Part One of this Introduction was concerned with the historical background of Caucasian Society; it dealt, accordingly, in some detail with the genesis and structure of that society, more particularly of its creative minority, the nobility, and in especial the spearhead of the nobility, the group of the dynastic princes. That study investigated also the ethos of this important and restricted group, a caste in fact, and its juridical status: the sovereign rights of the Princes, who were, under the presidency of kings, the real rulers of Caucasia; their internationally recognized position of minor kings; the ethno-political self-sufficiency and self-determination of their States, of which Armenia and to a large extent also the other Caucasian countries were little more than federative unions; the dependence of the Princes on other and greater monarchs; and the superadding of feudalistic features, resulting from this dependence, to the fundamentally dynasticist régime of Caucasia. Here, in the present study, it is proposed to consider this group in the concrete: to examine it, that is, as so many individual historical-genealogical-geographical (and often also ethnic) units. The preponderant role of the Caucasian dynastic aristocracy in the history of the formative centuries made, especially in Armenia, of this history, and of that of the following centuries as well, largely the history of these princely houses. This fully justifies our interest in this particular aspect of the Caucasian social development.

In dem Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae, der gegen Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts geschrieben wurde und unter dem Namen des damaligen obersten englischen Richters Ranulph de Glanvill bekannt geworden ist, spielt der Begriff der causa debendi bei der Darstellung des Schuldrechts eine beachtenswerte Rolle. Er hat hier eine augenfällig hervortretende technische Bedeutung. Ihm kommt die Funktion des systematischen Oberbegriffs zu, unter dem im 10. Buch des Werkes das materielle Schuldrecht vorgetragen wird.

Depuis qu'a paru l'ouvrage de S. de Ricci-W. J. Wilson, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (3 vols., New York 1935–1940), diverses bibliothèques des États-Unis ont acquis des manuscrits dont n'a pas encore été publié un catalogue d'ensemble. lei seront signalés, au moins d'une facon sommaire et seulement afin d'orienter des recherches ultérieures, des textes et des manuscrits cisterciens qu'il m'a été possible de consulter grâce àl'extrême obligeance des possesseurs ou des conservateurs, àqui je tiens à exprimer ici ma vive reconnaissance.

A fresh attempt on the two most formidable puzzles in the Divina Commedia, by one who cannot even profess to be a Dantist, may seem peculiarly open to what a contemporary scholar has called ‘the mild raillery that attends those who persist in offering solutions of problems apparently worked to death.' Yet a survey of the massive bibliography surrounding Dante's DXV and Veltro produces the strong impression that no explanation proposed for either of them so far has won for itself any real core of acceptance. If this one-sentence summary of six hundred years' scholarship is accurate, it suggests that a fruitful approach is less likely to emerge from comparative re-assessments of the existing theories, than from an exploration of some of the all-but-forgotten corners of medieval Christian tradition, in search of an interpretation that will fit the two prophecies and their contexts more precisely. In the present study, Part I will offer an interpretation of the DXV which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been proposed; Part II will demonstrate the compatibility of this interpretation with other crucial parts of the Commedia; Part III will offer a somewhat less original interpretation of the Veltro; and Part IV will examine the relationship between the two prophecies as I have interpreted them.

The major sources for an inquiry into the customs of the Spanish military Order of Calatrava are the difiniciones or statutes enacted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The difiniciones were formulated by the Cistercian abbots of Morimond, or by their representatives, and, on two occasions, by the masters of Calatrava.

The legislative authority of the abbots of Morimond resulted from the incorporation of Calatrava into the Order of Citeaux in 1187. At that time, the Cistercian general chapter affiliated Calatrava with the abbey of Morimond. Henceforth, the abbots of this monastery possessed the right of visiting the knights and of regulating their observances. Oftentimes this right was delegated to the abbots of Spanish Cistercian monasteries affiliated with Morimond.

In the winter of 1384–1385 Rodolfo de Sanctis, who had recently received his doctorate in Canon Law, set sail from Venice to take up residence as a member of the cathedral chapter of Patras in Greece. Before his death four years later, Rodolfo had accomplished nothing of great importance and would be of little interest to scholars were it not for a few letters he wrote from Greece to a friend in Venice. Although these letters deal chiefly with personal matters, they contain several items of historical interest and, more important, they provide a glimpse into the life and activities of a Latin cleric in Greece during the late Middle Ages. Not only do they paint a portrait of Rodolfo himself, but they also tell us a great deal about the type of man who staffed the remote Eastern dioceses. In this lies their value, for our knowledge of the Western Church in the Levant during this period is so imperfect that any added documentation assumes an importance sometimes out of proportion to its intrinsic worth.

The question of the dramatis personae in the last great act of history was a subject of perennial interest in the Middle Ages. Parts, both good and bad, had to be cast and it is not surprising that national hopes and rivalries frequently crept into the various attempts to assign these tremendous cosmic roles. Although both the pessimistic expectation of a mounting crescendo of evil and the hope of a millennium had existed in Christian thought since its beginning, it was the Joachimist structure of history which most clearly brought together the final crisis of evil and the final blessedness in a last great act which was yet within history, separated from eternity by the Second Advent. The concept of an age of blessedness had three strands in it: first, the idea of the millennium, derived from the Apocalypse (20.1–3), in which Satan is bound for a thousand years; secondly, the concept of a Sabbath Age, symbolized in the Seventh Day of Creation when God rested from His labors; thirdly, the Trinitarian interpretation of history, finally worked out by Joachim, in which history was expected to culminate in the Third Age of the Holy Spirit. The first two ideas did not necessarily lead to the expectation of a last age of blessedness within time: the millennium was frequently interpreted as covering the whole period between the First and Second Advents, or again, as constituting a rule of Christ and His Saints beyond history; the Sabbath Age could be seen as a Sabbath beyond the Second Advent and Last Judgment and therefore also beyond history. It was only when these two concepts became linked with the Trinitarian view of history that they clearly symbolized a crowning age of history, set in the future and therefore not yet attained, whilst unmistakably within the time process, preceding the winding-up of history in the Second Advent and Last Judgment. The full force of Joachim's concept of the Third Age was rarely grasped, appearing usually in a much-debased form, but the program of Last Things, as worked out by Joachites of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, profoundly influenced the form which these expectations took in the later Middle Ages and, indeed, right down to the end of the sixteenth century.

Beim Gespräch über liturgische Handschriften in den U.S.A. sagte mir Prof. E.A. Lowe eines Tages im Mai 1958 in seinem grossen Skriptorium im Institute for Advanced Study bei Princeton — ‘that “scholars' paradise” set among quiet green meadows' — wo die prächtigen Bände der Codices Latini Antiquiores das Licht der Welt erblicken, dass auch er ein kleines Missale des 14./15. Jahrhunderts besitze, und bald darauf hielt ich es in Händen. Während ich es betrachtete, meinte er: “You write a note on this book.” Da ich die alsbald begonnene Untersuchung nicht im Institut beenden konnte, liess Prof. Lowe einen Film der Handschrift hersteilen und schenkte ihn mir beim Abschied. Einige Fragen, besonders über das Alter der Hände und über schwer lesbare Stellen, beantwortete er mir später brieflich. Das hier vorgelegte Ergebnis der Untersuchung des ‘Codex Lowe' —es ist die einzige Handschrift in Prof. Lowes Besitz — möge dem hochverehrten Jubilar eine kleine nachträgliche Freude zum 80. Geburtstag bereiten (15. Oktober 1959).

Our editions of Gellius' Noctes Atticae read as follows at 1.15.1:

The biography of Pythagoras of Samos is embroidered with legend, and what the Neo-Pythagoreans tell us is interwoven with Platonic and Aristotelian ideas. His very name — he whose birth was foretold by the Pythian god, Apollo, or he who utters oracles as does Apollo — gives a hint of the mystery enveloping his personality. This at least is certain, that he was born about 580 B.C. as the son of a well-to-do merchant, Mnesarchus. Tradition has it that as a young man he spent a fairly long period in Egypt in order to familiarize himself with the cults of Isis and Osiris. There, too, so runs the tale, he acquired his mathematical knowledge from which he later developed his system of numbers. Upon his return to Greece, he visited first of all such religious centers as Delphi, Delos and Crete with a view to initiation in their mystic rites. In his native island, Samos, he then began to teach, but dissastisfied with the rule of Polycrates the tyrant, he soon resolved to seek out the Greek colonies of Southern Italy.

Latin palaeography of the pre-Carolingian era must surely rank high among the branches of medieval studies which have made dramatic progress in recent decades, and preeminent among the contributions to that progress is of course Codices Latini Antiquiores by E. A. Lowe, of which nine volumes have already appeared and the final two are well under way. But Dr. Lowe is not the kind of scholar who is content merely to compile a corpus which is a model of usefulness and filled with intriguing discoveries; fortunately for us he is also moved from time to time to offer essays in which he gives a broader historical interpretation. Such a book is English Uncial, which the Clarendon Press of Oxford published in 1960, including a substantial introduction, a series of comments on specific manuscripts, and 40 excellent plates. Here the author returns to a phenomenon he has examined several times before, the use of the most calligraphic of classical book hands, scriptura uncialis, in England, beginning late in the seventh century, contemporary with the perfection of the Insular ‘national' scripts.

Besides the version of Paul the Deacon's Homiliary which Aelfric probably used for most of the patristic material in the Catholic Homilies, he also made use of a compilation of brief excerpts from the works of the Fathers by Smaragdus, and the homiliary of Haymo of Halberstadt. A re-examination of the sources of the Catholic Homilies has led to the conviction that Aelfric's debt to Haymo is considerably greater than has been recognized. Besides the two homilies where Aelfric specifically mentions Haymo as his source, we can point out some twenty-five more homilies where Aelfric's text is beholden to Haymo's work.

The twelfth-century codex Beauvais 11 is rich in the possession of many medieval Latin verses. Of these almost all have by now been published: poems commonly assigned to Hildebert, by Bourassé; the De prelatis non bene intronizatis, by Rousseau; the ‘Mellifluae Meldi …,' by Lecomte and more recently by Colker; and, principally, works of Fulcoius of Beauvais — his Vterque, by Rousseau; the Epistulae, by Colker; the Epitaphia, by Omont; the Vita sancti Mauri, by the Bollandists; the Vita sancti Blandini, by Poncelet;′ the Vita sancti Medardi (a fragment), by Boutemy. It is true that FulcoiusVita sancti Agili is still unpublished and that his Vita sancti Earonis is represented only by excerpts published at various times, by Mabillon, Suchier, and Krusch. But Sister Mary Isaac Jogues Rousseau, S.S.N.D., will probably edit all of Fulcoius' verse lives of saints. What is left in the Beauvais manuscript are five poems attributed to an Odo Sacerdos, and even two of these have been published (as will be specified below).

Henry Ill's absolutist pretensions made his conduct of English foreign affairs almost as personal as his domestic policy. But since the heir of John Lackland was chronically dependent on others for ideas, there remain the questions as to (1) how much of the mercurial king's policy was his own or that of his advisers and (2) whether Henry selected his counsellors from that class of administrative clerks who were ‘most dangerous to the welfare of the state’ because they encouraged their master's foreign adventures. Or, were these men, as the executors of the king's personal designs, committed to carry out a course of action ‘dramatically opposite to the interests of the [Angevin] kingdom’ as interpreted by the barons of the realm?

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

All primitive decretal collections composed in England are conventionally classified in three main groups, described as the English, Bridlington, and Worcester Families respectively. These names are admittedly matters merely of convenience, and are open in all cases either to question or qualification. The Worcester Family (the most advanced of English primitive collections in technical construction) is named after the Worcester Collection, on the mistaken assumption that this, authentically Worcester, composition is the oldest surviving member of the group; whereas in fact a hitherto undiscussed manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, reveals an earlier derivation from their common origin, and there are good reasons for doubting if the family archetype was dependent in any way on the Worcester school of canon lawyers. Six members of this once-numerous family are known at present in manuscript, and two of these are also familiar in published analyses. All are technically primitive in composition, being either divided into books or libri simply, or in the most mature examples subdivided also into titles or tituli, but without the systematic device of dismemberment of the longer decretals. In systematic collections the longer letters, dealing frequently with several different and quite unrelated topics within the limits of a single decretal, are dissected into their component chapters, which are arranged analytically according to subject matter and distributed under various headings. None of the Worcester Family is systematic in this sense, though some record an advanced stage of technical development within the primitive conventions.

The Rare Book Room of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries has recently acquired an early fourteenth-century manuscript (Lat. 95) of a hitherto unknown Apparatus on the Clementines. The author is Stephanus Hugoneti (from southern France, possibly Narbonne), whose work as a canonist has gone unknown, and whose ultimate though brief emergence from historical obscurity as bishop of Bologna has hardly been noticed.

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.

The following Notes are concerned with Summae of which editions have been undertaken by members of the Institute, or which otherwise have been discussed in previous issues of the Bulletin.