This article identifies, details, and contextualizes three stages in the development of the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots in liturgical books produced for bishops in England from 900 to 1200. It shows how these rites, through the prayers recited, insignia bestowed, chants sung, and bodily gestures performed, sought to articulate and impress the normative ideals of monastic leadership on those who were elected to exercise it and how liturgists variously altered these rites in response to changing ecclesiastical pressures. Most significantly, for much of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots were the same, but, over the course of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the rites were split along gender lines with the dissemination, adoption, and adaptation of the ordines found in episcopal books affiliated with the tradition commonly identified by scholars as the Pontifical Romano-Germanique. In sharp contrast to their predecessors, the new rites envisioned dramatically different spiritual and temporal authorities for abbesses and abbots, clearly subordinating the former's office to the latter's by thoroughly feminizing its exemplary form. Yet, as close study of the material remains from communities of women religious during this period reveals, the consecration rite for abbesses was limited in its effect on how they actually fashioned and displayed their own authorities.

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.

The convent of sisters of the Order of St. Damian and St. Clare of Söflingen, initially established just outside the city of Ulm in what is today the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, moved to the village of Söflingen, slightly west of its first home, sometime in the early 1250s, and survived there until 1814 when it was finally dissolved. During the centuries of activity, the convent maintained a large archive of documents including charters, privileges, and other letters. The history of the foundation was already discussed in 1488 in the work of a local Dominican, Felix Fabri. But the modern historian responsible for cataloging much of the extant documentation was Max Miller (1901–1973). Miller, a Catholic priest and the director of the Staatsarchiv Stuttgart from 1951 until his retirement in 1967, produced a register of the Söflingen documents starting with the earliest land donations and continuing to 1550. He organized and numbered all of them according to date and included brief descriptions and abbreviated notes concerning their location in his register. It is still used as the finding tool, or Findbuch, for Söflingen's documents at the state archive in Ludwigsburg, and Miller's numbering system gives most items their current call number. Many of the items he listed can be found at the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg as well.

Vorarbeiten zur Erarbeitung einer Problemgeschichte der arabischen Philosophie beschränkten sich bisher auf den Bereich der arabisch schreibenden Logiker und Philosophen im engeren Sinn. Einen maßgeblichen Beitrag liefern Untersuchungen zur Terminologie der griechisch-arabischen und syrisch-arabischen übersetzungsliteratur. Jedoch wurde bisher kein Versuch unternommen, die islamische Theologie (kālm) für die Problemgeschichte der arabischen Philosophie heranzuziehen. Skeptisch war man, was umgekehrt die Verifizierung von Einflüssen griechischer Logik und Philosophie auf die frühe islamische Theologie betrifft.

The development of tax revenues into an important source of royal income was an important event in fourteenth century French history. The military successes of Charles V were based on large standing forces paid for by tax revenues. Under Charles VI, who as a minor and later as a lunatic was incapable of ruling for most of his reign, the struggle of the Valois princes for control of royal tax revenues brought the kingdom to civil war and, ultimately, to the brink of foreign conquest. Little is known, however, about the tax revenues of the period, and few records survive to guide historians who try to estimate the income from taxation of Charles V and Charles VI. The full impact of the establishment of taxation on French politics has, therefore, been difficult to assess.

A passing reference to pagan gods in the preface to the Merovingian Vita Landiberti inspired a number of poetic elaborations in the reworkings of the Life of St. Lambert during the late Carolingian period. These include the opening chapters of the Carmen de Sancto Landberto, which deal exclusively with pagan myths; the Versus in Laude Beati Landberti; and passages in the Vita Landberti of Stephen, Bishop of Liege (901–920). This paper is concerned primarily with the first two of these reworkings, which contain the more elaborate treatments of pagan mythology. The inspiration for the inclusion of these passages, as well as the sources for their information about the pagan gods, form a curious chapter in the survival and transformation of the pagan gods in medieval Latin literature.

In a recent issue of Traditio, Sister M. Teresa Brady demonstrates clearly that the late fourteenth-century devotional work The Pore Caitif, which she is confident is wholly orthodox, has made extensive use of some of the material produced in the well-organized and well-financed centers of Lollardy which Anne Hudson has shown to have been active at the time. Her demonstration starts with, and is clearest for, the Glossed Gospels, a series of commentaries on the four Gospels consisting entirely of translations from the works of standard authorities, mostly patristic, and based on the Catena Aurea, but including also quotations from authors more nearly contemporary, such as Grosseteste, John of Abbeville, FitzRalph, and William Peraldus. In establishing so clearly the use of the Glossed Gospels (hereafter GG) Sister Teresa claims justly to have found the first stone in the metaphorical arch which I once suggested should link Bible translation and tract production, though her tracts are orthodox, not the Lollard ones the metaphor envisaged.

Historians of philosophy have often discussed Aquinas's view of human knowledge as it appears in the first part of the Summa theologiae. They have observed that he represents a more philosophical view than the Augustinian account of divine illumination. Yet little attention has been paid to the relation between this discussion of human knowledge and the account of Christ's knowledge in the third part of the Summa theologiae. One reason for this neglect is that scholarship is often practiced within the spheres of intellectual inquiry that were framed during the modern period. We ignore issues present in primary texts in order to construct proof texts that respond to present-day philosophical interests. In pursuit of questions having to do with epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, rarely do historians or philosophers attempt to unravel the historical and theological context of specific texts. In regard to human knowledge, rarely do we read beyond questions 84 through 86 on the human knowledge of material objects, and even more rarely do we consider what Aquinas has to say about the knowledge of Christ. Rather, we treat questions on the human knowledge of material things as if they concerned issues raised today in epistemology or philosophy of mind.

In his Quaestiones et responsiones (PG 89.524d–525b) Anastasius Sinaita tells a story about three magi, Apollonius of Tyana, Julianus, and Apuleius, a story which he says is found ἐν τοῖς τῶν ἐϱχαιοτέϱων ἐνδϱῶν διηγήμασι. When Rome was suffering from a plague, the emperor Domitian summoned the three magi to the city and asked for their help. Apuleius told the emperor that he could put an end to the plague in a third of the city within fifteen days. Apollonius claimed that he could perform the same feat in another third of the city within only ten days. But Julianus, objecting that the plague would destroy the city before fifteen days could pass, put an end to it immediately in the remaining third of the city. Domitian then asked Julianus to free the other two-thirds of Rome from the plague, and he quickly did so.

“Aτη was an important concept for Aeschylus. A merely numerical comparison of the passages in which ἄτη appears in pre-Aeschylean authors with the number of such Aeschylean passages makes this clear. In what remains to us of Greek literature from Homer to Pindar ἄτη occurs fifty times. In the seven extant plays of Aeschylus the word occurs with certainty forty-eight times. Thus, in the work of one author whose career spans the first four decades of the fifth century ἄτη is employed approximately as often as it had been in the remaining literary tradition of the previous three centuries.

At a certain moment in his life Ramon Llull became convinced that if his great projects were ever to be realized, he would have to gain the support of the leading rulers of Christendom. The Crown of Aragon was not enough. God had revealed to him a universal Art for the conversion of infidels, a paradigm of all knowledge, a general method for contemplation, and Llull naturally deemed it vital that this revelation should become known throughout the world. Some thirteen years after his illumination, Llull decided to go to Paris, to address the most powerful monarch in Europe and defend his ideas before the most prestigious university in the western world.

Henry Ill's absolutist pretensions made his conduct of English foreign affairs almost as personal as his domestic policy. But since the heir of John Lackland was chronically dependent on others for ideas, there remain the questions as to (1) how much of the mercurial king's policy was his own or that of his advisers and (2) whether Henry selected his counsellors from that class of administrative clerks who were ‘most dangerous to the welfare of the state’ because they encouraged their master's foreign adventures. Or, were these men, as the executors of the king's personal designs, committed to carry out a course of action ‘dramatically opposite to the interests of the [Angevin] kingdom’ as interpreted by the barons of the realm?

The scanty remains of Hilary's Liber lujmnorumr, represented by the three hymns which have come down to us in the Arezzo manuscript. provide us with our earliest glimpse into Latin hymnody. Since these hymns have been found in no other manuscript, all attempts to provide a correct text owe a good deal to the editor's ingenuity. This study tries to analyze the metrical structure of the first of the three hymns and to offer a few emendations that seem required by the structure.

The Gregorian reform of the eleventh century mounted a massive attack on lay control over churches and church appointments, yet the degree to which this attack succeeded in attaining its objectives varied from country to country. Local conditions and personalities were important in determining the outcome of the struggle over investiture and other related questions, but neither side achieved a complete victory, because the final agreements between clerical and lay leaders were a compromise which produced the usual mixture of satisfaction and disappointment. The church gained the most substantial victory, for the smothering stranglehold of the laity over the church and churchmen was broken, nevermore to be restored in the Middle Ages. Increased spiritual freedom for the church in subsequent centuries resulted from the struggle of the mid-eleventh century. Nevertheless, the church had not broken completely from its close ties with the world of feudalism. If bishoprics, abbeys, and parish churches were not feudal possessions of kings and nobles, laymen still retained many rights reminiscent of the earlier days when laymen claimed a proprietary right over the churches in their areas. The purpose of this paper is to consider one of these remnants of earlier days: the right of regalia I will examine the right of regalia, temporal and spiritual, together with some related institutions during the reigns of St. Louis and Philip III of France.

Many thinkers, Thomists especially, view the real distinction between being and essence as one of the most important topics in philosophy. It is certainly one of the most intriguing. The philosophical development of this doctrine has thus been amply dealt with by historians of philosophy. The extent to which William of Auvergne has contributed to such development has, however, been a matter of considerable disagreement. In fact, scholars differ radically in their interpretations of William's distinction between being and essence. In this article, I shall attempt to make as clear as possible William's understanding of the distinction between being and essence. Specifically, I shall try to answer the question of whether or not he holds a real distinction between being and essence. To do so, I shall look closely at certain texts of William that are relevant to the question. I shall also provide a brief account of some of the more important and representative commentaries on William's understanding of this distinction.

Hymnological research has reached a very crucial stage during the past fourteen or fifteen years. The steady flow of publications in this field has never really stopped since the middle of the nineteenth century, which saw several attempts to make hymnological material scattered in medieval manuscripts accessible to hymnologists and philologists alike. Nineteenth-century hymnodists had little idea of the riches and depth of medieval Latin hymnody, and the impasse caused by their ‘misconceptions’ and preconceived ideas is still reflected in the erroneous interpretation and improper handling of many Latin hymns by early editors and hymnodists. Of the early editions of medieval Latin hymns there are only two (those of Daniel and Mone)1 that still have source value; most of the others have merely historical significance or offer manuscript readings not adequately evaluated by subsequent editors.

La tradition manuscrite des homélies Πɛϱὶ ὰϰατλᾐπτoν est particulièrement riche. C'est une preuve de l'intérět durable qu'elles ont suscité à travers les siècles. Mais cette richesse pose des problèmes difficiles à résoudre. Il faut, de toute nécessité, chercher des principes de classification qui aident à mettre un peu d'ordre parmi ces nombreux témoins.