncialis, in England, beginning late in the seventh century, contemporary with the perfection of the Insular ‘national' scripts.

In discussing the idea of musical World Harmony we have had occasion to mention the tetrachord and the fourth (interval) in their symbolic or allegoric impact. The number 4 is a constitutive element in Pythagorean cosmology since the speculations on the “well-tempered” state—of the soul, of the body, or of the universe itself—rest on the harmonious combination of four elements.

Neither of the two general councils of the western Church held between the Second and Third Lateran (1139, 1179) produced a large body of legislation: the genuine canons of the Council of Rheims (1148) number eighteen; those of Tours (1163) about ten. But in the great collection of Mansi this meagre store is eked out by an equal weight of additional canons, sixteen for Rheims and ten for Tours. Mansi looked on them with no great favor, but offered no criterion by which their validity and value might be judged. The Rheims canons, so far as I am aware, have never been submitted to critical study. The Tours canons, on the other hand, were examined and shown to be spurious by Seckel in a valuable appendix to his article on the sources of the canons of the English council of 1175, which he published in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht in 1899.

‘Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord’ (Gen. 10.8). This scriptural passage is familiar to many, but to historians of medieval astronomical literature Nimrod assumes a different profession. He stands as the principal character in a mythological astronomical handbook, the Liber Nimrod, cast in the form of a dialogue between the astronomer Nimrod and his disciple, Ioanton. This metamorphosis of Nimrod the Astronomer and his emergence into the medieval West is an interesting topic in its own right and one which this essay will examine.

The year 1494 marks the beginning of a series of French invasions of Italy. These invasions were to lead soon to a struggle among France, Spain, and the Empire for the control of the whole Italian peninsula. After 1519, when Spain and the Empire came under the scepter of one sovereign, Charles V of the Hapsburg dynasty, the contest for supremacy in Italy assumed the aspect of a great dynastic duel between the French Valois monarchs (Francis I, 1515–47; Henry II, 1547–59), and the Hapsburg rulers for the domination of Europe. This contest finally ended temporarily with the Spanish victory of St. Quentin (1557), and the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) which gave Spain supremacy not only in Italy but in Europe.

The Old English Elene has generally been considered Cynewulf's most successful poem; but while critics have admired specific passages in it, they have generally either ignored or patronized the poem as a whole. Thus Kemp Malone writes that in Elene, Cynewulf ‘told his tale simply and clearly as Old English poets go. Here he doubtless owed something to his Latin source ….’ The most recent editor of the text, Gradon, remarks that apart from the descriptions of the battle and the sea voyage, ‘there is little in Elene that can be shown to be original … a glance at Holthausen's composite text shows that, poetic circumlocution apart, there is little not to be found in some version of the Acta Cyriaci.’ One recent critic to deal with Elene, S. B. Greenfield, in his Critical History of Old English Literature, argues for a more sympathetic view of the poem, suggesting that ‘the struggle between good and evil that preoccupied Cynewulf is here [in Elene] presented thematically as a contrast between darkness and light, both on a physical and spiritual level’; he goes on to argue that the central episodes of the poem (i.e. Elene's quest for the cross) have a distinct literary if not necessarily poetic power.’ But Greenfield does not develop these suggestions in detail and it would, I think, be a fair summary of his discussion of the poem to say that where previous critics have been cool, Greenfield is lukewarm.

A scenario well known to Beowulf scholars alleges that after Beowulf has slain the monsters and gone home, Hrothulf, nephew of the Danish king Hrothgar, will murder prince Hrethric to gain the throne when the old king dies. This story, that many Anglo-Saxonists assume is integral to the ancient legend of these kings, is a modern misreading of the poet's allusions to events associated with the Scylding dynasty — a legendary history that the poet arguably takes care to follow. The present essay, in two parts, first shows how the idea of Hrothulf's treachery arose and became canonical under the influence of prestigious English and American scholars, then finds fault with this idea, refuting its “proof” from Saxo Grammaticus and showing how some Anglo-Saxonists have doubted that Beowulf supports an interpretation making Hrothulf a murderer. But when the poet's allusions to future treachery are ambiguous, at least for modern readers, in order to exonerate Hrothulf fully one must go to traditions about the Scylding dynasty outside the poem. Scandinavian regnal lists (including one that Saxo himself incorporates) consistently contradict the event the Saxo passage has been used to prove, as they agree on a sequence of Scylding rulers with names corresponding to those of persons in Beowulf. Attention to this traditional sequence exposes Hrothulf's murder of Hrethric as a logical impossibility. Moreover, the early medieval method of selecting rulers suggests that neither did Hrothulf usurp the throne of Denmark. In sum, careful scrutiny of the best Scandinavian evidence and rejection of the worst reveals Beowulf's “treacherous Hrothulf” to be a scholarly fantasy.

The names of John Buridan (1300–after 1358) and Nicholas of Autrecourt (1300–after 1350) are often associated with the so-called Ockhamist statute of 1340 at the University of Paris. For a long time the discussion centered upon the question: Was this statute directed against Ockham or Autrecourt? Puzzling also was the part Buridan played, who presumably was rector at the time that the statute was promulgated. Should he, as an alleged ‘Ockhamist,’ be accused of patricide or did he defend Ockham against the attacks of Autrecourt?

Ockham's doctrine of intuitive cognition lies at the heart of his epistemology. As Philotheus Boehner and Sebastian Day have quite rightly observed, one of the central aims of this doctrine is to answer the question how the intellect can have certain knowledge of contingent states of affairs (including the existence or non-existence of material particulars). A number of scholars, including Etienne Gilson and Anton Pegis, have charged, however, that far from achieving this goal, Ockham's doctrine (and especially what he says about the logical possibility of intuitive cognition of non-existents) leads to scepticism. Coming to Ockham's defense, Boehner and Day have rejected these criticisms as resting on misinterpretations of Ockham. I believe Boehner and Day have done much to clarify what Ockham actually meant. I should like to reopen the discussion, however, because I believe not all the consequences of Oekham's doctrine have been accurately drawn.

The name Boethius of Dacia evokes today an image of a radical thinker, who championed the cause of philosophical freedom, even at the expense of his religious beliefs. His writings have earned him, together with his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, the title of leader of the ‘Latin Averroists’ or ‘Heterodox Aristotelians.’ Boethius’ treatise on the highest good has contributed greatly to the modern opinion of Boethius as a radical thinker. M. Grabmann, who rediscovered the De summo bono, considered the work to be a clear expression of the anti-Christian tendencies inherent in ‘Latin Averroism’; and P. Mandonnet saw the short treatise to be the most radical expression of a program of the natural life, the purest rationalism, and a total denial of the Christian order. More recently, this view has been modified by F. Van Steenberghen and his students, who argue that Boethius of Dacia is indeed a Christian thinker, and in no way excludes ‘supernatural beatitude’ from his notion of the highest good. They point out that, as a teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, Boethius’ main concern is the summum bonum which can be attained on earth. As a result, the De summo bono is a characteristic product of the Arts Faculty at Paris.

Forbidden language, like forbidden knowledge, has always had its attractions. Of its many varieties, the inordinata locutio of blasphemy, speech which violates fundamental norms in the way it represents God, has held no small appeal for people in times of widespread religious practice. The late Middle Ages offers no exception to these two commonplaces of modern thought, judging from the number of civil statutes designed to extirpate blasphemy and from the stringent measures drawn up by influential clerics like Jean Gerson. This animus against blasphemy among the lettered, both lay and clerical, means that few blasphemous utterances, few of the words judged as blasphemous by someone other than the speaker, have come down to us. Preachers and compilers of catechetical handbooks, like theologians and glossators, are as silent about the actual words of blasphemers as they are eloquent about their temerity. Even the collectors of exempla, whose tales provide so much information about religious life, rarely record so much as a blasphemous phrase in their repertoire of tales about blasphemers. Perhaps these late medieval writers shared the reticence of the author of the Book of Job, who, according to the Priest (ps.- Jerome), wrote benedixerit for maledixerit, inverting the literal sense ‘quod non fuit ausus scriptor historiae ore suo in Deum dicere verbum blasphemiae.’