This essay analyzes the mechanics of temporary journeys to the afterlife in Latin texts from the ninth century, the period typically associated with the birth of a medieval visionary genre. Sometimes framed as near-death experiences, sometimes as simple dreams, journeys to an otherworldly landscape were primarily intended as admonitions to the living, but in crossing the boundary between living and dead, the visionary's own soul and body experienced a problematic disjuncture. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has analyzed early medieval visions primarily as political texts, as contributions to a Christian belief in purgatory, or as forerunners to later medieval classics like Dante's Divine Comedy, this study uses visions as windows onto the theology of the soul-body union. The first part surveys important discussions that preceded and informed Carolingian visions of the afterlife (including Augustine's dialogues on the soul, the famous Merovingian Vision of Barontus, and various Insular texts with otherworldly encounters). The second part shows how, against these earlier models, Carolingian visionary authors broke with conventions in order to safeguard the stability of the soul's containment within its earthly body — the very same doctrinal issue that appears with mounting urgency in treatises on the soul produced in the middle decades of the ninth century. A key intervention of the essay is to argue for greater attention to the connections between Carolingian visionary texts and theological tracts, a point often overlooked in a field that has emphasized the imaginative narratives of visionary literature as fundamentally distinct from the ostensible conservativism of early medieval theology.

This article evaluates the geographical consciousness of north and west found in the Five Books of the Histories by the eleventh-century Burgundian monk Rodulfus Glaber. In contrast with dominant approaches to medieval geography that have informed prior commentators, who have focused on ideas of Europe or the opposition of east and west, it argues that we must situate Glaber's spatial consciousness first and foremost in the lineage of Carolingian and post-Carolingian conceptions of the north. Focusing especially on the climactic episode of the first book, a vision of the crucifixion that prophesies the rise of Christianity in the northern and western regions of the world, it seeks to contextualize this around the wider geography within Glaber's text. First, the unusual place of the Riphaean mountains and Raetia Secunda in Glaber's descriptions of Gaul and Germania are compared with early medieval textual geographies and eleventh- to twelfth-century cartography to show the shifting and ambiguous place of the north as an expansive and immediate frontier of the Christian world. Then, with this background in place, Glaber's conception of the west is considered through its use alongside a range of signs and portents, most notably the whale sighting at the beginning of the second book. These considerations reveal a messier and more local, Frankish conception of west that is interconnected with the north as a site of violence and disorder. This not only highlights important tensions in Glaber's text itself, but also a geographical vision that remained influential well into the twelfth century.

As a poet, Avitus of Vienne is best known for his biblical epic, De spiritalis historiae gestis, but he also wrote a poem of exhortation addressed to his sister, Fuscina, a dedicated virgin. That poem is given the title De virginitate in the influential MGH edition, following one group of manuscripts, but in a second group it is entitled De consolatoria castitatis laude, a title attested in a dedicatory letter Avitus wrote for the poem and adopted by its most recent editor. The title is problematic, however. Why castitas rather than virginitas, and how is the poem consolatory since it refers to no grief experienced by its addressee? The paper addresses these questions by exploring the language of chastity and consolation. It also analyzes the model of womanly virtue that the poet holds up for his sister: one that, through the biblical and saintly examples of Deborah, Susanna, and Eugenia, proposes a kind of heroism, embodied in mental resolve, strength of character, and the maintenance of moral integrity. In more than one passage Avitus contrasts womanly resolve with male irresolution and weakness. Virtus, despite its etymological associations, lies with the women. By comparison, references to males or the manly (viri, virilis) tend to take on ironic or subversive connotations in such contexts.

The Expositio in Apocalypsim by Alexander Minorita (also known as Alexander of Bremen, d. 1271) is the earliest complete mendicant Apocalypse commentary. It has been noted for its highly chronological interpretation of the path toward the end times and its witness to the early spread of Joachimite texts into central Europe. Our knowledge of the transmission and, crucially, the use of this text has thus far not taken into account thirty-five folios of instruction on spiritual warfare found in one of the Expositio's eight manuscript witnesses: Cambridge, University Library, Mm.5.31 (c. 1270). The edition presented here of this unique addition, which was excluded from the modern critical edition of the Expositio, makes the complete Cambridge version of the Expositio available for the first time. While there has been some debate over the editorship of this version of the commentary — the Benedictine-turned-Franciscan Albert of Stade (d. c. 1260) and Alexander himself have both been suggested — we argue that a further possibility must be considered. Its author may have been a highly educated Benedictine writer, who adapted the commentary with his coreligionists (at least partly) in mind. His goal was not only to extol the importance within the apocalyptic timeline of Benedictine history, but also to promote ascetic values among his readers. Overall, the Cambridge Expositio provides further evidence of the intellectual conversations and cross-pollination of both practices of learning and structures of thought between mendicant, university, and cenobitic cultures in this period. Within this context, apocalyptic thought could find unexpected uses, including galvanizing monks in day-to-day religious practice and progress.

This essay offers a new examination of medical knowledge in Merovingian Gaul (c. 500–c.750), the ways that it became part of non-specialized learning, and its continuities with Carolingian medicine. In most histories of medicine, the Merovingian world is portrayed as providing a hostile environment for medicine due to the Christianization of knowledge. A significant problem, however, is that there has been no study of what medicine was known or how it was treated since 1937, and even that study can now be seen to be built on false premises. The first part of the present paper offers a new conspectus of Merovingian medical knowledge based on the earliest manuscripts and argues that this new overview changes where we can see continuities in content and practice with Carolingian medicine. The second part builds on this to explore the intersections between religious and secular study, and how medicine fitted within a generalist rather than specialist education. The final section looks at how this learning complemented understandings of the miraculous and nature and in the process helped to deal with challenges from folk practice and the failures of medicine to offer effective aid during pandemics. It is concluded that medicine was in good health in the Merovingian period as it contributed useful ways to see natural order in Creation.

The Faculty of Theology of Bologna, founded in 1364, presents a paradox when we investigate its custom of performing principia on the Sentences prior to 1400. Although we are fortunate to have from Bologna the most complete surviving documentation concerning the organization of a medieval theology faculty, only two complete sets of principia have been identified so far from the matricula of 450 known scholastics. The situation hinders any comparative investigation that intends to test how what is depicted in the statutes is reflected in practice. The two surviving sets of principia from Bologna are those of the Cistercian Conrad of Ebrach, from 1368–1369, and the Augustinian Augustinus Favaroni of Rome, dating to 1388–1389. This study uses Augustinus Favaroni's principia to illustrate how this academic exercise functioned at the University of Bologna. It begins with a biographical sketch of Augustinus Favaroni of Rome followed by a short description of the principia as mirrored in the statutes of Bologna. It continues with a brief summary of each of the four principia of Favaroni reporting the philosophical and theological topics developed in his text, with an emphasis on the debates in which he engaged to defend his theses, and concludes with an appendix containing an edition of the four principia.

This article offers the first full edition, translation, and commentary for three Latin texts relating to the death of Matilda de Bailleul (d. 1212), a Flemish abbess of Wherwell, a Benedictine abbey in Hampshire, England. Wherwell was relatively prosperous throughout its history and was probably founded in the tenth century by Queen Ælfthryth, wife of King Edgar. All three texts appear on the final verso (fol. 12v) of St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Lat.Q.v.I.62. The manuscript comprises two quires: the first contains a liturgical calendar; the second contains computistic and musical material, followed by the texts relating to Matilda's death. The calendar was made at St. Albans in the middle of the twelfth century and had reached Wherwell by 1189 or soon afterwards. The second quire could have been added at either St. Albans or Wherwell. The first two texts are short poems which commemorate Matilda in elegiac couplets. The third text is a letter of consolation on the death of Matilda, from Guy, prior of Southwick, to Euphemia de Walliers (or Wallers), prioress of Wherwell, who was Matilda's niece and successor as abbess of Wherwell. For the first time, evidence is identified which indicates that the two poems were written by different authors. Errors in previous editions of the poems and letter are corrected. Explanations are offered for numerous passages that are difficult to interpret, many of which have hitherto received no comment. Parallels are frequently cited for passages in Guy of Southwick's letter, thereby showing his influences and the extent to which his letter stitches together and reworks quotations from both the Bible and other sources.

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.

This paper provides an up-to-date inventory of the works of Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320–1382). For each text, we present the incipit and the explicit, its (approximate) date, the list of manuscripts, and, whenever possible, editions and translations. We also inventory self-references contained in Oresme's writings and discuss specific problems concerning their titles, attributions, and textual transmission. Oresme's works are classified into nine groups, for each of which we offer preliminary remarks to situate the group in the context of Oresme's career. The two appendices provide detailed information about two texts of possible Oresmian attribution.

Although interest in the influence of prophecy and eschatology on the crusade movement and on cross-cultural conceptions of righteous conflict has recently revived, to date there has been little consideration of the reception, transmission, and reinterpretation of multifarious prophecies by networks of individuals involved in the promotion of various crusades from roughly 1187 to 1240. This study tracks the circulation, adaptation, and impact of influential prophecies publicized by papal legates, by crusade recruiters trained in Paris, and by their colleagues in the Victorine, Praemonstratensian, and Cistercian orders, culminating in the crusades of Frederick II (1213–1229). Royal, imperial, noble, episcopal, and papal courts, as well as visionaries, regular religious, secular clergy, preachers, and prelates, played key roles in validating and publicizing predictions. The preservation and reinterpretation of prophecies by scholars, clerics, scribes, and historians working across Latin Christendom (and in the wider Mediterranean region and Central Asia) testifies to the cross-cultural transmission and reception of specific prognostications adapted to speak to local needs and concerns and changing circumstances. This article identifies manuscripts of prophecies which circulated both independently and in association with the crusading histories of Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, written during and used for the promotion of Frederick II's crusades. It concludes that prophecies and their promoters played essential roles in facilitating cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations, religious debates and conversion attempts, and in the fostering, contextualization, and commemoration of the act of pious warfare. Functioning as a common language, prophetic and eschatological expectations enabled Muslims, Eastern Christians, Jewish communities, and Latin Christians to justify their theoretical or actual roles on the orbis terrarum and to define and negotiate with other cultures. Moreover, they could be endlessly adapted both to fit and to shape existing past, present, or future circumstances. Prophecy and eschatology were not fringe phenomena or praxes, but presented holistic methods of making sense of and adapting to events and negotiating between one's own and other cultures, methods that both competed with and complemented historical and theological interpretations of the world (and texts) and rational, scientific, and philosophical modes of thought.

Este trabajo explica los orígenes y evolución de un preámbulo diplomático que fue común en los documentos de compraventa y donación que se redactaban entre mediados del siglo XII y mediados del XIII en la ciudad de Oviedo, al norte del antiguo reino de León. Merece estudio por su larga perduración en el tiempo, ya que fue pasando de unos escribanos a otros y alcanzó la época de la implantación del notariado público. Asimismo, interesa desde el punto de vista lingüístico, ya que comenzó su trayectoria como una composición latina que, en una fase avanzada de su trayectoria, dio lugar a una fórmula romance original. Pero sobre todo llama la atención por la extrañeza de hallar un discurso estructurado sobre las ideas de equitas y ratio en una zona con vida urbana débil, carente de instituciones de enseñanza sólidas, y en general considerada periférica en el reino, más aún a escala europea. En fin, el modo en que habla de la memoria puede aportar matices interesantes a un objeto de estudio que en la Edad Media leonesa ha buscado más la crítica de autenticidad de los cartularios, y luego la comprensión de los mismos, que el papel de lo escrito en la conformación de los derechos de propiedad.

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.

Revisiting Robert Brentano's 1960 article in Traditio on “The Bishops’ Books of Città di Castello,” this contribution challenges a reigning narrative of the “documentary revolution” in medieval Italy as primarily the achievement of the thirteenth-century communal governments of the north. While these urban ruling regimes did produce prodigious numbers of documents and new documentary forms, they were not the earliest innovators. By broadening the scope of analysis to include all the early administrative codices surviving in Città di Castello — those of the city's communal government, cathedral chapter, and bishopric — the author demonstrates that the initial leap from administrative reliance on single sheet parchments to registers occurred earliest in the cathedral chapter (by 1192), then in the bishop's court (1207), and finally more than a decade later in the commune (1221). At least in this one small Umbrian town, ecclesiastical institutions were the earliest innovators. The evidence of Città di Castello also indicates that political instability and its related economic effects drove innovation, not the reform initiatives of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council. Local ecclesiastical leaders, not popes, were the innovators.

This article investigates how civic discourse connects the virtue of citizens and the fortunes of cities in a variety of late antique and early medieval sources in the post-Roman west. It reveals how cities assume human qualities through the rhetorical technique of personification and, crucially, the ways in which individuals and communities likewise are described with civic terminology. It also analyzes the ways in which the city and the civic community are made to speak to one another at times of crisis and celebration. By examining a diverse range of sources including epideictic poetry, chronicles, hagiographies, and epigraphic inscriptions, this article addresses multiple modes of late antique and early medieval thought that utilize civic discourse. It first explores how late antique and early medieval authors employed civic discourse in non-urban contexts, including how they conceptualized the interior construction of an individual's mind and soul as a fortified citadel, how they praised ecclesiastical and secular leaders as city structures, and how they extended civic terminology to the preeminently non-urban space of the monastery. The article then examines how personified cities spoke to their citizens and how citizens could join their cities in song through urban procession. Civic encomia and invective further illustrate how medieval authors sought to unify the virtuous conduct of citizens with the ultimate fate of the city's security. The article concludes with a historical and epigraphic case study of two programs of mural construction in ninth-century Rome. Ultimately, this article argues that the repeated and emphatic exhortations to civic virtue provide access to how late antique and early medieval authors sought to intertwine the fate of the city with the conduct of her citizens, in order to persuade their audiences to act in accordance with the precepts of virtue.