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.

This essay offers several reasons for reconsidering seventh-century Rome's reputation as a literary dark age. It provides close readings of several epigrams inscribed in Roman churches during and soon after the papacy of Honorius I (625–38) as evidence for a revived literary scene in the city during these years. It also argues that the intertextual maneuvers deployed by these epigrams suggest, contrary to current opinion, that Lucretius's De rerum natura had Roman readers in the early seventh century. Lucretius's “popularity” in contemporary Visigothic Spain; the likelihood that Honorius's younger contemporary and acquaintance, Jonas of Bobbio, was familiar with Lucretius; and the eventual presence of a (lost) manuscript of the De rerum natura in the library of the Bobbio monastery are enlisted in order to set both early seventh-century Rome and the De rerum natura in wider historical context. In general, this essay encourages the re-evaluation of the place of epigraphic poetry in our histories of late Latin literature and literary culture.

The “Defense of Medicine” prefaces the Codex Bambergensis Medicinalis 1, a Carolingian collection of medical texts. Some scholars have dismissed the Defense as an incoherent patchwork of quotations. Yet, missing from the literature is an adequate assessment of the Defense's arguments. This present study includes the first English translation accompanied by a complete source commentary, a prerequisite for valid content analysis. When read systematically and with attention to the author's use of sources, the Defense is limpid and cogent. Its first purpose is to defend the compatibility of Christian faith and secular medicine. Key propositions include the following: God made nature good, so the natural sciences are reconcilable with divine learning; scripture respects medicine; God expects the sick to avail of physicians and deserves honor for healings done through physicians. Counter-arguments used by the Defense's opponents, who rejected medicine on principle, can also be reconstructed from the text. Two further purposes of the Defense have hitherto been explored insufficiently. After justifying medicine, the Defense addresses sick patients. It encourages them that illness can be spiritually healthful, an instrument for curing their souls. The Defense then addresses caregivers. It tells them why they should succor the sick, even the poor: not for gain or fame, but in imitation of Christ and as if treating Christ himself, whose image the sick bear. The Defense thus contributes to the history of ideas on medicine, health, sickness, and the ethics of altruistic care.

The sixth-century Rule of Benedict became a foundational text for the practice of Christian monasticism in medieval Europe, but its utility extended outside of the monastery as well. In the Carolingian period church prelates repurposed parts of this influential monastic handbook for the purpose of pastoral care. In the decades around 800 CE, excerpts from the rule appeared in several composite manuscripts made for the instruction of parish priests and by extension their lay audiences. Benedict's fourth chapter on the “Instruments of Good Works” was deemed particularly useful in the context of preaching to lay people not only because of its ecumenical message to love God and one's neighbor but also due to its formulaic and repetitive idiom. This study examines the redeployment of extracts of the Rule of Benedict for the cura animarum in Carolingian parishes with particular attention to the role of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans (ca. 760–821) in disseminating Benedict's teachings beyond the walls of the cloister.

Hrabanus Maurus's Commentary on Matthew provides a lens through which to view the centrality of biblical studies to Carolingian reform initiatives. The commentary sits amid a burst of interest in Matthew's Gospel in the first quarter of the ninth century. It also occupies a central place in Hrabanus's program for clerical education and renewal. Hrabanus imagined the work as a user-friendly reference guide or introductory text and structured the commentary with highly sophisticated and complementary indexing, organizing, and searching features to privilege ease of use. Hrabanus's design allows for quick appreciation and simple interpretation of the Gospel's overall narrative structure, its principal episodes, and its individual verses. Moreover, Hrabanus took painstaking effort to document the numerous patristic sources upon which he drew in building the commentary, as well as to acknowledge when he contributed thoughts of his own. The manuscript record, epistolary remarks, sermon texts, and literary references — including in the vernacular — testify to broad dissemination and use of the commentary by Hrabanus's network of patrons, peers, and students across Frankish Europe. Attention to the structure, content, and influence of the commentary expands scholarly appreciation of Hrabanus's genius beyond his achievements as an abbot and bishop or as a prolific biblical exegete, to include resourcefulness and practicality in teaching. Moreover, the study illumines the close association Carolingian leaders saw between biblical studies and broader cultural renewal along with the networks connecting leaders across the Frankish world as they reflected upon and promoted reform.

Much is known about processions within the Roman liturgy, but the processions of the Old Hispanic rite practiced in most of Christian Iberia until ca. 1080 have not been studied. Explicit evidence about Old Hispanic processional characteristics and liturgical contexts is preserved in manuscript rubrics. Processions happened around or during Mass (for example, on Palm Sunday), at the end of Vespers or Matutinum (for example, the consecration of a basilica), or outside the usual daily liturgy (for example, votive ordos). We have collated all of the extant Old Hispanic rubrics pertaining to liturgical movement. Some of these unquestionably refer to processions, while others describe ceremonies that might better be described more informally as “liturgy in motion.” We focus primarily on the processional rubrics, while also engaging with other liturgical movement. We identify the chant genres associated with processions and outline the processional practices attested in the rubrics.

The essay analyzes the formation of the oft-cited trope of the image engraved (or painted) in the heart, topical in the Sicilian lyric of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which it re-discusses a painstaking issue of Aristotelian physiology. The trope of the “pintura nel core” (figure in the heart), as described in Giacomo da Lentini's Meravigliosa⋅mente and Madonna mia, a voi mando, is immediately assimilated to the faculty of memory, and the human ability to represent external reality by means of signa. This process of formation that happens in the heart and allows the poet to fall in love is reworked in the image of the “pintura” carved like a seal into wax. The lexical choices of Giacomo's poems point to an Aristotelian understanding of sense perception, centered around the key role of the heart, dependent upon the fluidity of its bodily part, and resulting in an internal representation of phenomenal reality. The link between love lyric poetry and physiological learning shows the interdependence of these two fields of medieval culture, and the ways in which a debated scientific issue can be illuminated by the comparative analysis of vernacular literature and philosophical investigation. Giacomo's reworking of these Aristotelian physiological tenets testifies to his poetical ability to engage with medicine and aesthetic representation.

This article presents Augustine's De civitate Dei 11.2 as a valuable but overlooked source of influence on Bonaventure's making of the Itinerarium mentis in Deum. First, a detailed exposition analyzes the structure and content of Augustine's compact mystical treatise on the “ascent of the mind to God” located at the turning points of his magnum opus. Second, a study of the prologue of the Itinerarium mentis in Deum demonstrates how this passage informed Bonaventure's conception of his unique project. Third, the article offers support for his explicit reception of De civitate Dei — and Book 11 in particular — through an annotated summary of Bonaventure's references to the work in his earlier and later written corpus. Initial findings present how Anonymi Contra philosophos appears to have functioned as a privileged point for reception of De civitate Dei 11.2 among the early Franciscans scholastics from Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and Matthew of Aquasparta. The present research also offers a fresh case study through which to modify the central claims of Lydia Schumacher's scholarship on the Bonaventurean use of Augustine and the nature of early Franciscan theology. The closing section explores some of the possible influences shaping this approach. Finally, this article invites medievalists to expand their expectations of how De civitate Dei 11 may have communicated Augustine's thought through diverse forms of Franciscan reception and wide-ranging applications beyond the academy.

The present article presents the theory of the Franciscan master John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308) on the so-called “state of innocence,” namely the condition in which human beings lived before the first sin. The state of innocence is characterized by the gift of original justice, guaranteeing harmony between the soul's powers and immortality. Derived from traditional Christian anthropology, Scotus's description offers a chance for dialogue with the masters of the second half of the thirteenth century, among them Henry of Ghent, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure. Because of the theological orientation of Scotus's explanation, human beings as outlined by him are simultaneously naturally good and in need of divine gifts to reach their very end. Through a new interpretation of modality, Scotus's position is better able to express certain conditions related to power/possibility within the state of innocence.

The contemporary efflorescence of comprehensive codicological and paleographical scholarship, supported by the swelling digitalization of extant manuscripts, allows a statistical and cultural analysis of the audience for two popular funeral orations from the early Italian Renaissance. In 1417 Poggio Bracciolini eulogized Cardinal Francesco Zabarella at the Council of Constance, and in 1418 Leonardo Giustiniani commemorated Admiral Carlo Zeno before the assembled Venetian oligarchy. The material evidence of the codices suggests that educational concerns often prompted the copying of both orations. They were generally preserved among the texts of ubiquitous miscellanies that were written on paper by more than one hand. Over 25 percent of the manuscripts belonged to professional humanists and university students. Though the contents of a miscellaneous codex are at least in part spontaneous, those with the orations of Poggio and Giustiniani had a core of works that suggest an evolving textbook of rhetorical models for public speaking. The young humanist orators presented Zabarella and Zeno as committed public servants faithful in deed to the values that they advocated. Poggio offered Zabarella as a model for the reformed cleric. As a leading churchman, Zabarella had a powerful impact on the Council where he promoted unity and grounded his pleas on the ethos of his pedagogical and pastoral service. Zeno emerged as a contrast to the typical military commander because he was as esteemed for his counsel as he was for his courage. The admiral did not shy away from combat, but he won more impressive victories through his humane clemency. Both the cardinal and the admiral embodied the Ciceronian ideal that we are not born for ourselves alone.

This article is dedicated to Liesbeth van Houts, editor of the Gesta Normannorum ducum, generous mentor, colleague, and friend.

This article offers an analysis, edition, and translation of the Brevis cronica compendiosa ducum Normannie, a historiographical account of the dukes of Normandy and their deeds, written at the turn of the fifteenth century by the Norman jurist and man of letters, Simon de Plumetot (1371–1443). Having all but escaped the attention of modern scholars, this study is the first to examine and publish the Brevis cronica. It not only demonstrates that the work is of greater importance than its rather scrappy form might at first suggest, but it also looks to place the text within the broader context of Simon's literary and bibliophilic practices and to determine its raison d’être. In doing so, it argues that the Brevis cronica was perhaps created as part of a much larger historiographical project, namely an extended chronicle of Normandy, written in the vernacular, the text of which is now lost. By exploring these important issues, the article sheds new light on a wide range of topics, from early humanist book collecting to the writing of history in France in the later Middle Ages.