Writing early in the last decade of the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon monk Ælfric begins his Second Series of Catholic Homilies with a sermon for Christmas Day. The second of five Old English sermons he wrote for the Nativity, it combines dense doctrinal matters with concrete advice about how Christians should commemorate the birth of Christ. After discussing Christ's Incarnation and Virgin Birth, and the Old Testament prophecies anticipating his appearance, Ælfric concludes the sermon with a series of instructions directing believers how to conduct themselves at Christmas. Of particular interest is his singling out of clænnyss, an Old English word for “chastity” or “purity,” as the virtue to be most highly prized among the laity:

The essay analyzes the formation of the oft-cited trope of the image engraved (or painted) in the heart, topical in the Sicilian lyric of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which it re-discusses a painstaking issue of Aristotelian physiology. The trope of the “pintura nel core” (figure in the heart), as described in Giacomo da Lentini's Meravigliosa⋅mente and Madonna mia, a voi mando, is immediately assimilated to the faculty of memory, and the human ability to represent external reality by means of signa. This process of formation that happens in the heart and allows the poet to fall in love is reworked in the image of the “pintura” carved like a seal into wax. The lexical choices of Giacomo's poems point to an Aristotelian understanding of sense perception, centered around the key role of the heart, dependent upon the fluidity of its bodily part, and resulting in an internal representation of phenomenal reality. The link between love lyric poetry and physiological learning shows the interdependence of these two fields of medieval culture, and the ways in which a debated scientific issue can be illuminated by the comparative analysis of vernacular literature and philosophical investigation. Giacomo's reworking of these Aristotelian physiological tenets testifies to his poetical ability to engage with medicine and aesthetic representation.

This article investigates the ideologies which underpinned unconsecrated burial in late Anglo-Saxon legal and religious texts. The exclusion of sinners and criminals from Christian cemeteries has typically been interpreted by scholars as a form of excommunication or an attempt to facilitate damnation. However, a reassessment of legislative, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical sources reveals that this was not so. In tenth-century laws and charters, unconsecrated burial was imposed exclusively by secular authorities; it was only prescribed by ecclesiastical authorities from ca. 1000. This suggests that it originated as a temporal punishment but later came to be used as an ecclesiastical sentence. The following analysis of the textual evidence yields two interrelated arguments. First, this article demonstrates that through the mid-eleventh century, unconsecrated burial was a penalty distinct from ecclesiastical excommunication. Where excommunication was imposed upon living sinners, to coerce them to penance, unconsecrated burial was prescribed for the unrepentant or criminal dead, whose actions placed them beyond earthly help. Second, this article contends that written prescriptions for unconsecrated burial differentiated secular from ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Although laymen and clergy collaborated in the dispensation of law and justice throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, the written evidence for unconsecrated burial shows that this penalty fell either under the authority of secular or of ecclesiastical agents, demonstrating a clearer separation between these spheres than is usually recognized in pre-Conquest England.

The origins of Irish Christianity are unknown. Even the history of the Irish Church during the fifth and sixth centuries is somewhat shrouded in obscurity, and leaves a wide scope for speculation. This is particularly true with regard to the careers of the earliest missionaries of Ireland known to us by name—Palladius and Patrick. Contemporary evidence is extremely meagre in the case of Palladius and conflicting in the case of Patrick; and the more eloquent witnesses of later times often contradict either each other or our primary sources. It is not, then, surprising that the relation between these two missionaries and their respective missions was fervently discussed by scholars during the last one hundred and fifty years. Looking back at the vast amount of diligent labour and learned argument devoted to this problem, one is surprised to find the status quaestionis almost the same at the end as at the beginning. Only in recent years has a way been opened which gives hope to attain reasonable certainty on some at least of the disputed points. With Professor T. F. O'Rahilly's pamphlet The Two Patricks (Dublin 1942) the problem has entered its critical phase. By his lucid statement of the principal issue and its implications, based on a firsthand knowledge of the complete evidence, Professor O'Rahilly has put under a lasting obligation even those who, like the present writer, find it impossible to accept his main thesis. If I offer a different solution of the vexed problem, I do so in a spirit of gratitude to the pioneer whose work alone has made the present study possible.

The Maitland Memorial Lectures for 1948, delivered at Cambridge University by Dr. Walter Ullmann, were published in 1949, somewhat enlarged, under the title, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London, Methuen & Co., 1949; pp. xiv, 230). In six chapters the author sets forth his views on certain fundamental problems of medieval political history which were given their doctrinal development and practical realization by the canonists jointly with the popes, that is to say, by the legislative authority and the jurisprudence of the medieval Church.

The recovery of the work of an author previously known only through citations and references in other manuscripts is always an exciting event. Although rare in any area of medieval studies, such finds broaden our knowledge of the intellectual development and open up new aspects for study. It was through a fortuitous paralleling of citations in Gregory of Rimini with an anonymous Sentences-commentary at the Franciscan convent in Fribourg that Damasus Trapp, a ground-breaker in fourteenth-century scholastic studies, discovered the Sentences-commentary of an English Benedictine still known only as Monachus Niger. More recently Jan Pinborg has connected the fourteenth-century citations to the Magister Abstractionum with a work otherwise known as the Sophismata of Richardus Sophista. The following discovery, although not at present of the same importance to the field, shares one thing in common with Trapp's discovery. It provides us with yet another text from the same period of Oxford thought and may in fact also be by a Benedictine, a group that was numerically strong at Oxford but from which we have had almost no extant work to study.

Precise differentiations between the pictorial techniques referred to by the terms σκιαγϱαφία and σκηνογϱαφία in the fourth century b.c. have proved difficult to establish. The terms occur most often in illustrative metaphors which compare these techniques with restrictions or deficiencies in various disciplines such as metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, optics, ethics, rhetoric and poetry. It is difficult to judge, however, from the metaphors illustrating these limitations just what these techniques were and how they were evaluated in themselves as types of artistic representation. One might use, that is, a skiagraphic sketch, roughed-out in shadow and shading and probably viewed from some distance, to illustrate the incompleteness of knowledge, or use a carefully contrived skenographic perspective, characteristic of stage scenery, to illustrate the deceptiveness of sophistic argumentation, without regarding either artistic method as illegitimate in itself. This paper will deal primarily with the metaphorical applications of these terms in order to clarify further the nature of the literary styles which were described by comparisons with them. Further clarification of the metaphorical illustrations may, in turn, suggest further consideration; for the history of art.

Thomas of Hales has long been recognized as the author of a fine Middle English lyric, the ‘Luue Ron.’ He is also known to have written a sermon (or meditation) in Anglo-Norman, and a few manuscripts of a Latin life of the Virgin, Vita Sancte Marie, have also been attributed to him. Modern accounts of his life depend almost entirely on an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Thomas More, humanist, statesman, and martyr, was one of the most prolific apologists for the Catholic Church in the early years of the Reformation. In numerous polemical and apologetic works he ranged widely over the issues raised by the controversy. But if his scope was large, he possessed one sure foundation to which all his arguments inevitably returned. This was the faith of the early Church Fathers, those men who interpreted the life and faith of the Church from the time of the Apostles to the end of the pontificate of Pope Gregory I in 604.

The study of Latin manuscripts has been of vital importance not only to the student of classical and patristic literature but also to every serious scholar interested in the literature, theology, philosophy and science of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. In this field, the manuscripts contain not merely new variants of well-known texts but an often unsuspected amount of new textual material that never got into print but often had as wide a circulation and importance as some of the printed works. This material is by no means easily accessible. If a collection of manuscripts has no printed catalogue, there is no way of investigating its content except by working on the spot. On the other hand, printed catalogues, when available, permit the location of pertinent material from a distance, and hence are a definite scholarly aid and desideratum. Since even the printed catalogues are often inadequate and sometimes rare, it has seemed useful to compile an annotated bibliography of these catalogues, which would serve as a guide to medievalists and Renaissance scholars in general, and in particular to the contributors to the project of ‘Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries,’ which has been undertaken by a group of scholars under the auspices of several learned societies. The present bibliography was originally compiled for the purposes of that project, and it has been decided to print it, since previous bibliographies of a similar nature were either conceived along narrower lines, like Weinberger's, or were inaccurate, like Richardson's.

Some years ago I called attention to these words of the early thirteenth-century decretalist, Vincentius Hispanus, on the powers of the pope and of the prince: ‘… sit voluntas pro ratione.’ What is the meaning? Did Vincentius hold that the supreme authority was arbitrarily absolute, that the voluntas of the monarch must in all circumstances be accepted as reason itself? Must we believe that he advanced a doctrine of unlimited absolutism — of the pope in the Church and of the emperor in the Empire? And that he anticipated a theory of sovereignty as the authority and powers of the ruler subject neither to the law nor to the laws?

One of the most difficult objectives of research into sacred traditions is to reveal their underlying origins. For early periods, about which we have scanty and sporadic information, the scholar must be content with indicating the earliest piece of historical evidence that connects a tradition with a specific site, though the reasons for this connection often remain unexplained. The tradition that locates the tomb of King David on Mount Zion, the southwestern hill of ancient Jerusalem, has often been considered one such case. Nevertheless this case seems to be exceptional. In this study I shall attempt to show that it is possible not only to indicate the connection between a site and a tradition, but also to explain the circumstances of the emergence of this tradition.

My aim in this paper is to study the relationship between love and pleasure as understood by the Franciscan masters Peter Aureol, William of Ockham, Walter Chatton, and Adam Wodeham. These masters have treated this relationship in their commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences, book 1, distinction 1. The standard subject matter of the first distinction of scholastic Sentences commentaries was the nature of beatific enjoyment (fruitio beatifica). The comparative study of these texts is important, because it sheds some light on the history of fourteenth-century scholastic philosophy of human psychology in general, and on the contribution of Franciscan writers to the philosophical and theological analysis of volition and emotions in particular.

Codex 485 (213) of the University Library of Erlangen contains an anonymous commentary, by questions, on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle commencing on fol. 47r and ending on fol. 80v. In 1930, M. Grabmann called attention to this commentary as one of the sources of the thesis that God cannot be the immediate source of human happiness — a thesis condemned in 1277 by Stephen Tempier along with 218 other ‘heretical’ doctrines. Professor Gaines Post of the University of Wisconsin had a photostatic copy made of the manuscript in question and Miss N. Koskenlinna, a former student of his, performed the painful task of its transliteration. The object of this article is the description and analysis of this unpublished, late thirteenthcentury exposition of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.

The use of moral stories or cautionary tales in sermons to illustrate and reinforce homiletic doctrine was widely accepted by medieval preachers. While diffusion of suitable narratives for this purpose was sometimes accomplished by oral means, such tales were more commonly transmitted by compendia or encyclopedias of didactic stories. These compilations were circulated throughout medieval Christendom for use as reference books by the homilist composing a sermon or series of sermons to be read by his colleagues or delivered from his pulpit.

The Spanish reconquest was a complex process, consisting of at least two aspects, the military seizure of Muslim territory and the occupation of that land. Although many historians prefer to regard only the military actions as constituting the Reconquista proper, it is possible that the process of resettlement exerted the greater long-term effect on Spanish society. From this point of view the reconquest can be seen as a centuries-long process of internal migration, in which the Christians continually pressed into the depopulated zones that the Muslims vainly attempted to maintain along their frontiers. Military successes or reversals could temporarily accelerate or arrest the process, but the constant tendency of at least some elements of Christian society to seek their fortune along the frontier was a force which the Muslims were unable in the long run to resist.

Reading the Poetics in light of Aristotle's most complete statements of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, this essay undertakes to demonstrate how and why Aristotle develops an art of poetry within the context of a science of ethics. It seeks to show, that is, how in direct response to Plato's epistemological and ethical objections to tragedy, Aristotle's argument for the preservation of the literary arts follows from a fundamental conviction that poetry shares not only its object of inquiry but also its method of inquiry with the ethical and legal sciences. Like moral philosophy or ethics, tragedy investigates human action. To this end, it relies on the mechanism of ‘fiction’ (πoíησις), which clearly emerges in the course of the Poetics as the literary counterpart to ‘equity’ in the disciplines of ethics and law. As logical constructs, both fiction and equity are designed to qualify ethical action by negotiating between universal propositions — the general ethical presuppositions of the poet's audience or the advocate's legal code — and particular circumstances — the details of the plot or the events of the individual legal case.

Little is known of the early history of the court of audientia litterarum contradictarum. Professor Barraclough has suggested that its origins must be sought in the 1150's and 1160's, when under the popes Eugenius III and Alexander III there was considerable development of judicial procedure by rescript. To begin a suit before papal judges, the plaintiff or his proctor produced a letter to the pope announcing the petition, stating the ‘libellus’ or charge, and beseeching him for the cause to be heard at Rome, or, more frequently, for a mandate to judges delegate. It is likely that the plaintiff would have informed the charged party of his action, and that by this time the defendant's proctor, too, would have been instructed in the matter and would be ready to appear at the papal court.

These Notes are the result of a protracted study in the course of which the Byzantine synapte has been examined in more than fifty manuscripts, each of which has again and again for this and other purposes been closely scrutinized. The text which precedes the Notes includes a distinctive —and, as far as I know, entirely new — feature, viz., a twofold recension of the synapte which is explained and justified in the Concluding Remarks following Note II. Immediately after the text itself and the brief comments which have appeared desirable or necessary, there is an Excursus on saints' names in the Τῆς παναγίας bidding at the very end of the synapte. This subject is part of a much larger one, viz., lists of saints' names in liturgical prayers. One thinks first of all of the list which appears in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon and of parallel lists in the East. It is interesting to note, however, that whereas the lengthened medieval lists failed to establish themselves permanently within the framework of the Anaphora in the East or of the Canon in the West, they did succeed in maintaining themselves in the East in certain prayers still found in the Euchology and Horologion.