Western Europe in the first half of the twelfth century was witnessing a great intellectual and cultural revolution. One manifestation of this was the hordes of ambitious youths seeking instruction, not only in the traditional ‘seven liberal arts,’ but also in the more specialized fields of law, medicine, and theology. In consequence, old educational centers were being revitalized and new ones were appearing. For centuries, of course, most monasteries and some cathedrals had maintained schools. Previous to the twelfth century, however, the monastic schools had played a more conspicuous role in education than those of the cathedrals. The period with which we are concerned saw a notable reversal in this situation. Usually located in rural areas, monasteries were unprepared to supply the needs of large numbers of students. Nor was the presence of a transient and turbulent body of adolescents conducive to monastic discipline. Cathedrals, on the other hand, situated in the rapidly growing towns, could supply the students in their schools with the necessities of life, while providing elementary and often advanced instruction through a corps of teachers supervised by the cathedral scholasticus. Thus the early progress of the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ can frequently be best observed in a study of the history of this or that cathedral school. In the long run Paris, Laon, and Chartres were to exert the greatest influence. Yet there were many other schools in the period, 1100-1150, which could boast a famous master or two and which produced notable scholars. One of these was Reims, which under Master Alberic enjoyed for nearly twenty years a prestige in theological studies equalled by no contemporary school.

The notion of natural “occult” is usually viewed by modern scholars as a tautological way of dealing with phenomena for which there was no current explanation. Consider how Molière mocks scholastic medicine in the “Intermède” of Le malade imaginaire when he gives the Bachelierus a silly answer to the question of why opium makes one sleep: “quia est in eo virtus dormitiva / Cujus est natura / Sensus assoupire.” Opium makes one sleep because it has a sleep-inducing power; its nature is to make “the senses drowsy.” The words of Molière's Bachelierus are strikingly similar to what Augustine writes in the City of God (21, 7) concerning natural things that are endowed with extraordinary properties: “So for the other cases, irksome to rehearse, in which an unusual power seems to be present contrary to nature, yet no other explanation is given except to say such is their nature. No doubt their explanation is short, and still it answers enough.” Obviously, however, the very meaning of Augustine's statement is just the opposite of Molière's. In Augustine's view, the answer is “short,” because the real and only cause is God himself; nature is only an illusory cause. For Molière, the Bachelierus's answer is inane, because it seems to give a scientific explanation but in fact says nothing and certainly does not look for the true natural causes. But between Augustine and Molière there was scholastic science, in which the virtus occulta was not a mere tautological statement but a real explanation based on a coherent conception of nature.

Plusieurs voyages d’étude, notamment en Espagne, et le dépouillement des MSS de la Compilatio prima nous permettent de présenter quelques nouvelles découvertes et les réflexions qu'elles ont suscitées. Nous les répartissons sous trois rubriques: Autour d’Yves de Chartres, Décrétales et Questiones. Nos remerciments vont au Consejo Superior de investigaciones científicas de Madrid qui, une fois encore, a subventionné notre séjour en Espagne, et à St. Kuttner, qui a apporté à notre texte de nombreuses précisions.

Previous research into the sources of the Vercelli Homilies has established that Caesarius of Arles is an influence on some of the pieces in the collection. Rudolph Willard has shown that a Caesarian homily on the last judgment is a source for a part of Homily VIII (untitled) and that Homily XI (spel to forman gangdaege) is for the most part dependent on Caesarius' De natale sancti Felicis with the opening statement based on one of the bishop's Rogationtide sermons. Prof. Willard has also noted that although no specific source has been found, Homily XII (spel to ðam oðrum gangdaege) may very well have been written with one of the homilies of Caesarius in mind. J. E. Cross has demonstrated that a part of Homily XIII (spel to priddan gangdaege) is a close rendering of a paragraph in Caesarius' De elemosinis. Caesarian influence, however, is not limited to these homilies and can be seen in several of the Vercelli Homilies not yet published.

The modern interest in and study of medieval sermon literature was first driven by a combination of confessional acrimony and professional scholarship. L. Bourgain, Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Richard Albert, Rudolf Cruel, Anton Linsenmayer, and G. R. Owst combed through the archives to uncover the written remains of medieval preaching, and what they discovered came as a surprise to those who had been raised on the Protestant black legend of a mute medieval Church. For quantity and variety the period from the twelfth century to the Reformation must count as one (or several) of the great ages of pulpit activity. In fact, on the eve of the Reformation there was some concern that too much was being preached too often. For example, as a result of complaints by laity and clergy alike, in 1508 the Bishop of Breslau ordered a limit on the number of sermons preached in the city. To be sure, modern judgments concerning the quality of that preaching in both style and content vary with the confessional stance and aesthetic preferences of the individual scholar. But of the late medieval dedication to preaching in season and out there can be no doubt.

The pejorative phrase of the title, penned by Eóin MacNeill in his article ‘Beginnings of Latin Culture in Ireland’ has clung tenaciously to the study of Hisperic texts. Indeed, it was repeated some twenty-odd years later by Bieler in his ‘Hibernian Latin’. However, the belief that Hisperica Famina and the texts related to them — the Lorica of Laidcenn, the Rubisca (possibly by Máeldub of Malmesbury), the St. Omer Hymn, some of the writings of Aldhelm, and a few other works — are the products of a literary decadence rests squarely on the assumption that they spring from southwestern Britain, especially Wales, around the middle of the sixth century; to cite MacNeill:

The liturgical ceremony for the taking of the crusading cross did not develop until well into the twelfth century. Texts which reveal how the cross was bestowed are relatively rare from the period 1095 to 1200. It was not until the thirteenth century that pontificals commonly contained such a ceremony. It is not clear why the rite for taking the cross took so long to develop, but two twelfth-century Italian pontificals from the Graz University library shed some light on how the liturgical ceremony evolved on the continent.

By their exchange of articles in the Studi Gregoriani, M. Fliche and the Canon Arquillière have reopened the question of what actually happened when Pope Gregory VII received Henry IV at Canossa. Both scholars assume that Henry approached the Pope, excommunicate and stripped of the royal office; but they differ widely in interpreting Gregory's reception of the penitent King. Taking issue with views Arquillière had expressed in his work Saint-Grégoire VII, Fliche maintained that when Gregory released Henry from excommunication he also reinstated him in the royal office. In response, Arquillière reaffirmed his earlier position that only the ban, and not the sentence of deposition, was lifted.

The French Franciscan, Peter Aureoli, was born shortly before 1280 near Cahors in the south of France. He studied in Paris, but the date of his arrival there, 1304, quite likely would have made him too late to hear the lectures of Duns Scotus on books 1 and 4 of the Sentences. After teaching at Bologna (1312) and Toulouse (1314), Peter finally returned to Paris where he lectured from 1316–20. In July 1318, his friend John XXII sponsored him for the licentiate in Theology. The request was granted and Aureoli took the oath of Magister actu regens on 13 November 1318. Elected provincial of the Aquitaine Franciscans toward the end of 1320, he was nominated archbishop of Aix-en-Provence before he exercised the former office. Pope John XXII consecrated him on 14 June 1321, but before Peter could settle into his new task he died, probably on 10 January 1322.

The French word macabre was first used as an ordinary adjective by the French Romantic writers of the last century: Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel say ‘c'est macabre’ for anything lugubriously grotesque. Sachs quotes fantaisie macabre from Émile Montégut. The word was not included in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (1694) up to the seventh edition of 1878, but is now to be found in the eighth in the connections danse macabre, récit macabre, plaisanterie macabre. Bal macabre is not recorded, but often used. In the printers' craft-language macabre is said to be used for a Mort, that is, the accidental omission of one or more words of a text by the compositor. The medical students and servants of the dissecting rooms at the French universities call the bodies dissected les macabres. The bargees on the Seine employ the word for corpses seen drifting on the water. Parisian grave-diggers call the bodies of the poor people buried at minimum cost mauvais macabés. In the Auvergnat patois, [chant] macabre is a bag-piper's melody. In the Bergamask dialect macabret is said to mean the Devil-an easy transition from ‘Death.’ In Cervières (Burgundy) a certain sword-dance is called Bachuber, obviously either a wrong transcription of an aurally recorded macuber or a local mispronunciation of an adopted word. Macabre is found as a loan-word in English, Dutch, and German: Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish.

On 20 March, A.D. 698, eleven years after his death, the grave of Cuthbert, holy man and bishop of the Northumbrian diocese of Lindisfarne between 685 and 687, was opened and the body was found to be incorrupt. It has been argued in modern times that this was possibly due to the monks' technique of embalming, or to the salty condition of the island soil, which literally pickled the saint's body. However, the bishop at that time, Eadberht, proclaimed a miracle. Cuthbert's body was reinterred with rich gifts in a shrine above the church floor so that the saint could be easily accessible to the faithful. Thus began the cult of Saint Cuthbert which culminated in the building of the magnificent cathedral of Durham.

In a letter of 1404 to the Sienese professor Francesco Casini, the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati expressed appreciation for the addressee's commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, comparing it favorably with the Greek (XI/XII century) commentaries of Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus, and with the Latin ones of Albert the Great, Albert of Saxony, Gerard of Odo, Walter Burley, and Jean Buridan. He invited Casini not to neglect the works of Henry of Friemar, a minor fourteenth-century figure. Furthermore, Salutati remarked that Casini had even surpassed Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, whose commentaries were doubtless the most widespread in the Latin West of Salutati's time. As Luca Bianchi has pointed out, Salutati's letter highlights the degree to which Italian humanists depended on the scholastic tradition (whether Byzantine or Latin) when approaching Aristotle's Ethics; even Donato Acciaiuoli's famous commentary, published in 1478, draws heavily on Eustratius, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas. This was actually seen as one of its greatest merits by later commentators.3 However, Salutati's comments invite yet another observation: namely, that Salutati is unable to point to any specifically Italian tradition connected with this work. In fact, although Salutati does name two Italians (Thomas and Giles of Rome), they too, like all the other commentators mentioned, spent most of their lifetimes in northern Europe; for most of them, the center was not Italy but Paris. This is why Salutati heaped so much praise on Francesco Casini — finally an indigenous Italian tradition might develop; its beginnings were promising indeed.

When in 1922 Clemens Blume published the fifty-fifth volume of the Analecta Hymnica, almost a hundred years of development in the field of Latin hymnology reached its final stage. Although the idea of collecting hymns was not an outcome of the growing interest in literature in the nineteenth century, the first extensive work in this field was not begun earlier than about the middle of that century. A study of the origins of this research and of certain aspects of the work in its earliest stages, while not to be attempted here, would be of great interest — and instructive as well; for it appears that many errors and many misconceptions of the subject go back directly to the lack of a methodical and scientific approach on the part of the earlier hymnologists.

The are several reasons why the problem of early-Georgian, and particularly early-Iberian (East Georgian), chronology has been a vexing one. In the first place, the early-Georgian historical works contain almost no direct chronological indications, i.e., dates, but rather offer quite numerous relative indications, i.e., synchronisms, lengths of reigns and lives, regnal years, the distance between events, etc. Secondly, in these historical works, hard facts of history often lie buried under a superimposition of myth, legend, and epos, or are occasionally fused with the picture of other historical facts, occurring at different epochs, that is projected on them. And, thirdly, the attempts at establishing such a chronology, which have not been wanting, have tended to be somewhat vitiated by misconceptions upon which they were based. Thus, early in this century, the imaginative attempt of S. Gorgadze was ruined by the fact that he preferred the evidence of the king-lists (Royal List, I, II, III), which form a later addition to the seventh-century Conversion of Iberia, to that of the more authoritative and older (eighth-century) History of the Kings of Iberia by Leontius of Ruisi, which contains a still older historical tradition. Gorgadze, accordingly, tended to neglect what chronological indications are found in Leontius. And in our own days, another such attempt was made by P. Ingoroqva, which cannot be described as entirely successful.

In the eleventh century, all over Christendom, government was in a rudimentary stage. Because it was rudimentary there is not much evidence to show how rudimentary it was. A danger is that modern scholars are tempted to read what scraps of evidence they have with a prejudice they are only partly aware of; and to see chancellors and chanceries in the light of what they would expect them to have been, much as their colleagues have done with parliaments and popular liberties.

John of Legnano (ca. 1320–1383) was the foremost professor of law at Bologna in the last half of the fourteenth century. Although he has received recognition for his early study on the ethics of warfare, his importance today might better be ascribed to the breadth of his writings, to his close connections with the papal and civic affairs of his day, and to his role as the chief apologist for Urban VI at the outbreak of the Great Western Schism.

In the study of Carolingian Christianity, biblical commentaries are a vast and largely untapped resource. Exegesis, whether for teaching or homiletical purposes, dominated the ninth-century school tradition; in this world, nearly all theologians were primarily expositors of the Bible. It is one of the ironies of historical inquiry that the non-exegetical treatises of such figures as Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus have been studied to the exclusion of their biblical commentaries. Although this situation is beginning to change, much remains to be done, beginning with the crucial work on the texts. Meanwhile, in the absence of critical editions of any of the major works of the Carolingian exegetical tradition, all scholarship in the field is a mere suggestion as to what might be discovered when the primary materials have been better presented. This study is no exception. The two treatises discussed here have received practically no attention from modern historians, and are printed only in the uncritical editions of the Patrologia Latina. It is my hope that this analysis will encourage further inquiry into Carolingian exegesis by showing some ways in which two commentaries, the first in the Latin tradition on the book of Lamentations, reveal the theological and pastoral concerns, and the exegetical methods, of two generations of ninth-century monastic authors.

If Peter John Olivi was given less than his due by previous generations of scholars, the present generation seems bent on making it up to him. Recent writers have identified him as a father of fourteenth-century nominalism, as a major architect of the dogma of papal infallibility, as a trail-blazer in economic thought, and as an astute reformer whose advice, if heeded, would have saved the church a good deal of subsequent trouble. In the process, Olivi's image has been substantially refurbished.

According to medieval legend, Gratian, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor were bro7thers. What united these men in the medieval imagination were the three great works they produced, respectively, over the course of the twelfth century: the Decretum, the Sentences, and the Historia scholastica. The two Peters, in particular, were connected. Stephen Langton, one of the most prominent teachers of Scripture and theology at Paris during the last decades of the twelfth century, praised both Peters for their mastery of Sacred Scripture. The joint ascendancy of the reputations of Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor can also be seen in the tradition of medieval chroniclers such as Otto of St. Blaise, who wrote that “in those days Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor shone forth as distinguished masters at Paris.”