Ipsa autem, bonorum temporalium liberalissima ac spiritualium avida beneficiorum …

— 1293 charter of Oxford University, describing Ela Longespee

In 1293, the elderly and twice-widowed Ela Longespee, countess of Warwick, or someone acting on her behalf, gathered together eighteen charters that had been issued to her over the past dozen years and sent them to the bishop of Lincoln, to be confirmed and copied into a single roll. The original charters have long since vanished, but the enrolled copy survives in The National Archives at Kew. Its component documents, all of them detailed grants to Ela by religious institutions in the Oxford area, are highly unusual; even when compared to the few surviving parallels, they stand out for their specific content. The roll itself, comprising eighteen such documents in a private archive created for a thirteenth-century laywoman, is unique. And when it is examined along with other surviving evidence of Ela's religious activities, it provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the reciprocal nature of religious patronage at this time. What is especially unusual about Ela's case is that we know much more about what the religious promised to Ela than what she granted to them. Thus Ela Longespee's records tell us the side of the story that is seldom told when we look at records of religious patronage; they reveal the return that donors expected in the late thirteenth century, with increasing precision and urgency. Using a chronological framework, this essay will examine the surviving documents, tell the story of Ela's life, and explore the most interesting dimension of that story: her startlingly explicit reciprocal relationships with religious institutions.

Lengthy and complex rituals surrounding illness and death were an important part of the collective experience of medieval monastic communities. In manuscripts from as early as the eighth century, the texts for Christian death rituals consist of prayers, readings, and chants for the visitation of the sick, unction, communion, the funeral mass, and burial. Even though many of the early medieval formularies were copied in monastic scriptoria, the texts could be performed in secular or monastic settings. The earliest death rituals that are explicitly written for monastic communities and contain extensive prescriptions for the actions that accompanied a monk from his final hours of life to his grave are transmitted in monastic customaries of the eleventh century.

El importante trabajo realizado durante los últimos decenios en el dominio de los textos médicos latinos y la renovada atención al estudio de las fuentes manuscritas han ido generando la convicción de que resulta imprescindible revisar un buen número de ediciones al uso, realizadas con medios limitados o con criterios ecdóticos hoy ampliamente superados. Tal retractación viene exigida de ordinario por el descubrimiento de nuevo material manuscrito, pero también por la peculiar orientación que en el pasado presidió no pocos trabajos de edición de textos médicos latinos, que interesaban más por su contenido que por su forma, o bien eran traídos a colación secundariamente, por su condición de testigos de un texto en otra lengua. Es la necesidad de reorientar esta perspectiva, situando el texto latino como objeto de estudio en sí mismo, la que subyace detrás del presente trabajo, que pretende corregir las deficiencias de un pequeño fragmento publicado hace algunos años por H. J. De Vriend dentro de un libro sobre el corpus de recetarios del anglosajón. El editor acompaña cada capítulo del texto anglosajón de su correspondiente paralelo latino, que transcribe a partir de un único manuscrito, dotándolo de una puntuación elemental.

En este trabajo nos proponemos revisar uno de los sucesos trascendentales que repercutieron sobre la cultura del Imperio Romano, produciendo modificaciones sustantivas en todos los órdenes de su vida, y de tan pronunciada magnitud, que incluso se consolidó como sustrato medular del imaginario medieval, en general, y de su literatura, en particular. Ese acontecimiento, de dinámica progresión temporal, es la paulatina infiltración del cristianismo, cuya actividad culmina con la conquista del poder político — observando principios que seguirá ejercitando hasta en tiempos de absoluta hegemonía —, y su relación con la cultura oficial.

Petrus Helias is well known as a grammarian since his commentary, or rather summa, of Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae enjoyed a lasting popularity in the Middle Ages. However, his rhetorical summa, too, should be taken into consideration, since it was widely read in the Middle Ages, and was as popular as the earlier, rhetorical commentaries by William (of Champeaux?) and Thierry of Chartres (from the turn of the century and the 1130s). We do not know much about Peter's life, but according to William of Tyre he came from Poitiers and was a pupil of Thierry of Chartres; in both cases, the information is substantiated by other sources. Doctrinally he was influenced by Thierry in both grammar and rhetoric, as well as by the twelfth-century humanist, philosopher, and grammarian, William of Conches. Peter's school was sought by such ambitious students as John of Salisbury, William of Tyre, and many others. He is mentioned by the author of the Metamorphosis Goliae (ca. 1140) among the famous Parisian masters.

In the Bull of Promulgation of his 1234 Compilation of Decretals (commonly known as the Liber extra), Pope Gregory IX declared the goal of written law to be that “the human race is instructed that it should live honorably, should not injure another, and should accord to each person his own rights.” Yet despite the proliferation of canon laws and ecclesiastical legal procedures, Archbishop Milo Sweteman, metropolitan of the Irish province of Armagh from 1361 to 1380, could still complain about the futility of the church's ultimate legal measure, excommunication, against the many crimes of local malefactors. In 1366, he wrote to one of his officials:

In Summa theologiae 1a.2.1, St. Thomas Aquinas asked “whether that God exists is self-evident” and argued that it is not. His response is generally taken as a rejection of St. Anselm's argument for the existence of God in the Proslogion. In his Summa quaestionum ordinarium (hereafter SQO) 22, Henry of Ghent asks as his second question: “whether that God exists is naturally self-evident to a human being,” and like St. Thomas, he argues that the proposition that God exists is not self-evident. Neither Thomas nor Henry mentions the Archbishop of Canterbury in these questions, although they both use expressions that are clearly borrowed from the argument in the Proslogion. Moreover, both Thomas and Henry also cite in the arguments to the contrary St. John Damascene's statement in De fide orthodoxa that “the knowledge that God exists is naturally implanted in all,” as well as Aristotle's definition from the Posterior Analytics of what it means for a proposition to be self-evident. Henry, however, regards the Proslogion argument quite favorably and examines it at length in SQO 30.2 in an article on the immutability of God in which he asks whether God can be thought not to exist and argues that God cannot be thought not to exist, at least if one has a proper concept of God. Hence, Henry holds both that God cannot be thought not to exist and that the proposition that God exists is not naturally self-evident to a human being, and that would seem to be contradictory or at least to require some careful distinctions.

In his magnum opus on the history of magic, Lynn Thorndike devoted a few pioneering pages to the Liber vaccae or Book of the Cow. He identified and described several of the manuscripts of this singular Arabic compilation of magical experiments, pointed out the many different titles under which it was known in the medieval West, and discussed its false attribution to Plato, Galen, and Hunayn ibn Ishâq. By contrast, given his habit of paraphrasing the texts he examined at great length, Thorndike's account of the content of the work is uncharacteristically patchy. He hastily referred to “elaborate experiments in unseemly generation and obstetrics,” the aim of which was “to make a rational animal from a cow or ape or other beast, or to make bees.” In his opinion, the experiments of the Liber vaccae were, in fact, “unmentionable,” and “hardly such as can be described in detail in English translation.”

Gratian, the “Father of the Science of Canon Law,” had at least a passing familiarity with the scholastic theology of the early twelfth century. His Concordia discordantium canonum or Decretum displays a knowledge of many doctrines debated and discussed in the schools of northern France and also employs the dialectical method for reconciling contradictory authorities pioneered by the scholastics. How did Gratian become acquainted with these methods, doctrines, and ideas? What written sources, if any, introduced him to early scholastic theology?