The miracle of the Apostle of Ireland leading to the expulsion of noxious reptiles from the Emerald Isle is, if not one of the best attested, at least one of the most widely known. In a brief study published some time ago, the writer pointed out that similar miracles are credited to quite a number of other holy men, the scene of their actions being, significantly enough, the Channel Islands and some islands on the French Riviera. The list might be considerably extended.

Some time ago, while I was working on the life of William Lily, the Grammarian, my attention was directed to the state of letters and learning in the Rhodes of early Renaissance times. George Lily, William's son, tells us that his father, when a young man, stayed at Rhodes a certain length of time for the sake of letters, and that he learned there the elements of Greek and Latin. Objection may be made to the second part of this statement: since the senior Lily already had his B.A. from Oxford when he began his foreign travels, presumably he had learned there a fair amount of Latin, and quite possibly some Greek; the choice of the word “elements” was surely not a happy one. However, on the face of things, there would seem to be no good reason for doubting the main assertion: that William Lily went to Rhodes “for the sake of letters.” Later biographers of Lily incorporate George's statement in their own accounts, some of them adding a detail or two of their own. But we must wait until the eighteenth century before we are given a reason for believing in any noteworthy culture in Renaissance Rhodes. Philip Morant, in the article which he wrote on Lily for the Biographica Britannica, says: “At his [Lily's] return from thence [Jerusalem], he studied some time at Rhodes; where, after the taking of Constantinople, several learned men had taken refuge.” Bliss's edition of Anthony à Wood carries this statement about the learned men, quoting the Biographica Britannica as source. Morant, although he did take occasion to drive home the point in correcting an earlier biographer, Thomas Fuller, had offered no support for his assertion.

In modern society, enmeshed with confrontations involving the individual, military service and the state, historians are often inclined to make comparisons with the distant past which offer relief from the pressures of contemporary history. Regarding military service, the Middle Ages are occasionally suggested as an age when combat was sporadic, when only the small feudal aristocracy encountered a martial obligation, and when the remainder of society could concentrate on the other burdens of life, free of the paraphernalia of war, hot or cold. As with many romantic generalizations concerning the period, the comparative bliss of the medieval non-combatant is open to question. Many would note, however, that the feudal classes did possess a monopoly on warfare for several centuries in parts of Continental Europe, and would tend to place all discussion of military institutions within a feudal context.

Die neue Liste der von Simon von Bisignano in seiner Summa zitierten Extravaganten, welche T. P. McLaughlin in den Medieval Studies 20 (1958) 167–176 veröffentlicht hat, gibt die Möglichkeit, die Dekretalensammlung, welche Simon benutzt hat, mit ziemlicher Sicherheit zu bestimmen. Wenn sich dabei die Vermutung auf eine Sammlung der ‘italienischen Gruppe' der Primitiven vor 1Comp. richtete, so lag das nach dem, was J. Juncker in seiner grundlegenden Abhandlung über die coll. Berolinensis ausgeführt hatte, von vornherein rein nahe. Aber als Juncker die Ber. als älteste und primitivste Sammlung in die Literaturgeschichte der kanonistischen Quellen einführte, hatte er von der Existenz weiterer, teils noch altertümlicher, teils umfangreicherer Sammlungen, die sich mit der Ber. zu einer Familie oder Gruppe zusammenfassen lassen, noch keine Kenntnis. Weitgehende Übereinstimmung im mitgeteilten Material, Gleichlauf in der Reihenfolge der einzelnen Stücke auf kürzere oder längere Strecken, textkritische Einzelheiten berechtigen methodisch zu dieser Gruppierung; ihr Wachstum von Sammlung zu Sammlung ist kein Gegenargument angesichts der rechtsschöpferischen Tätigkeit der Kurie, welche in Schule und Kirchenverwaltung gleichermassen das Bedürfnis wacherhielt, die jeweils neueste und vollständigste Sammlung zur Hand zu haben. Diese Entwicklung innerhalb der Gruppe kann erst durch die ausführliche Analyse jeder einzelnen Sammlung sichtbar gemacht werden; für den Nachweis, dass zu fast allen zu der von McLaughlin nachgewiesenen Dekretalen die Texte in den Sammlungen der italienischen Gruppe zu finden sind, wird die Zusammenstellung im Anhang genügen. Da aber vier von fünf in Frage kommenden Sammlungen kaum mehr als dem Namen nach, bekannt sind, müssen über sie einige Bemerkungen vorausgeschickt werden.

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in his Diatessaron — as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.

The Prague Sacramentary is the only complete example of this important early-medieval liturgical book to survive from eighth-century Bavaria. But, as the name implies, its present home is in the Czech Republic. The manuscript (Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituli, O. LXXXIII) was acquired in 1776 for the old metropolitan chapter library in Prague from a Czech private library, and nothing certain is known about its earlier location. That volume contains three works: the Sacramentary itself (fols. 1–120) together with an abridged lectionary (121–30), to which an incomplete penitential (131–45) in a different hand was added at an early date, almost certainly before autumn, 792. The page size is 247 × 165 mm (9.75 × 6.5 inches), and the gatherings of the volume vary between three and five sheets with four sheets predominating. The first 84 folios are written in a single column of 21 lines across the entire page, but folios 85–120 are written in two columns also of 21 lines each with marginal bounding lines drawn in an arrangement that is characteristic of Bavarian scriptoria in the Carolingian period. Four folios are now missing from the Sacramentary, three from the lectionary, and two from the penitential.

Paulinus of Nola (ca. 355–431)—the wealthy aristocrat from Aquitaine and once governor of Campania who converted to asceticism, sold his and his wife's property, went to Nola to live as a monk at St. Felix's shrine, and was eventually elected bishop of Nola—is remembered not so much for any single great achievement as for a number of smaller ones. His contemporaries admired his asceticism, and he is counted among the earliest Christian Latin poets. His descriptions of the buildings at Nola are important to Christian archaeology, and he was known to many Latin fathers, including Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. Of his works, about fifty letters and thirty poems are extant. Paulinus is also known through other writers, both contemporary and later; and what follows is an attempt to trace him in the literary tradition from his own day through to the Carolingian age.

Modern critics usually read the vision of Dryhthelm as an account of a man frightened into penitential asceticism even though Bede explains that Dryhthelm lived out his days in the desire for heaven, not fear of punishment. While fear is an important part of Dryhthelm's conversion, Bede depicts the process according to the doctrine of compunction as it is received from Gregory the Great, who presents compunction as a process by which fear of punishment yields to love and the desire for heaven. Reading the conversion of Dryhthelm as a process of Gregorian compunction reveals both Bede's fundamental optimism about the vision Dryhthelm has seen and a spirituality in the text that is more nuanced and positive than the fire and ice that figure so prominently in it. Proceeding from these observations, the paper argues that the celestial topography of Dryhthelm's vision is a spiritual topography — a map of personal and emotional progress through compunction, as understood by Gregory the Great and received by Bede, and only incidentally a map of celestial regions deemed logically necessary by later theologians. These conclusions complicate hellfire and brimstone readings of this and other Anglo-Saxon texts about judgment and penance, and they call for nuanced readings of compunction as a complex and productive experience.

This article offers a new perspective on the anonymous Liber beati et laudabilis viri Gregorii. The oldest extant life of Pope Gregory the Great, the Liber was composed at the double monastery of Strænæshalch, conventionally known as Whitby, under Abbess Ælfflæd probably between ca. 704 and 714. A principal concern of my article is the function, within the Liber, of its report of Gregory's encounter with a group of Deiran Angles in Rome, and that story's relation to the emphasis throughout the Liber on orality: the transmission of knowledge miraculously from heaven and through earthly channels by means of speech and other sounds. The Liber survives in an early ninth-century redaction, part of St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 567 (pp. 75–110). After discussing some issues that pertain to the modern edition and translation made by Bertram Colgrave from this manuscript, I compare the legend of Gregory and the Deirans in the Liber with the version in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. I then review the larger hagiographical narrative in which the Whitby author frames this episode, and I examine the story and other distinctive thematic as well as stylistic aspects of the Liber in the light of the following circumstances: seventh- to eighth-century regional developments that affected Whitby; conditions of teaching at this monastery, a major early English educational center; the documented interest at Whitby under Ælfflæd, as under her predecessor Hild, in heaven-inspired or miraculous forms of oratory; and liturgy and commemoration of the dead. Of interest for analyzing all these topics, but especially the last two mentioned, is Whitby's status as a female-led institution.

The twentieth century witnessed an efflorescence of interest in medieval exegesis, sparked by scholars across a wide spectrum of intellectual, methodological, and confessional commitments. Thanks in large measure to the work of Beryl Smalley (1905–1984) and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), to name only two major exponents, the modern study of medieval exegesis achieved a depth and significance that fittingly complements the attention earlier generations had paid to scholastic theology.

The Collectio ex opusculis sancti Augustini in epistulas Pauli apostoli is an exegetical commentary on the Pauline letters that consists of 457 fragments from the works of Augustine of Hippo. The Collectio was compiled by the Northumbrian scholar Beda Venerabilis (672/73–735), whose biblical commentaries heavily rely on patristic exegesis and theology, and, as such, function as an important mediator between patristic and medieval exegesis and theology. Though many scholars have stressed the importance of the Collectio for the study of the transmission and reception of Augustine's writings and thinking in Anglo-Saxon England, the commentary has never been edited nor have its contents been thoroughly studied. The following contribution offers the first detailed study of the Collectio’s contents by analysing the ways in which Bede presents Augustine's Pauline exegesis in his own commentary on Paul's letters. Specifically, this article will study Bede's compilation methods by means of a close analysis of one of the Collectio’s fragments, fr. 315, which offers an exegetical commentary of Eph. 3:17–18. By studying the textual channels through which Bede had access to Augustine's writings as well as by considering other passages in Bede's biblical commentaries that discuss Eph. 3:17–18, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how Bede uses, adapts, and presents Augustine's exegesis of this pericope.

When Christian Friedrich Kling published Berthold des Franziskaners deutsche Predigten in 1824, he opened the study of the great thirteenth-century preacher to theologians, historians, and Germanists alike. Although Berthold had never been completely forgotten, was his fame rather than his actual sermons that were recorded by poet and chronicler. The sermons themselves remained, as most of them do still today, in manuscripts accessible to only a few scholars.

The early expansion of Islam led in time to widespread conversions of Christians in conquered territories. In the later eleventh century, however, western Christendom was in turn launching offensives against Islam on several fronts. Territorial gains were made in various Mediterranean regions and, although by the end of the thirteenth century the Holy Land had been lost again, Sicily remained in Christian hands, and in the second half of the thirteenth century in the Iberian peninsula only Granada remained under Muslim control: the whole peninsula was under Christian rule before the end of the fifteenth century. This expansion was accompanied, especially in the thirteenth century, by attempts to convert Muslims and other non-Christians. Yet in the period from the late eleventh until the later fifteenth century some western Christians converted to Islam. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the situations that prompted the adoption of Islam, and the reasons for such conversions, although the evidence is usually insufficient to indicate exactly why a particular Christian became a Muslim: the preconceived ideas voiced in western sources about forced conversions can be misleading and, although a crude distinction might be made between conversions from conviction and those based on worldly considerations, motives did not necessarily always fit neatly into just one of these two categories. But obviously not all converts would have had an equal understanding of the nature of Islamic beliefs and practices. The response of western ecclesiastical and secular authorities to renegades will also be considered. Further conversions of Christian peoples who had already for centuries been living under Muslim rule will not be examined, but only the adoption of Islam by those whose origins lay in western Christian countries or who were normally resident in these, and by westerners whose lands were newly conquered by Muslim powers after the eleventh century; and the focus will be mainly, though not exclusively, on the crusader states and the Iberian peninsula.

The discovery of a copy (in Lincoln MS 230) of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Sentences in three books (starting with the hexameral discussion that follows the treatise on the angels in the four-book version edited by Brady) makes possible for the first time investigating the development of the Lombard's theological teaching during his Parisian teaching career and the fortuna of that teaching outside of Paris. The fact that the Lombard began his early-career lectures on the Sentences in precisely the same place as he began his lectures on Genesis means that all of his teaching originated with Scripture. Moreover, the fact that Lincoln MS 230 is one of many early copies of the Lombard's Parisian teaching found in English cathedral libraries — Lincoln's Cathedral Library has another manuscript containing another copy of the Sentences, Lincoln MS 31, this one on four books, almost certainly copied within the Lombard's lifetime — has revealed the inadequacy of Brady's edition for scholarly understanding of the Lombard's career and teaching. Until now, no scholar paid much attention to the fact that Brady's choice of manuscripts was largely arbitrary and that his edition reflected the state of the Lombard's text around the time of Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus this discovery makes clear that the Sentences, like Gratian's Decretum and Comestor's History, developed over time. The Sentences were not, as so long assumed, a book written by the Lombard late in his career but rather the product of lectures delivered over the course of his career. The discovery of a treasure trove of English manuscripts preserving the Lombard's earliest extant Parisian teaching will enable scholars for the first time to trace the origins and development of the institutional practices of the cathedral school of Paris right up to the time of its transformation into the University of Paris.

This article investigates how and why medieval ecclesiastical writers thought and wrote about experiences of grief in human history. It examines the works of three late twelfth-century Latin writers from England: a foundation history of Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales's autobiographical and travel writing alongside his De principis instructione. Drawing on biblical, literary, theological, and iconographic models for grief and suffering in the western Christian tradition, the article situates these works in the exegetical and philosophical ideas they shared, and explains what is original and significant about their approaches to each instance of grief. It argues that the central problem these writers pondered in their narratives was the relationship between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving, they thought, had three key qualities: it impelled a desire to act; it could not be meaningfully measured; and it persisted in time. In prioritizing the experience of grief over its function, meaning, or morality, these writers considered the emotion rational, natural, and honest. The value these writers placed on human family or family-like relationships provides the context for understanding their priorities in thinking about responses to loss. Interest in grief's endurance, rather than its resolution in consolation, has been understood as more typical of secular, not sacred, thought. By showing how these writers’ ideas about grief's nature lived alongside and within other ideas of Christian thought, this article illuminates a greater range of medieval ecclesiastical ideas about the dignity of human history and emotion.

Kingship has always been conceived to be either the totality of royal functions or the art and science of discharging them well. If we attempt to narrow down specifically medieval kingship a bit more, we find that its conception had more to do with the monarch's will and his faith in the right things, while conversely it had a shade less to do with his knowledge than did ancient and early modern kingship; however, there is every reason to minimize this distinction, since medieval kings were very well supposed to be wise, or well advised on pertinent matters, or, preferably, both. The total being of the medieval king was so nearly identical with the royal office that in the Middle Ages the question ‘What are the functions of the king?’ is really the more simple question ‘Who is the king?’ If the man looked at is a true king, his functions — his practice of kingship — will follow as a matter of course.