A most pernicious problem contributing to the economic woes of English monasteries in the early-fourteenth century was mismanagement. This condition was usually, if not almost universally, present and derived in part from the fact that the administrators of religious houses, especially the small ones, were not well trained for the complexities of their tasks. The official records of the royal chancery abound with notices that monasteries suffered from this malady, and the entries in these records follow a pattern, repeating time and time again a variety of standard charges. Having perhaps endured internal dissension that had contributed to the economic difficulty, monasteries became impoverished by indiscreet rule, their goods were wasted, and they experienced mismanagement. In addition, the documents assert that these troubled monasteries suffered from indebtedness, that lax discipline prevailed, and that lands of religious corporations were alienated illegally. Finally, the entries maintain that the ill-advised sale of corodies, and the unwarranted grants of pensions contributed to a depressed monastic economy. To illustrate these observations upon defective monastic administration, reference to specific examples is needed.

I wish to add some details to my paper published in this Bulletin last year and also make a few corrections.

Seven additional MSS have been examined.

(1) MSS of Form A:

1. Cc Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Libr. 441, pages 37-134;

2. Ci Cambridge, University Libr. Ii.6.18, fols. 3r-129v;

3. Ck Cambridge, University Libr. Kk.6.1, the whole MS, fols. 1r-97v;

4. H Paris, Bibl, Nat. lat. 10691, the whole MS, fols. 1r-96r;

5. Tu Tübingen, Deposit from the Prussian State Libr. of Berlin lat. fol, 212, fols. 56r-65r;

6. U Paris, University Libr. 1247, fols. 10r-33r.

In recent years, a good deal of attention has been paid to the place of typology in late medieval art. This way of thought so characteristic of the Middle Ages, in which Old Testament persons and events are seen to have a prefigurative relationship to those of the New, was a popular teaching device. It is nowhere better seen than in the Biblia pauperum or picture Bible, which originated in a mid-thirteenth-century Dominican milieu and was probably inspired by the altar piece of Nicholas of Verdun, made in 1181. The pages of these books contain drawings that show the typological relationship between Old and New Testament events by means of a center roundel depicting some episode of Christ's life, known as the anti-type, flanked by two Old Testament scenes, the types, which were thought to prefigure it. Appropriate Bible prophecies in banners heightened the visual impact of the drawings for the literate. From its inception, the Biblia pauperum was of enormous importance for northern European art, and its influence can be seen well into the Reformation.

Between 1994 and 1997, William Newman published three articles in which, for the first time, a profound connection between Roger Bacon's doctrine and Ps.-Avicenna's alchemical De anima was pointed out. These studies were a major step in understanding Roger Bacon's elemental physics, alchemy, and alchemical medicine, as well as his prolongatio vitae theory. By a thorough study of the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrine of the Jābirian treatises via Ps.-Avicenna's De anima, in comparison with Bacon's texts, I will continue the work initiated by Newman and draw some new conclusions. I will specifically focus on some principal differences between Roger Bacon and his favorite alchemical source, which allow us to understand the originality and innovation of the Franciscan. In addition to the De anima, a specific aspect of the alchemy of the Ps.-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum will also be studied here, being another of Bacon's major sources.

The relatively clear-cut distinction between the subjective and objective meanings of ᾄτη which appears in Aeschylean tragedy tends to disappear in Sophocles' extant work. The use and meaning of ᾄτη in Sophocles, rather, is marked by ambiguity. He shows himself conscious of the differences in meaning which Aeschylus had so sharply emphasized, but in a brilliant extension of his propensity for dramatic irony Sophocles most often employs ᾄτη in contexts where it carries the overtones of both blindness' and ‘ruin.’ This is, of course, quite consonant with so much else in Sophocles' dramatic style and way of thought.

John Keats was one of the last English poets to lyricize a venerable tradition when, in his “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” the narrator describes

In the mid-1390s, a group of Oxford scholars caused the authorities some concern because of their Lollard sympathies, and for propagating heretical teachings at the university. Among them was Robert Lychlade, singled out by name in the following royal directive to the chancellor of Oxford dated 18 July 1395:

The superior learning of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–704) was acknowledged in both Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic contemporary sources by such renowned scholars as Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Adomnán of Iona, Stephen of Ripon, and Alcuin of York. Both Aldhelm and Adomnán knew him personally, and texts composed by these two scholars and presented to Aldfrith help delineate the breadth of his educational background. He was educated among the Gaels, and their records described him as sapiens. By examining texts of other seventh-century Gaelic sapientes, and the comments of Aldhelm and Bede about Gaelic intellectual life and educational opportunities, we can expand our purview of the scope of his education. The nature of seventh-century schooling was peripatetic, and Aldfrith's dual heritage requires a broad search for locations. Many scholars accept Iona as the likely source of his learned background, but this essay will argue that, among other likely locations in Britain and Ireland, Bangor in Northern Ireland is best supported by surviving evidence. His benign reign is placed at the end of the first century of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, but his education benefited the kingdom of Northumbria through generations of Gaelic scholarship, as exemplified by peregrini such as Columba and Columbanus, and sapientes like Laidcenn mac Baíth, Cummíne of Clonfert, Ailerán of Clonard, Cenn Fáelad mac Ailello, and Banbán of Kildare. Aldfrith's rule ushered in a period of cultural florescence in Northumbria that saw the first hagiography and earliest illuminated manuscripts produced in Anglo-Saxon England and that culminated in the extensive library authored by Bede (d. 735).

Despite scholarly attention on its later medieval popularity, the feast of Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, first appeared in the West in twelfth-century England. The earliest surviving liturgical texts for the feast were composed in the 1130s by Osbert of Clare, prior of Westminster, for Worcester Cathedral. They attest to the novelty of the celebration and the process by which a saintly identity was constructed for Anne, an apocryphal figure. To understand why Anne began to be celebrated at this time and how her liturgy was crafted, this article explores Osbert's texts in their devotional context. A lively monastic cult of the Virgin Mary in England provides an important backdrop to the emergence of the celebration of Anne. Debates about the Anglo-Saxon feast of Mary's Conception were especially influential, and a comparison between the liturgical texts for the feast of the Conception and the feast of Anne yields striking parallels. This suggests that the liturgy for Anne both drew on and supported the contentious feast of the Conception. At the same time, Anne was presented as a monastic role model, a virtuous and chaste woman with special appeal for nuns. The history and identity of Anne were therefore deeply embedded in trends of monastic devotion to Mary as Anne was shaped into a deserving mother of her illustrious offspring but also as a worthy saint in her own right.

“The Twenty-five Joys of Our Lady” is a study, examination, and critical edition of an unpublished fifteenth-century Middle English prose devotion preserved in Bodleian Library MS Don. d. 85. It is here associated with twenty-five “Joys of Our Lady” and presented as a vernacular Marian rosary, the first such to be identified in the period. The introduction to the edition considers early liturgical influences upon what became the tradition of Our Lady's Joys, their late-medieval development both across Europe and across England, and the circumstances that usually indicated fewer in number than is present in the devotion printed here. The introduction also concerns itself with the presence and practice of the rosary itself in late-medieval England and elsewhere and the limited evidence that has come down to us for its presence and circulation in England, including woodcut evidence in Caxton and allusions in other Latin devotions. It further indicates an ambiguity in this devotion's treatment of Christ's passion and concludes by considering the role and importance of joy as a pervasive, if often ignored, Christian attitude present in late-medieval English devotion.

El códice Roma, Biblioteca Casanatense, 641, conserva, en su Sector II (del s. x y procedente de la catedral de Benevento) un tratado sin título sobre el destino del alma humana después de la muerte del cuerpo, conocido tradicionalmente como Vtrum animae de humanis corporibus exeuntes mox deducantur ad gloriam uel ad poenam an exspectent diem iudicii sine gloria et poena (CPL 1263), aunque en este artículo es denominado Serpens ille ueternosus. Esta obra sólo ha conocido una edición completa, publicada por Angelo Mai en 1833, quien, sin embargo, no consultó el manuscrito de la Casanatense, sino que trabajó sobre los materiales inéditos de Lorenzo Alessandro Zaccagni († 1712), prefecto de la Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Una parte de la crítica ha querido identificar esta obra con el perdido Libellus de remediis blasphemiae del obispo Julián de Toledo (680–690). El estudio interno del texto lleva a pensar, no obstante, tal y como sugirió José Madoz, que se trata de un escrito redactado en el noroeste de la Península Ibérica hacia el último tercio del s. viii. El presente artículo revisa los distintos argumentos sobre la autoría y la datación del tratado Serpens ille ueternosus, estudia sus fuentes y el testimonio de Alcuino sobre una hejería similar a la criticada en el citado tratado, y ofrece la primera edición crítica del texto junto con su traducción.

Medieval canon law recognized detrusion (detrusio in monasterium) as a sentence for women convicted of adultery. Civil law had made adultery a capital crime, so that detrusio was a milder action. This article traces the history of detrusio in canon law, especially in the thirteenth century, and treats further questions that detrusio raised. Detrusio was originally a pastoral provision, meant to provide a woman rejected by her husband for adultery an opportunity to enter religious life. But in the hands of the jurists detrusio became a coercive ecclesiastical penalty for adultery. The practice raised further concerns, for example: how the woman's property was to be treated; whether the woman sentenced to detrusio became a religious; whether a monastery should be a site of confinement for the laity; and, under what conditions a husband could take his adulterous wife back. The case was also raised of a man who accused his wife of adultery so that he could dissolve his marriage and enter a monastery.

Several scholars have studied meanings attributed to the lion in the western European Middle Ages, but their accounts have tended to be partial and fragmentary. A balanced, coherent interpretive history of the medieval lion has yet to be written. This article seeks to promote and initiate the process of composing such a history by briefly reviewing previous research, by proposing a thematic and chronological framework on which work on the lion might reliably be based, and by itself discussing numerous textual examples, not least from German, Latin, and French literature. The five categories of lion symbolism covered are, respectively, the threatening lion, the Christian lion, the noble lion, the sinful lion, and the clement lion. These meanings are shown successively to have constituted regnant fashions that at various times profoundly shaped people's understanding of the lion; but it is demonstrated also that they existed alongside, and in a state of creative tension with, a “ground bass” of lion meanings that changed relatively little. Lions nearly always, for example, represented important, imposing things and people (for example, kings); and the New Testament's polarized presentation of the lion as either Christ or the devil proved enormously influential both throughout and beyond the Middle Ages. As such any cultural history of the lion — and indeed of many other natural phenomena — must be continually sensitive to the co-existence and interaction of tradition and innovation, stability and dynamism.

Few taxes have been as enduring and as evocative of identity as the Christian ecclesiastical tithe, arguably “the most important tax in the economic development of western Europe.” The secular enforcement in 779 of the tithe's collection by the church clearly marked a decisive moment in its evolution, but its earlier origins as religious law have been much more elusive. Scholarship over the past five decades has made clear that mandatory tithing to the church was not a custom of early Christianity but rather something that developed in late antiquity, with our first unambiguous evidence of a developed theory of the tithe coming from sixth-century Gaul. The key figure providing that evidence was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 469–542).

The medieval military orders were religious institutions whose members had professed a life of combat and prayer that integrated them into a religious landscape sharply defined by diversity. And yet still very little is known about the military orders’ religious functions in the dioceses in which they held ecclesiastical possessions. By focusing on one military order in particular, the Order of the Temple, this study aims to achieve two goals: first, to provide a critical overview of recent scholarship in the emerging field of military order (and especially Templar) religion, and second, to examine aspects of Templar religious involvement in medieval society in general and the reactions of senior clergymen to the Templars’ religious engagement on the parish level in particular. It argues that the Templars proved very keen to expand their network of parish churches and that in so doing they proved willing to engage with the lay public on a much larger scale than has hitherto been believed.

The reform movement of the later tenth and early eleventh centuries distinguishes itself from other such episodes in monastic history not so much by its impact on the existence of ecclesiastical communities throughout western Europe as by its diversity. Whereas Cluny, Gorze, and the movements initiated or inspired by William of Volpiano, Romuald of Camaldoli, Johannes of Vallombrosa, and Peter Damian have rightly attracted the most interest from scholars, there existed a number of regional movements led by individuals with a reformist agenda, carried out with as much determination, and with results as significant as their international counterparts. One such example is that of the so-called Lotharingian reforms initiated by Richard, abbot of Saint-Vanne (d. 1046), which, over the course of the first half of the eleventh century, spread across large parts of the archbishoprics of Reims, Metz, and Cologne. The exact nature of the movement has long been a subject of debate, with Kassius Hallinger proposing controversially to designate it as a Mischobservanz, or mixed observance, based primarily on the customs observed at Cluny and Gorze. The current consensus, however, seems to be that the “Richardian” understanding of monastic life was indeed original and that, like other movements of its time, it originated in a genuine reflection on ways to return to a more authentic experience of the vita regularis. To achieve this goal, Richard and his principal collaborator Poppo, abbot of Stavelot (d. 1048), introduced groups of monks and former canons to their interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict, fostered the creation of collective identities around the figure of patron saints, intervened in the production of scriptoria and the creation of libraries, rationalized the monastic economy, and generally attempted to create a more favorable legal and political situation for the communities coming under their care.

Who schulde now knowe emperours, wonder of philosofres, other folwe the apostles, but hir noble dedes and hir wonder werkes were i-write in stories and so i-kept in mynde? … For storie is wytnesse of tyme, mynde of lyf messager of eldnesse — John Trevisa's translation of Polychronicon.