In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in his Diatessaron — as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.

La noción de cosas indiferentes (adiaphora) ocupa un lugar no del todo marginal en la historia intelectual de Occidente. Pues si bien es cierto que no estamos con ella ante uno de los hilos conductores de la historia de la filosofía, la idea de que existan ciertas cosas, actos o doctrinas indiferentes evidentemente se relaciona con muchos de los grandes temas de la tradición filosófica: la demarcación de algo como indiferente puede ser el camino para detectar por vía negativa lo que sí importa, y puede también desempeñar un significativo papel en la fundamentación de la tolerancia. El presente artículo busca sacar a la luz la posición de Agustín ante las distintas ramificaciones del problema.

The reform movement of the later tenth and early eleventh centuries distinguishes itself from other such episodes in monastic history not so much by its impact on the existence of ecclesiastical communities throughout western Europe as by its diversity. Whereas Cluny, Gorze, and the movements initiated or inspired by William of Volpiano, Romuald of Camaldoli, Johannes of Vallombrosa, and Peter Damian have rightly attracted the most interest from scholars, there existed a number of regional movements led by individuals with a reformist agenda, carried out with as much determination, and with results as significant as their international counterparts. One such example is that of the so-called Lotharingian reforms initiated by Richard, abbot of Saint-Vanne (d. 1046), which, over the course of the first half of the eleventh century, spread across large parts of the archbishoprics of Reims, Metz, and Cologne. The exact nature of the movement has long been a subject of debate, with Kassius Hallinger proposing controversially to designate it as a Mischobservanz, or mixed observance, based primarily on the customs observed at Cluny and Gorze. The current consensus, however, seems to be that the “Richardian” understanding of monastic life was indeed original and that, like other movements of its time, it originated in a genuine reflection on ways to return to a more authentic experience of the vita regularis. To achieve this goal, Richard and his principal collaborator Poppo, abbot of Stavelot (d. 1048), introduced groups of monks and former canons to their interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict, fostered the creation of collective identities around the figure of patron saints, intervened in the production of scriptoria and the creation of libraries, rationalized the monastic economy, and generally attempted to create a more favorable legal and political situation for the communities coming under their care.

Egyptian days were one of the most enduring forms of calendrical prognostication in the ancient and medieval worlds. The Romans called these calendrical omens evil, dark, or ominous days (dies ægri, atri, mali, maledicti, ominosi, infortunati, and tenebrosi), and dies aegyptiaci at least by the fourth century C.E. There were twenty-four Egyptian days, two each month, recurring annually. In time, each day was paired with a particular hour viewed as dangerous, suspect, or inauspicious (hora suspecta, aegra, mala, timenda, or even unica). People who feared Egyptian days were bowing to the weight of tradition, much as someone today might have a superstitious fear of Friday the 13th. This article will focus on the role of cultural memory in providing a rationale for a belief in Egyptian days, and on mnemonic aids that were used to remember where they would fall during the calendar year. Special attention will be devoted to an obscure set of mnemonic verses with the incipit Armis gunfe, which the astronomer Johannes de Sacrobosco (Sacro Busto) (ca. 1195–ca. 1256?) disseminated in Paris around 1235. We will consider how these verses circulated in writing and were applied in practice.

“Two angels shall lead him,” predicts The Prophecy of the True Emperor, offering signs by which the people will recognize a foreordained holy leader, sent to restore a divided, besieged, and weakened Christendom. Although this prophecy, which was translated from Greek into Latin in the second half of the thirteenth century, spoke only of an emperor, western Christians soon came to ignore or even change the word “emperor,” preferring to read the text as a prophecy concerning the papacy. The peculiar reception of that prophecy cannot be understood apart from a crucial conceptual development that occurred in Italy during the years surrounding the turn of the fourteenth century. Whereas many thirteenth-century hopes and fears of the future were expressed through the medium of prophetic writings, these texts mainly emphasized the influence of the emperor and other secular rulers on the future course of history, for better or for worse. However, the election of the hermit Peter of Murrone as Pope Celestine V in 1294 offered unprecedented hope — especially among groups of Spiritual Franciscans — that the papacy would become the vehicle of social, moral, and spiritual reform. So great the hope, so great the disillusionment, for Celestine stepped down a few months later. He was replaced and imprisoned by Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303), who shared none of his predecessor's sympathy for the Spirituals or their ideals. In the wake of this turmoil was born a prophetic narrative according to which the papacy first had to be usurped by one or more wicked popes before finally being restored by a particularly virtuous one. The latter would be no ordinary pretender to the throne of Peter, subject to the political machinations of cardinals and barons, for he would be elected by divine providence and crowned by an angel (Fig. 1). Thus originated the concept of the angel pope, the pastor angelicus, which was to remain a powerful image of dissent and reform in the following centuries.

MS Vat. Gr. 915 (bombyc., ca. 266 × 170 mm, 258 fols.) is a most interesting collection of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek poetry (from Homer and Hesiod to Pindar, from Theocritus and Lycophron down to Moschus and Musaeus) put together during the early Palaeologan Renaissance, more exactly between the last years of the thirteenth century and 1311 (the terminus ante quem is provided by the subscription on fol. 258v). The contents of this codex as well as the textual facies of several of its items have led various scholars, each from a different perspective, to conclude that it was produced in the circle of Maximus Pianudes, the most outstanding Greek scholar of his age (of which he is also in a sense the “eponymous hero”); more on this will be said below in §3.

The notion of natural “occult” is usually viewed by modern scholars as a tautological way of dealing with phenomena for which there was no current explanation. Consider how Molière mocks scholastic medicine in the “Intermède” of Le malade imaginaire when he gives the Bachelierus a silly answer to the question of why opium makes one sleep: “quia est in eo virtus dormitiva / Cujus est natura / Sensus assoupire.” Opium makes one sleep because it has a sleep-inducing power; its nature is to make “the senses drowsy.” The words of Molière's Bachelierus are strikingly similar to what Augustine writes in the City of God (21, 7) concerning natural things that are endowed with extraordinary properties: “So for the other cases, irksome to rehearse, in which an unusual power seems to be present contrary to nature, yet no other explanation is given except to say such is their nature. No doubt their explanation is short, and still it answers enough.” Obviously, however, the very meaning of Augustine's statement is just the opposite of Molière's. In Augustine's view, the answer is “short,” because the real and only cause is God himself; nature is only an illusory cause. For Molière, the Bachelierus's answer is inane, because it seems to give a scientific explanation but in fact says nothing and certainly does not look for the true natural causes. But between Augustine and Molière there was scholastic science, in which the virtus occulta was not a mere tautological statement but a real explanation based on a coherent conception of nature.

During the century before the Reformation, lay elites on the Italian peninsula composed a striking number of classicizing Latin texts about the saints. These narratives are little known, although some — for example, Leonardo Giustiniani's life of St. Nicholas, Francesco Diedo's vita of St. Roch, and Giovanni Calfurnio's passion of Simon of Trent — went into print early and have thus been more or less available for centuries. Others, such as Giovanni Carrara's life of Clare of Montefalco, have been recovered and edited only recently. Some remain unstudied, even unrecognized — among them Nicolaus Secundinus's translation of a Greek account of Gregory Nazianzus. Yet others depend on an uncertain manuscript tradition (such as George of Trebizond's passion of Andrew of Chios) or are lost entirely (e.g., Pier Candido Decembrio's life of Ambrose). I propose here that the authorial ambitions, the details of style and content, and the complications of context embodied in this minor literature make it very much worth knowing.