Scholars tracing the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the fourth century tend to pass over the Catechetical Homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) rather quickly, with the observation that, from the perspective of systematic theology, Cyril made no new contributions to the doctrine, and even warned against going beyond the texts of Scripture when speaking of the Spirit. But such lack of attention to Cyril as a theologian leaves several questions unexplored. Cyril's homilies were a central part of the preparation of adult converts for baptism, a task crucial for the Church's survival; in the baptismal rite the converts would receive the Holy Spirit. Given the foundational nature of Cyril's homilies in forming the members of the Jerusalem church, might it not be useful, when tracing how the understanding of the Holy Spirit developed in the fourth century, to consider how Cyril uses Scriptural material concerning the Spirit? Which Scriptural texts on the Spirit does he employ? Are there any texts later considered significant which he omits? What is Cyril's purpose in citing these texts on the Spirit and how does he present them to his hearers? Even though he confines himself to presenting Scriptural material, what understanding of the Spirit is communicated by his shaping of that material? Is there any sense in which the understanding of the Spirit inculcated by Cyril's preaching prepares the way for the conceptual doctrinal distinctions concerning the Spirit's nature and divinity made in the next generation?

To most people inclined, in the late twentieth century, to think in such terms, the idea of pilgrimage as a metaphor for the Christian life seems natural and almost perfect — natural and perfect to the extent that it is often assumed to have been the metaphor for such a life from the beginnings of the religion. This is not the case. Although the image of pilgrimage — peregrinatio — can be found occasionally in earlier fathers, it did not receive a full theological exposition until Augustine's City of God in the early fifth century. There, peregrinatio is linked directly to the theme of the two cities, the essential and basic conceit of the book. Even in the very first sentence, Augustine says that he will seek to defend

The modern interest in and study of medieval sermon literature was first driven by a combination of confessional acrimony and professional scholarship. L. Bourgain, Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Richard Albert, Rudolf Cruel, Anton Linsenmayer, and G. R. Owst combed through the archives to uncover the written remains of medieval preaching, and what they discovered came as a surprise to those who had been raised on the Protestant black legend of a mute medieval Church. For quantity and variety the period from the twelfth century to the Reformation must count as one (or several) of the great ages of pulpit activity. In fact, on the eve of the Reformation there was some concern that too much was being preached too often. For example, as a result of complaints by laity and clergy alike, in 1508 the Bishop of Breslau ordered a limit on the number of sermons preached in the city. To be sure, modern judgments concerning the quality of that preaching in both style and content vary with the confessional stance and aesthetic preferences of the individual scholar. But of the late medieval dedication to preaching in season and out there can be no doubt.

While it is true for most literature, theological and otherwise, that an informed awareness regarding antecedents provides valuable perspective toward its interpretation, this is especially true for the theology of the Carolingian period. The Carolingians often used their source material in verbatim citations which remained unacknowledged. One has the impression of a kind of homemade theology, constructed out of bits and pieces of materials that were chosen partly because they were convenient or familiar. The result at its best had an appeal not unlike the patchwork quilt which has a unity and charism all its own even though it is cut predominantly from pieces which were not themselves the work of those designing the quilt. In order to appreciate the final effect achieved by such literature, it is crucial then to be able to identify not only the authors upon whom the writer is relying, but the precise patches of material which have been cut from each, so that we may observe the final effect as the result of a complex of decisions to select, combine, juxtapose, add to, adjust, comment upon, and otherwise utilize a large body of literary fragments.

‘The origin of the notions transubstantiatio and transubstantiare has frequently been sought.’ With this classic understatement Ludwig Hödl began a section of his magisterial study ‘Der Transubstantiationsbegriff in der scholastischen Theologie des 12. Jahrhunderts.’ Interest in the origins and the originator of this influential idea, however, has cooled in recent decades. In part, this is due to changing fashions in scholarship. The philosophical and confessional interests that fueled much of the earlier research into Eucharistic doctrines hold less attraction in an ecumenical age.

Some twenty years ago Canon Étienne Delaruelle and Janine Povill wrote a history of the parishes of Toulouse from their origins to 1160. My design is to review their findings for the mid-twelfth century and carry the history forward until about 1250. The limitation of 1250 is imposed essentially by a change in the nature of the documentation of Toulousan local history, which among other things involved a great diminution in preserved private documents.

In the seventh bolgia of the Inferno, Dante encounters the thieves, who are punished by undergoing an horrific series of Ovid-like metamorphoses in which men are changed into snakes or unidentifiable amalgams of matter. Since theft violates particular justice, which is a dynamic process that coordinates relations, I will argue that Dante properly makes metamorphosis and the lack of relation it creates between the forms that are changed the fitting punishment for thieves. Ovidian metamorphosis, however, can only image the mutations they experience because Dante's sinners have undergone a transformation even before they are changed into snakes. For particular justice, as Aristotle says, is only part of a more general kind of justice which is complete excellence. In the Inferno, this global justice is the final cause of Hell (‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore,’ Inf. 3, 4), and the principle of retribution that establishes the balance between the punishment and crime of those in it. This general justice, I shall argue, also effects a metamorphosis in the damned prior to their particular punishments, a metamorphosis of unbecoming which makes each of them a perverse parody of what God had originally made them. Every sinner in Hell is undergoing a deformation, a disordering movement away from form which unbalances the vital relationship between body and soul that had made him or her human. More precisely, even though we learn from Statius in the Purgatorio that the damned retain the rational soul, it no longer functions as the form of the body, for it has ceased to be that determining element which allows us to understand the one it is in is a member of the species man. Indeed, as the particular transformations of Agnello and Buoso will make clear, the substantial form of all the damned has become less the intellectual soul than the shape of their matter, from which the intellect can no longer abstract any intelligible form. And as their increasing corporeality suggests, the sinners throughout Hell are being transformed into creatures of ever greater density, who lack inner depth, creatures devoid of an animating essence whose powers persist despite outer change.

The Middle English Ypotis, a ‘wise child’ dialogue poem deriving from the third century A.D. Latin Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epicteti philosophi via the French L'Enfant sage versions, exists in fifteen texts. Fourteen of these are edited in scattered collections published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the fifteenth, from the York Minster MS XVI.L.12 fols. 58r–69v (Yk), is the only one hitherto unavailable. Surprisingly enough, it has never been the subject of a full critical edition.

Das Erfurter Studium generate, wie es in den Quellen bezeichnet wird, war eine Bildungseinrichtung ganz besonderer Art und wird seit längerem vom historischen Interesse begleitet. Wissenschaftler wie Heinrich Denifle, Hermann Grauert, Martin Grabmann und Gray Cowan Boyce haben schon früh auf die Bedeutung der Erfurter Schulen hingewiesen. Besonders ergebnisreich waren die philosophiegeschichtlich grundlegenden Betrachtungen von Jan Pinborg.

When William Langland revised his poem Piers Plowman for the second time, he added a long, intricate analogy to the third passus. In all three versions of Piers, the dreamer, Will, finds himself in this early passus at a king's court and witnesses a debate between two figures, Lady Meed and Conscience, about the appropriateness of their possible marriage. The B text, the one scholars most often discuss, presents the would-be bride, Lady Meed, arguing that regardless of their nature the gifts she dispenses at court are integral to the smooth operation of society. These gifts, then, are honorable, and Lady Meed's nature need not prevent her marriage to Conscience. The reluctant Conscience, however, distinguishes between two kinds of meed, one holy and one corrupt. He holds that Lady Meed represents only the corrupt meed and so is intrinsically immoral. Her ‘gifts’ and ‘payments,’ he says, are not proportionate to desert, as she claims, but are instead bribes and payoffs. Rather than easing the functioning of society, they subvert it. On these grounds, Conscience refuses to marry Lady Meed. The king before whom Lady Meed and Conscience argue is initially torn about the nature of Lady Meed, as indeed readers of the poem have remained. In what appears to be an effort to clarify Conscience's argument, Langland adds almost a hundred lines to the debate in the C text.

Early in the thirteenth century, probably within the first decade, a treatise on plants was translated from the Arabic by Alfred of Sareshel (or Alveredus Anglicus), which was to become the foundation of the science of botany for the Latin-speaking world. This treatise was until the sixteenth century universally ascribed to Aristotle and awarded all the authority accorded the Philosopher in the other sciences. Within a generation of the appearance of the Latin version the De plantis had become a set text in university curricula and by 1254 was prescribed by statute at the University of Paris as an examination subject. Roger Bacon was lecturing on the text at Paris already in the 1240s and a decade later Albert the Great was composing his monumental and never-to-be-surpassed commentary on the same text.

In the Spring of 1985, I visited the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to examine in situ Alfred of Sareshel's commentary on Aristotle's Metheora. Although they were listed in the Aristoteles latinus as anonymous, I had already identified the linear and marginal comments in manuscript Selden supra 24 ff. 84r-114r, as another, and to date, the oldest known version of Alfred's commentary on that Aristotelian treatise. That codex also contains a Graeco-Latin version of Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione which is also accompanied by an anonymous commentary (ff. 41r-63r). I decided at the time to transcribe the commentary, and to prepare it for an edition with the aim of publication, a process in which I am still involved.

‘It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a Pun’
LEWIS CARROLL

The name of the English Dominican Robert Holcot was still familiar to European intellectuals in the seventeenth century, thanks in part to the wide diffusion of his challenging Questions on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, but even more to the ready availability of his lectures on the biblical book of Wisdom.1 The latter commentary clearly was, as Fr. Joseph Wey observed, a ‘medieval best seller’;2 but few historians investigating late medieval thought or early modern access to it have recently studied the work. One who has done so, the late Beryl Smalley, has drawn attention to the verbal ‘pictures’ (Holcot's term) and extended plays on words that were surely among the pleasures that scribes and readers found in the book for at least three centuries.3 Any reader inclined to ‘look grave at a pun’ and not yet aware that the authors of Sentences commentaries commonly embedded their own cognomens implicitly (and often obscurely) in the biblical tags they chose as their incipits must have found cause for distress with the opening words of Holcot's Wisdom commentary.

Paul Oskar Kristeller's rich compilation Iter Italicum IV (Alia Itinera II) (London-Leiden 1989) covers manuscripts in libraries from Great Britain to Spain. It is provided with a copious index, but since the medical items are only sparsely indicated, a summary such as that supplied here is more than called for. It is modeled on those published in Traditio 41 (1985) 341–365, covering volume III, and 44 (1988) 485–536, covering volumes I–II of the Iter.