The saying of Terentianus Maurus, habent sua fata libelli, may well be applied to the Latin text here edited. Out of my studies of Berthold of Zwiefalten's Chronicle grew my thesis for the Ph. D. degree of the University of Tübingen, Studien zur Chronik Bertholds von Zwiefalten, published in Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 51 (1933) 83–101 and 183–195. The subsequent work on the Chronicle and the relevant studies that appeared between 1933 and 1938 are described below in the Introduction. The political developments in Germany prevented me from bringing out the planned edition of the reconstructed Chronicle, and compelled me to be satisfied with the presentation in the Revue Bénédictine 50 (1938) 141–145, of the synopsis of my reconstruction with the first edition of 1852 in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In 1946–47 my fortune led me to Cornell University where the work in its present form was written. When preparing in 1953 the MS for the printer, I noticed in Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter I (Weimar 1952) 29 note 106, the edition by Erich König and Karl Otto Müller, Die Zwiefalter Chroniken Ortliebs und Bertholds (Schwäbische Chroniken der Stauferzeit 2; Stuttgart-Berlin 1941). Upon inquiry the W. Kohlhammer Verlag at Stuttgart informed me that their stock of the book had been destroyed during the war. Professor Dr. P. Gehring of the University Library at Tübingen then kindly mailed the surviving library copy of the book to Ithaca, New York, in January 1955. The examination of both Chronicles plainly showed me,

a) that the text of Berthold's Chronicle edited by Erich König is basically the text of my first reconstruction, the MS of which I had turned over to E. König before I left Germany in August 1939, and

b) that the Introduction to Berthold by Karl Otto Müller, also his re-evaluation of Ortlieb, often follow in word and contents my Tübingen Ph. D. Thesis of 1932.

1. —Wir wissen, dass sich die Lehre der Kirche bezüglich des Paulinischen Privilegs (= P.Pr.) um 1140 gefestigt hatte und demselben die Kraft zuschrieb, das Band der Naturehe zu lösen. Nach 1234 dagegen tritt schon Göffredus von Trano mit seiner Summa super rubricis decretalium (1241-1243) als ausdrücklicher Zeuge der Interpellation auf:

Readers of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae will recall the striking passage in 8.7 (Faral 125) in which Aur-elius, after the great victory over Hengist and the Saxons, calls together his leaders to decide what to do about the captive Hengist. Whereupon Eldad, Bishop of Gloucester, addresses Aurelius as follows:

Unlike Samuel, Bishop Eldad does not hew Hengist in pieces before the Lord; instead the Saxon is decapitated by the Bishop's brother, Eldol (who was not a churchman), and in fact is given a decent burial by Aurelius, who was, Geoffrey tells us, a moderate (‘ modestus’) individual. Yet it is almost beyond question that Geoffrey's whole account of the death of Hengist (for which there is no hint in his sources) is modeled on the biblical story of Samuel and Agag.

Even though Chaucer the Pilgrim refers to ‘the povre Persoun of a toun’ as a ‘lerned man, a clerk,’ it is still surprising to hear the humble Parson discourse at length on one of the fine points of canon law. And yet, despite his own protestation of ignorance, the Parson devotes sixteen lines (654–79) of his discussion of Wrath to distinguishing between the many species and sub-species of corporeal and spiritual homicide. Upon closer examination of the passage itself, we are more inclined to take the Parson at his word. Where we are promised ‘foure maneres’ of homicide in deed, we get only three, while in place of the anticipated fourth category we find a discussion of the various forms of infanticide, contraception, and abortion. Although Chaucer rightly identifies these as types of homicide, they hardly comprise a major classification to rank alongside the other three ‘maneres.’ Further evidence of confusion in the passage is a textual problem, which involves the number of species of spiritual homicide. The manuscripts read, ‘spiritueel manslaughtre is in vj thynges’ (545) when, in fact, only three are named.

Medieval missals that hand on the liturgical tradition of earlier centuries, but record little or nothing that is really new, do not as a rule merit publication of their entire text. Yet it is instructive to study them for the light they shed on the gradual formation of the full missal, the history of plain chant, the diffusion of feasts and prayers, the vicissitudes of the mixed types of sacramentaries and missals, and the local or regional characteristics of the medieval liturgy, which continued to abound until the missal of Pope Pius V came into general use.

In the Middle English Pearl, the maiden's explanation of heavenly equality through the Parable of the Vineyard (497–588) is followed by a fresh objection of the dreamer:

The origin of the actual Roman Canon missae, despite the labors of prominent scholars in the field of Liturgy, remains a secret. We agree with Dom Bernard Botte who declares in regard to questions concerning the Roman Canon:

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.

The compiler of the fourteenth-century Middle English manual of popular religious instruction known as The Pore Caitif was somewhat erratic in his acknowledgment of the sources from which he drew the various sections of his fourteen tracts. Although he excerpted passages from Rolle's Encomium nominis Jesu, Emendatio vitae, and Form of Living, he never mentioned Rolle by name or recorded the titles of the books. In one tract, only, ‘Of Vertuous Patience,’ did he state: ‘Al ϸis sentence seiϸ a seynt in his boke’ (fol. 85r). I have dealt elsewhere with the four Pore Caitif tracts which draw on Rolle's Emendatio vitae. In this paper, I will examine the nature and extent of the indebtedness to The Form of Living.

Das Seminar wurde im Wintersemester 1969/70 von den Professoren Raymund Kottje, Peter Landau, Kurt Reindel an der Universität Regensburg veranstaltet. Es wurde von etwa zwanzig Teilnehmern besucht, die in der Mehrzahl Historiker waren, unter denen sich jedoch auch einige Theologen und Juristen befanden. Als Text wurde die Ausgabe des Dekrets in der Patrologia Latina Bd. 140 zugrunde gelegt.

Tradition and habit over many centuries have led Western civilization to take for granted the idiom, throwing pearls before swine. Yet, as numerous interpreters of its source, Matt. 7.6, have puzzled, why pearls? The principal exegetic difficulty of the passage, in other words, consists in the analysis of the literal rather than the idiomatic meaning. The conventional semantic rationalizations can be illustrated by quotations from two of many commentators: J. P. Lange calls the act of casting pearls before swine ‘foolish’; O. Baumgarten et al. consider the expression ‘ein derb volkstümliches Gleichnis: man wird doch nicht den Säuen Perlen als Futter vorwerfen.’ Various attempts have been made to change the reading of the passage: while these provide no satisfactory solution to the problem, they are, obviously, expressions of dissatisfaction. The present note is a suggestion that the correct interpretation may be reached by a study of the stylistic pattern of the passage.

The present study deals with a segment from the history of the eternal problem, Ethics and Law, and their interrelation. It investigates the origin and evolution of a moral idea—the meaning of goodwill in action, and especially in giving. Some of the greatest and most noble minds of all times have cooperated in this evolution—Aristotle, St. Paul, and St. John Chrysostom. Emperor Justinian undertook later the attempt to anchor this moral claim in law. The attempt failed. The failure unveils the border line between ethics and law.

Few problems in medieval constitutional history, and perhaps none in English constitutional history, have occasioned more irreconcilably different interpretations than the problem of the meaning and significance of the coronation oath of 1308. Divergent interpretations began in the seventeenth century, and they have continued to provide the substance of an interesting historiographical problem ever since. It is doubtful whether complete agreement on all of the specific questions raised by the oath will ever be reached, but at the present stage of debate there are still questions which have neither been raised nor answered. The purpose of this paper is to raise one of these questions and, by providing an answer, to narrow further the limits within which there is still disagreement concerning the oath which Edward II swore at his coronation.

Our knowledge of school education in medieval England has been immeasurably advanced during the last fifty years or so by the study of school textbooks. When the topic of medieval English schools was first identified in the 1890s, by A. F. Leach and others, it centered chiefly on their organization. Scholars collected references to their existence and continuity, together with the rather sparse records of their constitutions, masters, and pupils. Then, in the 1940s, the late R. W. Hunt drew attention to the manuscripts by which Latin and English were taught and studied in schools, a source that has since been explored by other writers. The study of manuscripts, it is now clear, enables us to understand much of what the schools taught, to gauge better the objectives and standards of school education, and to measure the similarities and differences between schools. Some of the surviving manuscripts cannot be attributed to particular schools, masters, or pupils, and therefore form a guide to education only in general. Others can be more exactly located. Dr. David Thomson, who has studied twenty-four fifteenth-century school manuscripts that contain material in Latin and English, is able to link at least half to particular schools, including Basingwerk Abbey (north Wales), Battlefield College (Shropshire), Beccles (Suffolk), Eton College (Bucks.), Exeter (Devon), St. Anthony's School (London), Magdalen College School (Oxford), St. Albans (Herts.), and Winchester College (Hants.). Other manuscripts can be attributed to Barlinch Priory (Somerset), Newgate School Bristol (Gloucs.), and Lincoln or its vicinity. This is a wide selection of places, geographically and institutionally. There are schools connected with monasteries (Barlinch and Basingstoke), fee-paying town grammar schools (Beccles, Exeter, and St. Albans), and the free grammar schools endowed during the later Middle Ages, such as Eton, St. Anthony's London, Magdalen College Oxford, and Winchester.

Recent research on the Collectio Isidori Mercatoris, better known to historians as the False Decretals compiled by Pseudo-Isidore, has refuted the prevalent view that the Pseudo-Isidorian compilation became widely diffused in Italy only when the Lotharingian churchmen in Pope Leo IX's (1049–54) entourage brought it to Rome and made it known as their favorite collection. Although Schafer Williams' Codices Pseudo-Isidoriani appeared too late for me to use in the preparation of this paper, his articles make it evident that the initial error rests with Hinschius' incomplete and incorrectly dated list of manuscripts. Horst Fuhrmann, moreover, has shown that, with the possible exception of the first six decades of the tenth century, at least since Hadrian II (867–72), popes made continuous albeit sparing use of the forgeries, and it was only with Urban II (1088–99) that they began to rely on them extensively. His conclusion that the principal channel of diffusion for the False Decretals was not the papacy but the systematic collections which incorporated the forgeries, suggests that further research is needed on the influence of canonical collections in the pre-Gregorian period.

Not overfamiliar, it seems, to students of late medieval patristic scholarship is the Milleloquium veritatis S. Augustini, the work of a fourte enth-century Augustinian Hermit, Bartholomew, native of the city of Urbino and for the last three years of his life (1347-1350) its bishop. This impressive compilation was produced largely at Bologna, where Bartholomew devoted much of his maturity to teaching, applying thus the fruit of earlier studies at Paris that had led to the doctorate in theology. While the composition of a treatise De Romani pontijicis Christi viearii auctoritate appears to have had great weight in deciding Pope Clement VI to grant the see of Urbino to Bartholomew, it is for his Augustinian Milleloquium — and for a similarly organized and similarly titled compilation frem the works of St. Ambrose — that he is chief'y known to scholars. The Milleloquium S. Augustini contains perhaps fifteen thousand excerpts from the writings that its compiler regarded, not always correctly, of course, as works of Augustine's. These excerpts, selected for significant. treatment of the themes with which they deal, are set out — hence Bartholomew's titles — under some 1000 alphabetically arranged subject headings running from ABEL to ZJZANIA. Produced in a period that, like Pope Clement VI himself, was ‘compendiorum avidissimus,’6 the Milleloquium did not fail of success: to this fact the not fewer than forty surviving manuscripts” and a series of five or six printings' from 1555 to 1734 amply testify. In recent times the utility of the Milleloquium as a subject index to Augustine was noted by Ludwig Traube, while Père Joseph de Ghellinck indicated how the work could be helpful ‘en faisant parfois retrouver au lecteur des textes peu connus.’ Doubtless, too, this rich assembly has its simple appeal to the hurried scholar who would quickly find an apt sententia from Augustine on this subject or that, and even to the pigri lectores et inbecillitatis sarcina gravati who were the expected clientele of a yet earlier florileqium from Augustine with which we shall shortly deal.

Le deuxième livre de la Geste de l'histoire spirituelle publiée par l'évêque gallo-romain Avit de Vienne au début du VIe siècle apparaît, en réalité, comme le cœur d'une trilogie hexamétrique consacrée aux premiers instants bibliques de l'histoire du monde et des hommes, et que l'on a parfois comparée au Paradis perdu de Milton. Dès le premier vers de ce livre, le poète prend soin de rattacher le sujet du péché originel à la longue méditation initiale Sur le début du monde, jusque dans l'emploi d'un adverbe temporel de transition qui marque le début du récit, interea. Par ailleurs, comme l'a observé Michael Roberts, la longue digression finale sur l'épisode de la femme de Lot et de la destruction de Sodome et Gomorre, qui occupe quatre-vingt-un vers du deuxième livre, assure la transition entre le sujet majeur de ce livre, à savoir la lutte qui oppose Ève au serpent, et le problème de la culpabilité d'Adam, qui sera débattu au troisième livre: la femme de Lot est, comme Ève, une autre «fouineuse de malheurs», mais à l'inverse de la première femme, elle n'est pas parvenue à séduire son «propre Adam». Un peu à la manière des décors simultanés en usage dans le drame médiéval, le récit principal se double ici d'un récit secondaire qui annonce recentrage au livre III sur l’évaluation de la complicité d’Adam et Ève dans la faute. Parmi d'autres détails qui confirment le lien entre cet épisode adventice du livre II et le livre III, la malédiction de Dieu contre le sol des deux cités condamnées est un exemple particulier de cet espace de punition et d'illusions qu'est devenue la terre depuis la sentence de Dieu contre Adam; du reste, le châtiment de Sodome réapparaît explicitement au livre III comme une figure du feu éternel qui attend les damnés à la fin des temps.

In his chronicle of Bloemhof Abbey (Floridus Hortus) in Wittewierum Magister Emo of Huizinge inserts a treatise on simony in which the following passage is to be found: