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.

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.

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 article examines a corpus of over forty Italian civic histories produced from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century, when the wealth of many of the peninsula's inhabitants increased significantly. Evidence from this corpus demonstrates that attitudes about wealth in historical writing changed over time and argues for a shift from a more static to a more dynamic representation of material goods in these texts. The novel mechanisms for accruing wealth that developed in the Italian urban context were important factors in the historigraphic turn, but as the period wore one, changes in the types of people writing history also contributed to modified presentations of wealth in their writings. Whether describing the display of luxury or its regulation, civic improvements or the destruction of a town's buildings by warring factions, taxation in a city or the corruption of its offiicials, views towards material goods in medieval Italian urban histories were neither wholly positive nor negative. Rather, the historiographic value of material goods was complex. The frequency with which wealth was a topic of discussion in civic histories highlights how the peninsula's inhabitants were coming to terms with the influx of wealth and the material goods they could acquire as members of their urban communities.

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.

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.