Richard Jasper Durling (1932–1999) made many important contributions to the study of the Latin tradition and critical edition of the works of Galen (AD 129–216), the Greek physician who was a notable figure in the history of medicine from late antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Sometime around 400 BC Hippias of Elis assembled the first cumulative list of victors in the Olympic Games. In the centuries that followed the victor list was regularly updated and widely circulated. The enduring popularity of Olympic victor lists, which the Greeks called Olympionikai, was due to the fact that, by the fourth century BC, numbered Olympiads and the names of Olympic stadion victors became a standard means of identifying individual years. (The stadion, a footrace over a distance of roughly 200 meters, was the signature event of the ancient Olympics.) The Olympic victor list thus became a basic chronological referent that was used by Greeks across much of the Mediterranean basin.

A unique set of ritual prayers from tenth-century Northumbria offered the means to protect fields and crops from birds, vermin, and other demonically inspired threats to the agricultural community. They were part of a series of additions made to the Durham Collectar or Ritual (Durham, Cathedral Library A.IV.19) around 970 by the Chester-le-Street scriptorium of St. Cuthbert's community, under the direction of Aldred, the eccentric glossator of the Lindisfarne Gospels. These five Latin prayers glossed in Old English use exorcistic and benedictional formulas, invoke the assistance of an Archangel Panchiel, and contain atypical references to the Book of Tobit, among other unusual characteristics. This seemingly heterodox material has received scant attention from scholars assessing the Durham Ritual manuscript and the work of Aldred. These prayers, however, may reflect the particular interests of the cult of St. Cuthbert, as well as Irish influences in Northumbrian religious practice. Also, a comparable example of one prayer appears in a contemporary Mainz text related to the early development of the Romano-Germanic Pontifical, suggesting that these prayers were part of a larger process, often invisible, of liturgical experimentation during a period of reform and regularization. The prayers read:

Around the year 1200 there appeared a Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's De mineralibus, in which the author denied the possibility of the transmutation of metals. This statement, especially when placed in the mouth of the revered Aristotle, was a severe blow to the aim of the alchemists. Indeed it had been Aristotle's theory of the generation of metals in his Meteorologica and his theory of a common origin of all metals that had encouraged the alchemists in their efforts to transmute base metals into gold. This pseudo-Aristotelian challenge to the truth of alchemy seems to have elicited at least one previously unrecognized response. In a short treatise, tucked away in a sixteenth-century manuscript of alchemical miscellany, an anonymous author quotes “Aristotle” saying that the species of metals cannot be transformed or transmuted, but includes the proviso, also taken from Aristotle: unless they be reduced to their primary matter. This materia prima is identified by our author as the moistness that comes from water, water whose creative power our author grounds in Holy Scripture, especially in the hexaemeral tradition of the story of creation from the book of Genesis.

El objetivo del presente artículo es poner de manifiesto algunas fuentes hasta ahora no señaladas del libro 1 del Chronicon Mundi de Lucas de Tuy. Esta obra es la primera de las grandes obras historiográficas hispanolatinas del s. XIII. La comienza a redactar su autor a partir de 1230 y la concluye hacia 1237. Sólo nueve años más tarde, y tomándola ya de fuente para muchos de sus capítulos, el arzobispo de Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada concluye su De rebus Hispanie, la segunda de las grandes historias escritas en el siglo XIII. Lucas de Tuy, nacido en León posiblemente y a finales del s. XII, fue diácono del monasterio San Isidoro de Léon y posteriormente canónigo. Viajó a lo largo de su vida por muchos lugares, París, Roma, Grecia e incluso Constantinopla y los Santos Lugares. En 1239 fue nombrado obispo de Tuy, junto al río Miño, en la frontera con Portugal, de donde el gentilicio de Tudense. De su mano salieron el mencionado Chronicon Mundi y otras dos obras más: el De altera vita, conocido también como Adversus albigensium errores libri III, pero que en realidad más que ir contra posibles albigenses leoneses, en realidad versa sobre un conjunto de filósofos de León autoproclamados “filosofos naturales,” cuyos nombres nos resultan desconocidos y seguidores del averroísmo más avanzado, y ello mucho antes del apogeo del averroísmo en Europa; y el De miraculis sancti Isidori, obra sobre los milagros del santo obispo de Sevilla, en razón de la cual se le han atribuido la Historia translationis sancti Isidori y una Vita sancti Isidori. Pero su obra fundamental, al menos por lo que a la historiografía se refiere, es el Chronicon Mundi.

Although the study of high- and late-medieval eschatological prophecy has gained considerable momentum in the last few decades, much ground-level work remains to be done. A case in point is the state of knowledge concerning a prophetic vision attributed to “John, Hermit of the Asturias,” published in 1941 in Alsace by the Franciscan scholar Livarius Oliger. Because no sustained treatment of this thirteenth-century text has appeared since then, Oliger's publication has remained the sole point of reference. But it is inadequate. Oliger was unable to identify the author of the text or to come within decades of a correct dating. He was also unaware of much relevant data. Whereas he knew of only two independent manuscript copies of the vision and a version included in a life of Saint Dominic, I have identified four more manuscript copies, as well as a misplaced one and a substantial passage from the vision in a fourteenth-century treatise. Given that the text is a revealing document concerning the religious history of the second quarter of the thirteenth century, it is time to return to it.

The intentional distinction is commonly and rightly recognized as one of the hallmarks of the metaphysics of Henry of Ghent. Raymond Macken, for example, says, “Comme Ton sait, la distinction intentionnelle est une théorie bien caractéristique de Henri de Gand.” He adds that it bears the influence of Avicenna and contributes to the view of John Duns Scotus. On the contrary, he notes, “La distinction réelle est une doctrine tout aussi charactéristique de S. Thomas.” Certainly the real distinction between essence and existence in creatures is characteristic of the metaphysics of St. Thomas, but Henry too has real distinctions in his metaphysics. However, what Henry means by a real distinction is something quite different from what St. Thomas and his followers mean by a real distinction. So too, it is not really helpful to say that Henry considers the intentional distinction “comme une sorte de distinction intermédiaire entre la distinction réelle et la distinction de pure raison,” unless one is clear about what a real distinction and a purely rational distinction are in the thought of the philosopher in question. It is also commonly recognized, as Macken notes, that “Henri, dans ses questions consacrées à cette distinction intentionelle entre l'essence et l'existence, n'attaquait pas en premier lieu Thomas d'Aquin, mais bien Gilles de Rome, ou plutôt, qu'il répondait à ses attaques.” Macken even goes so far as to claim that “la distinction intentionnelle est donc une sorte de distinction réelle,” although he admits that “elle a donc un certain lien avec la distinction de raison.”

Proh dolor quantum refert in quae tempora vel optimi cuiusque virtus incidat.