The end of the fifteenth century witnessed the dissolution of the medieval kingdom of Georgia. The three kingdoms — of Georgia proper (Iberia= K'art'li), of Imeretia (Abasgia), and of Kakhetia — and the five sovereign principalities, into which that ancient and once powerful realm had found itself divided, were ill prepared now to face the onslaught of the Islamic imperialism of the Osmans and the Safawis or, finally, to prevent the nearest Christian empire, to which they had turned for aid, from absorbing them.

The following Latin version, hitherto unpublished, of the Byzantine Liturgies of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom was generously placed at my disposal by my confrère, the late lamented Dom André Wilmart, O.S.B., who about seventeen years ago discovered and transcribed it from a manuscript purchased at London in 1899 by the Bibliothèque Nationale: Nouv. Acq. lat. 1791 Since the manuscript was written in the second half of the twelfth century, this translation is—to put it roughly—at least as old as that of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (= X) made at Constantinople about 1180 by the Pisan interpreter, Leo Tuscus, or that of the Liturgy of St. Basil (= B) made shortly afterward by Nicholas of Otranto. But it is important to note at the outset that the present translation represents a considerably earlier redaction of the Liturgies than do the two aforesaid versions, for we have here, as in the earliest of our manuscripts, the Barberinum S. Marci (= BSM), and several others, the prayers of the celebrant only and a corresponding minimum of rubrics. Of special significance, moreover, are the two following facts: first, the precedence given to B, an arrangement found in comparatively few manuscripts, among them the oldest which we know; and secondly, the occurrence in this same Liturgy of ancient rubrics and of the ancient form of at least one exclamation of the deacon, which point to a very early recension as the original from which the translator worked. On the other hand, over against this ancient form stands a relatively modern text, for not only are certain prayers which appear in the most ancient manuscripts only, missing from this translation, but in those few prayers also in the tradition of which it is possible to distinguish an older from a more recent set of readings, it is the latter which are almost invariably found. Similarly, the indication of certain acclamations by the initial words only (an ancient trait) and the writing out of the ἐκΦωνήσ∊ις in full (a very late practice) constitute another combination of ancient and recent features. But to attempt on the basis of these characteristics to fix the date of either the original or the translation, is to face possibilities only, concerning which it would be useless to speculate.

The authenticity of the service book known to scholars as the Gregorian Sacramentary or simply the Gregorianum has long been a matter of discussion. From the mid-eighth century to the end of the ninth we find a strong external tradition assigning its authorship to St. Gregory the Great. Doubts on this point were first expressed by George Baron d'Eckhart in 1729, and the controversy flared up once more in 1890, when the traditional view was vigorously defended by Dom G. Morin.

The Somnium of John of Legnano, the great Bolognese lawyer of the fourteenth century, was first properly brought to the attention of scholars by G. W. Coopland in 1926. Professor Coopland's chief concern was with the relationship between this work and the much more famous Somnium Viridarii, composed about 1375 at the court of King Charles V of France, whose author made some substantial borrowings from John's slightly earlier work. Though he supplied a synopsis of its content, Coopland gave it as his opinion that John's work was not in itself of any great interest, apart from the section in it which is devoted to a defence of papal monarchy, a section which, as the author makes clear, incorporates into the Somnium a tract on this matter which he had composed previously. This probably is the most interesting part of John's much larger and more ambitious work, which seems to have been written in 1372, but our opinion is that the other sections have rather more in them to reward the reader than Coopland suggested. This is the justification for an attempt to describe the work in more detail than he did and to discuss briefly some parts of its content and arguments.

A Byzantinist today would not attempt to investigate any area of the Byzantine landscape without a thorough consideration of the hagiographic evidence. And yet, hagiography, which admittedly does not always make for entertainment, is not as well plowed a field as one might hope. We may point, by way of example, to the manuscript of the Vita Euthymii Sardensis, Bodleianus Laudianus Graecus 69, fol. 306v-324v, written by the monk Metrophanes. The text has been entirely ignored and neglected, although Krumbacher had noted some seventy years ago that it was easily accessible in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Of course, the neglect may be due to the unwarranted assumption that the text's value is meagre if not wholly negligible. And yet, Euthymius' personality should certainly have aroused the interest of historians.

L'Epitome in philosophiam fut publié pour la première fois par B. Hauréau, en 1859, conjointement au De contemplatione et eius speciebus en appendice à son ouvrage Hugues de Saint-Victor. Nouvel examen de l'édition de ses oeuvres. Mais la présentation n'était qu'une simple indication et ignorait apparat critique et historique aussi bien qu'étude du texte. Au demeurant, quatre manuscrits seulement — de Paris — étaient signalés, deux autres — de Douai et d'Oxford — devant être découverts ensuite. Ce sont ces six manuscrits que nous aurons à étudier: les quatre de Paris, trois de la Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS lat. 15.315, 14.506, 14.659, un de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS lat. 717; le manuscrit de Douai, MS lat. 366; le manuscrit d'Oxford, Balliol College, MS lat. 296, et nous nous demanderons comment se présente la question de l'authenticité hugonienne de l'Epitome et quelles sont les caractéristiques des manuscrits qui nous en présentent le texte.

In one of the very few essays in English on Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, Eleanor Shipley Duckett calls him a prince of the Church, a statesman, an administrator, a scholar who rises far above the other figures she surveys and who stands out in the company of Charles the Great and Pope Nicholas I in the historical records of the ninth century. His long life, from his birth in northern France in 806, his entry into the monastery of St. Denis in 814, his consecration as archbishop in 845, to his death in 882 at Epernay while fleeing from the Danish invasion, was one long series of combats calling for a variety of talents. He revealed a deep knowledge of canon law in his various ecclesiastical disputes with recalcitrant clergy and laity, an astute diplomatic talent in his attempts to knit together the rapidly unraveling unity of the empire, a broad but unoriginal scholarship in his theological controversies over predestination and the Trinity which brought him to grips with the leading thinkers of the Carolingian renaissance, especially the redoubtable Saxon Gottschalk, monk of Orbais. It is with this last controversy that this paper will be concerned.

In the latter part of the twelfth century, a significant change of emphasis occurred in the art of preaching, which in turn had a profound influence on the transmission of knowledge and moral values. Whereas, in an earlier era, preachers had addressed themselves largely to clerical audiences, at this time popular audiences came to receive greater attention. Parisian masters and doctors were in the vanguard of this influential movement whose ideal, the vita apostolica, became a rallying cry to those who sought to restore the Church and its clergy to an earlier purity.

El importante trabajo realizado durante los últimos decenios en el dominio de los textos médicos latinos y la renovada atención al estudio de las fuentes manuscritas han ido generando la convicción de que resulta imprescindible revisar un buen número de ediciones al uso, realizadas con medios limitados o con criterios ecdóticos hoy ampliamente superados. Tal retractación viene exigida de ordinario por el descubrimiento de nuevo material manuscrito, pero también por la peculiar orientación que en el pasado presidió no pocos trabajos de edición de textos médicos latinos, que interesaban más por su contenido que por su forma, o bien eran traídos a colación secundariamente, por su condición de testigos de un texto en otra lengua. Es la necesidad de reorientar esta perspectiva, situando el texto latino como objeto de estudio en sí mismo, la que subyace detrás del presente trabajo, que pretende corregir las deficiencias de un pequeño fragmento publicado hace algunos años por H. J. De Vriend dentro de un libro sobre el corpus de recetarios del anglosajón. El editor acompaña cada capítulo del texto anglosajón de su correspondiente paralelo latino, que transcribe a partir de un único manuscrito, dotándolo de una puntuación elemental.

The historical work of the Premonstratensian canon Robert of Auxerre († 1211) was one of the most influential of medieval chronicles. Vincent of Beauvais († 1264) borrowed heavily from it in Speculum historiale, the final section of his great encyclopedia. The content of the Auxerre chronicle, extant in its independent version in relatively few manuscripts, thus contributed to an essential element in the textual foundation of later medieval education. The shape of Robert's narrative, however, differed from that of Vincent's treatment of history. The canon of Auxerre wrote in an old genre and for a traditional end. His was the kind of monastic chronicle that had for centuries affirmed for Benedictine and reform congregations their connection to venerable tradition, and traced for them the workings of providence in time. Vincent's work, on the other hand, set the record of human experience alongside compendia about the divine and natural worlds. It thus represented the historiographical fulfillment of the thirteenth century's ambition to systematize knowledge.

An essoniatus de malo lecti is dispensed from appearing in court for a certain time, to wit, for a year. How is this time to be computed, if in its course there occurs the additional day of a leap-year? If e.g. the year, given to an essoinee, began on January 20th of a leap year, does the year end on the next 20th of January (so that the essoinee has a time of 366 days) or on the next 19th of January (so that the essoinee has a time of 365 days, as in a normal year)? Bracton discussed this question, on which there was a lively dispute among English lawyers of his time, in a long chapter of his treatise (fol. 359–360). Everybody who attempted to read this text unprepared, would soon push it aside in despair of finding any sense in this abstruse discussion. In fact Bracton's text has been spoilt by numerous ruthless interpolations which have rendered it entirely unintelligible. Such a text is of eminent value for everybody who is interested in the problem of the Bractonian text, for the process of deterioration is here more evident than elsewhere. Nevertheless nobody has hitherto tried to disentangle the ravelled skein and to reconstruct what Bracton actually wrote. The latest editor of the treatise, Professor Woodbine, has, according to his principle, abstained from emending what he believed to be the best text of our manuscripts. The inevitable result of this conservatism is, that the chapter is in his edition entirely unreadable just as in the older editions. At first sight it may seem hopeless to find a way through the jungle, but a minute and patient examination shows that the genuine Bractonian text may still be traced. We are fortunate enough to possess an unusually rich store of material for our inquiry, and by methodically using it we may confidently hope to reach our goal.

Ipsa autem, bonorum temporalium liberalissima ac spiritualium avida beneficiorum …

— 1293 charter of Oxford University, describing Ela Longespee

In 1293, the elderly and twice-widowed Ela Longespee, countess of Warwick, or someone acting on her behalf, gathered together eighteen charters that had been issued to her over the past dozen years and sent them to the bishop of Lincoln, to be confirmed and copied into a single roll. The original charters have long since vanished, but the enrolled copy survives in The National Archives at Kew. Its component documents, all of them detailed grants to Ela by religious institutions in the Oxford area, are highly unusual; even when compared to the few surviving parallels, they stand out for their specific content. The roll itself, comprising eighteen such documents in a private archive created for a thirteenth-century laywoman, is unique. And when it is examined along with other surviving evidence of Ela's religious activities, it provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the reciprocal nature of religious patronage at this time. What is especially unusual about Ela's case is that we know much more about what the religious promised to Ela than what she granted to them. Thus Ela Longespee's records tell us the side of the story that is seldom told when we look at records of religious patronage; they reveal the return that donors expected in the late thirteenth century, with increasing precision and urgency. Using a chronological framework, this essay will examine the surviving documents, tell the story of Ela's life, and explore the most interesting dimension of that story: her startlingly explicit reciprocal relationships with religious institutions.

This article is focused on Angelo Poliziano's general attitude to philosophy as a discipline and on his specific accounts of scholastic philosophy, found mainly in his four opening lectures to his courses on Aristotle's logic and ethics that were held in the Florentine Studium between 1490 and 1494, in the light of his overall exclusive classical approach. It shows, among other things, that philosophy was more important to Poliziano than common expressions such as “the humanist interest in philosophy” may suggest. Poliziano's important definition of history presented in his Panepistemon, together with other pieces of evidence, can reveal the moment in which disciplines associated with the “humanities” (in the modern sense of this term) began to be separated from the natural sciences — at a point just preceding the massive critique of Aristotelian science during the sixteenth century — through Poliziano's notion of a philosophical literature to which also the Aristotelian texts belong.

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

Through an Anglo-Norman case study, this article highlights the value of normative liturgical material for scholars interested in the role that saints’ cults played in the history and identity of religious communities. The records of Anglo-Saxon cults are largely the work of Anglo-Norman monks. Historians exploring why this was the case have therefore concentrated upon hagiographical texts about individual Anglo-Saxon saints composed in and for monastic communities in the post-Conquest period. This article shifts the focus away from the monastic to those secular clerical communities that did not commission specific accounts, and away from individual cults, to uncover the potential of historical martyrologies for showing how such secular communities remembered and understood their own past through the cult of saints. Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3518, is a copy of the martyrology by the ninth-century Frankish monk, Usuard of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, written in and for Exeter cathedral's canons in the mid-twelfth century. Through investigation of the context in which it was produced and how its contents were adapted to this locality, this article uncovers the various different layers of the past behind its compilation. It further suggests that this manuscript is based on a pre-Conquest model, pointing to the textual debt Anglo-Norman churchmen owed to their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.