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.

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.

In a recent article on the study of Boethian logical works during the Middle Ages, Osmund Lewry discusses the revival of logical studies at the end of the tenth century, focusing on the period after ca. 970 when Abbo of Fleury and Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) renewed the teaching and study of dialectical works, and when Notker Labeo translated some logical texts into German. To this small group of tenth-century scholars known to have been concerned with dialectic and philosophy may be added the name of Heriger, schoolmaster and abbot (990–1007) of the Belgian monastery of Lobbes. The present study begins with the identification of quotations by Heriger from dialectical and philosophical works, then discusses Heriger's use of dialectic in theological argumentation, and finally considers the influence of his philosophical teaching at Lobbes. Heriger's interest in dialectic is revealed by quotations in his Vita Remacli from Boethius' In Topica Ciceronis and Apuleius' Peri Hermeneias. These quotations are identified for the first time in the present study. The application of dialectical learning to theological questions, specifically his use of logical principles in his tract De corpore et sanguine domini (PL 139.179–88), indicates that Heriger's quotations from logical texts reflect more than bookish antiquarianism; the study of dialectic was useful to him in theological argumentation. The evidence of Heriger's philosophical pursuits provides the first clear indication that Lobbes was one of the important Lotharingian centers for philosophical studies.

The versicles, Salvum fac servum tuum, etc., which are written by another scribe after the Agnus Dei in Missal W 11 (fol. 12r) of the Walters Art Gallery of Baltimore, are a formula—the shorter and, as I believe, the, older of the two formulae still printed in the Monastic Breviary—for the blessing of the weekly reader prescribed in Chapter xxxviii of St. Benedict's —Regula Monasteriorum. Since St. Benedict directs that the reader is to ask for the blessing on Sunday ‘post Missas et Communionem,’ the insertion of the formula at this point, that is, after the Ordinarium Missae, as we call it to-day, is not surprising. It is found similarly placed in at least one other book, the Sacramentarium Fuldense saeculi X, in which it is preceded by a title, Oratio pro ebdomadario refectorii lectore. Besides this Fulda book and our Walters Missal, the text is found in several customaries and ordinals which will be mentioned below, but for its earliest occurrence we must go to the commentary on the Holy Rule composed before 774 by Paul the Deacon in the monastery on Monte Pedale near Civate in the diocese of Milan. Accordingly, it is found also in the commentary ascribed to Hildemar, an amplified recension of the work of the Lombard monk of the preceding century.

Le ms. H. 308 de l'É cole de Médecine àMontpellier contient une collection de textes patriotiques et conciliaires qui a livré plusieurs pièces de grande valeur. En 1656, le jésuite P. F. Chifflet en a tiré de très importants fragments de l'ouvrage perdu de Fulgence de Ruspe, Contra Fabianum. Il a également servi àSchwartz, avec un seul autre ms. de Paris, pour son édition d'une lettre de Jean II, déjà publiee par Sichard. Le même critique l'utilise aussi pour de nombreuses pièces des conciles de Chalcédoine et d'É phèse. En préface de son édition de la lettre de Jean II, il a donné une description du contenu, et il nous avertit qu'il l'a faite d'autant plus volontiers qu'il s'agit d'un genre d'ouvrage fort peu étudié. Je crois pouvoir apporter ici des indications précises sur l'origine de la collection.

One of the most memorable and hideous scenes in Njáls saga is the death of the apostate viking chief Bróðir. According to the account of the battle of Clontarf in the saga, after the Irish forces had won the victory most of Brian Boru's bodyguard left the king in order to pursue the survivors. Bróðir, who had been hiding in the woods near the battlefield, saw that the king was relatively unprotected, and took the opportunity to break through the line of men who were protecting King Brian and kill him.

“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.

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?

Europe was christened in the waters of Roman Christianity. Creeds, liturgies, hierarchies, saints, and ascetic practices favored in later imperial Rome washed over the European peoples in successive centuries and marked their Christianity indelibly. The splendor of that imperial era, rescued from facile notions of a declining Rome, has come to historical life in a distinct epoch called “late antiquity” (300–650). Its monuments testify to an ethos at once classical and spiritual. Late antique Christians instinctively took from Roman surroundings all that suited their new religious ends, from the architectural form given churches to the rhetoric and philosophy that mediated sermons and theologies. This Roman imprint passed to European Christians as a sacred legacy: the basilica as a church rather than a civic hall, the metropolitan as a clerical rather than a civic official, Rome as the city of Saint Peter rather than the emperor, the Empire as destined for Christ's birth as much as Augustus's triumphs. Medieval believers, seeking to re-create the church of first-century Jerusalem, fixed repeatedly upon exemplars from late antique Rome: the teachings of Augustine, the Bible of Jerome, the philosophical theology of Boethius, the laws of Leo, the Rule of Benedict, the prayers ascribed to Gregory. Even the story of Rome's religious transformation entered into the self-understanding of medieval and modern Europeans, the conversion narrative joined to biblical history with its outcome treated as providential and decisive.

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.

In the Old English poem Andreas, the narrative begins with the imprisonment and suffering of Matthew, who is blinded and forced to drink a magic potion which is intended to reduce him to bestiality. This drink, which literarily is directly descended from Circe's potion, fails to be effective in this case, and Matthew prays to God for help in his affliction. God responds directly and tells Matthew that He will bring help. God's help is mediated by the apostle Andrew, and immediately before God summons Andrew He is apostrophized in the following passage:

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.

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.

The popular portrayal of John Wyclif (d. 1384) is that of the inflexible reformer whose views of the Church were driven by a strict determinism that divided humanity into two eternally fixed categories of the predestined and the damned. In point of fact, however, Wyclif's understanding of salvation is quite nuanced and well worth careful study. It may be surprising to find that Wyclif's soteriology has not received a thoroughgoing analysis, one that would pull together the many facets involved in medieval conceptions of the salvific process. Instead, one finds some insightful, but abbreviated, analyses that tend to focus more on specific aspects, rather than offering a comprehensive view. The best sources are Lechler, Robson, and Kenny, all three of whom offer valuable appraisals. Actually, Lechler comes the closest to a broad view within his study of Wyclif, but well over a century has passed since it was first published. Needless to say, there has been an enormous amount of research done on late medieval thought since then, research that enables us to situate Wyclif more thoroughly within the discussions of his day. Even Robson's work is more than forty years old by now. And, while Kenny's treatment is comparatively recent at twenty years old, he tackles the subject only as part of a more strictly philosophical discussion of necessity and contingency. We will, of course, consider the views of each of these scholars in the course of this essay, the purpose of which is to offer a full appraisal of Wyclif's soteriology in its many facets. This means that we will first discuss the related questions of divine will and human freedom, and their impact upon his soteriology. Then we will examine his views on sin, grace, merit, justification, faith, and predestination, all within the larger medieval context. What we should find is that Wyclif's soteriology makes quite a lot of room for human free will even as he insists on the leading role of divine grace in all good works. Futhermore, Wyclif will emerge as a subtle thinker who most often presents a God who is at once just and merciful, extending grace and the possibility of salvation to all.

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.