Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der ps.-plutarchischen Institutio Traiani, deren Existenz bisher allein durch 16 lateinische Fragmente im Policraticus des Johannes von Salisbury gesichert ist, haben sich in der neueren Forschung zwei gegenläufige Auffassungen herausgebildet.

Of the numerous criticisms and expressions of grievance directed at the Church in Germany on the eve of the Reformation, the most devastating was the charge of inadequate pastoral care. Reformers of all complexions bewailed the poor state of the parish clergy and the inadequate manner in which they provided for the spiritual needs of their flocks. At the very least, the parish clergy were ill-educated and ill-prepared for their pastoral tasks; at the very worst, they exploited those to whom they should have ministered, charging for their services, treating layfolk as merely a means of increasing their incomes, and, above all, resorting to the tyranny of the spiritual ban to uphold their position. The popular propaganda of the early Reformation fully exploited such deficiencies, exposing the decay in root and branch of a system of pastoral care depicted as no more than an empty shell, a facade of a genuine Christian cure of souls. The attack on the traditional Church was highly successful, successful enough to provoke an ecclesiastical revolution, and almost a socio-political revolution as well. It was, indeed, so successful that generations of historians of the Reformation have seen the condition of the pre-Reformation Church largely through the eyes of its critics and opponents. This negative image was matched by an idealized view of what succeeded it: where the old Church had failed the Christian laity, indeed, so much that they had virtually fallen into the hands of the Devil, the new Church offered solutions, a new way forward, a new standard of pastoral care and concern that created a new ideal, the Lutheran pastor, who cared for his flock as a kindly father, a shepherd who would willingly give up his life for his sheep.

Almost from their foundation, the mendicant orders proved problematic. Their insistence on poverty, their preaching skills, and their responsiveness to contemporary spirituality challenged the Church at many levels, providing standards against which the secular clergy might be judged and found wanting. Their dependence on papal privileges which limited episcopal oversight, and their claims to a special role as confessors and preachers, threatened the Church’s current order, especially in parishes. By undermining the parish priest’s authority — jurisdictionally by offering confession and absolution, financially by encouraging burial in their houses — the friars in fact undercut some of the aims of the early thirteenth-century reformers, most notably by disrupting the demands of Omnis utriusque sexus, the decree requiring annual confession to the ‘proprius sacerdos’, issued at the Fourth Lateran Council. The most important resolution of these ‘grass root’ problems was provided in Boniface VIII’s Super cathedram of 1300, which by 1326 applied to all four of the main mendicant orders, and formally became part of canon law when enshrined in the Clementines. Unfortunately, Super cathedram seemed incompatible with Omnis utriusque sexus, and debate on the resulting discrepancy persisted throughout the Middle Ages, despite attempts at resolution such as Vas electionis of 1321.

Born at Bridlington in 1136, William of Newburgh was educated at Newburgh, an Augustinian priory a few miles north of York, where he became a canon. William probably lived at Newburgh for the rest of his life, for the only instance of him travelling outside Yorkshire is one visit he paid to Fínchale. He died between summer 1199 and autumn 1201, leaving three extant writings. This outline of his life is based on John Gorman’s introduction to the only writing by William which has received a modern critical edition, his commentary on the Song of Songs. William’s other writings are sermons, and the Historia rerum Anglicarum (hereafter History). Yorkshire Cistercian patronage envelopes two of the works. The commentary on the Song of Songs is dedicated to Roger, Abbot of Byland, while the History is prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Ernald, Abbot of Rievaulx (1189-99), which states that Ernald had requested the work.

All too often neglected and overgrown, holy wells still dot the AA English countryside. Many more are merely a distant memory: names recorded by dead antiquarians, folklorists, and topographers and since forgotten, sites marked on Ordnance Survey maps soon to be obliterated by the encroaching urban and industrial world. Despite the heroic efforts of a group of local historians, this aspect of British heritage is in rapid decline. Those which have survived represent only a tiny fraction of the vast number that were scattered across the rural landscape on the eve of the Henrician Reformation. Wells were an integral part of the late medieval geography of the sacred, a matrix of ancient holy places where ordinary people could approach and invoke the divine. Casual weekend visits by ramblers and picnicking families are almost all that remains of the thriving culture of pilgrimage to such hallowed spots.

THE work of Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy, and John Walker in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the indefatigable A. G. Matthews and Charles Surman in the twentieth, has illuminated the history of the sufferings of the clergy ejected from their livings in the 1640s and 1650s, and of those who lost their livings at the Restoration and in its aftermath. The history of their families, however, is much less well known. This essay is concerned with the chronicling of the sufferings and with the economic and psychological plight of the families of the clergy ejected in the 1640s and 1650s.

The concept of Jewish serfdom has always figured prominently in interpretations of the medieval Jewish European past. It has seemed at once to hold the key to the understanding of Jewish status at both civil and ecclesiastical law and to mark in an especially dramatic way the degraded position (to some historians, a legal condition of rightlessness) forced on Jews in the period that witnessed a marked deterioration in their position in Christendom. ‘Crucial for an understanding of the entire Jewish position in the medieval world’, Salo Baron has written, summarizing a long-established interpretation, ‘is the institution of “Jewish serfdom”.’ And Gavin Langmuir sees the concept as dominating present historiography about the legal status of medieval Jews. This dominance, however, he has challenged: ‘To speak of Jews as royal serfs or “serfs” only obscures legal realities… Neither Jewish status in canon law nor Jewish status in secular law are accurately described as Jewish serfdom.’

The canonist John of Ayton was described by Maitland as being ‘a little too human to be strictly scientific’. His best-known work, the commentary on the legatine constitutions of Otto (1237) and Ottobuono (1268), was dubbed a ‘grumbling gloss’, which often became ‘a growl against the bad world in which he lives, the greedy prelates, the hypocritical friars, the rapacious officials’. But this, while it may not make him the ideal canonist, is precisely what makes a study of his view of society rewarding.

Among the best-known mediaeval women are literary and pictorial personifications of abstract concepts: Virtues and Vices, Fortune and Philosophy, and the Seven Liberal Arts. Male embodiments of these subjects are exceptional, flouting both iconographie convention and the gender of the Latin nouns. The artes liberales in particular might be expected to remain a female preserve. In literature, from their first appearance as personifications in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, they are uniformly female.

One of the questions that appeared in the theologians’ list of questions to be asked of suspected Lollards was ‘An reges et domini temporales existentes in peccato mortali eo ipso cadunt ab omni iure et titulo ad illa regna vel dominia.’ This question appears between one that enquires whether anyone may preach without authority from the pope or a bishop, and another that seeks to know whether the suspect considers that the laity may freely ad suum arbitrium correct and judge delinquent lords. At the same position in the longer list put together by a jurist appears a somewhat different question: ‘an domini temporales possunt ad arbitrium suum auferre bona temporalia ab ecclesia et a viris ecclesiasticis.’ Wyclif’s followers would have returned a positive answer to both questions, though the enthusiasm of their reply would have been the more audible for the second. Throughout the history of the movement Lollards were notable for the stridency of their objections to clerical prerogatives, and, especially in the view of their opponents, for their sympathy towards the secular rulers. Individual heretics and isolated texts applied Wyclif’s views of dominion to kings and secular lords, but the theory was undoubtedly primarily used against ecclesiastics. Academic debate of Wyclif’s theory of dominion was early, and the issue formed the heart of Gregory XI’s condemnation in 1377. But the question does not seem to have figured largely in the disputations that followed Wyclif’s departure from Oxford in 1381.

At the close of the eleventh century the region of north west France experienced a revival in popularity of the eremitical movement. Men and women seeking retirement from the world, withdrew to the seclusion of forests and wastelands where, dwelling in crudely constructed huts and living only on small provision, they devoted themselves to a life of voluntary poverty and simple piety. Robert of Arbrissel provides an example of one following the eremitical life. Having retired to the forest of Craon he lived under conditions of extreme austerity, seeking solitude and dedicating himself completely to the contemplation of God. While still practising his austerities in the forest he began his mission of preaching and very soon gathered around him people eager to hear his message. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss the influences and personal motivations which were at work in determining Robert’s career as a hermit and wandering preacher, aspects which I have examined elsewhere, but to provide an analysis of the impact Robert’s career may have had on others, and on women in particular.

The Cornificians, says John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon, find new laws for every subject of study in the schools; grammar is revised, dialectic altered, rhetoric despised, and ‘abandoning the rules of former masters’, they put forward ‘new ways’ for all the subjects of the quadrivium. In fact, they despise the real quadrivium, and prefer a quasi quadrivium in which the four ‘ways’ are ways of making money or influencing events: by entering the clerical or the medical profession, or seeking a position at Court, or becoming a merchant.

Although Jesus wept while mourning the inevitable destruction of the city (Luke 19. 41), and St Paul taught the Christians of Galaria to look for it not on earth, but in heaven (cf. Gal. 4.25-6), the Christian imagination has always been haunted by the city of Jerusalem. As early as the second century Melito of Sardis travelled to Jerusalem to see for himself ‘the place where these things were preached and done’. And as soon as Christianity became a licensed religion under the protection of the Emperor, Christians from all parts of the Empire began to flock to Jerusalem to see for themselves the holy sites ubi steterunt pedes eius, where once his feet stood (Ps. 132. 7) Churches were built to mark all the places mentioned in the Gospels, monasteries were founded to receive the pilgrims, and stories began to circulate about the spectacular conversions which happened to pilgrims while visiting the Holy Places, such as that of St Mary of Egypt who turned from a nymphomaniac into a desert mother on the very doorstep of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Quite soon earnest Church Fathers like St Jerome and St Gregory of Nyssa, both of them pilgrims to Jerusalem, had to issue dire warnings that true Christianity was a matter of the heart and not of geography, and that a trip to Palestine might perhaps be helpful but certainly not necessary in order to find Christ.

It has long been recognized that the mainspring of Bede’s intellectual work throughout his life was pastoral. Recently it has become increasingly apparent that his dedication to the continuing demands of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons was stimulated and informed by the ideas of Gregory the Great. What is less clear is the relationship between the great bulk of Bede’s exegetical writings and his conception of the precise needs of those priests and monks whom he was seeking to prepare for pastoral responsibility. He had a certain amount of immediate personal experience of the range of technical problems involved in communicating the essentials of Christian doctrine and liturgy to an illiterate people who were ignorant of Latin.

‘From the era of its first foundation, this has been the venue for the royal consecration, the burial place of kings, and the repository of the royal insignia, and deservedly named from ancient times as the (spiritual) head of England and the diadem of the realm.’ This claim, made on behalf of Westminster Abbey by the fifteenth-century monk John Flete, is examined here with reference to its history between the reign of Edward the Confessor and that of John.

The fifteenth century was a very important period in the history of the Polish State and nation. It had a particular significance for the development of national consciousness. The union of the Polish kingdom with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1385) changed not only the boundaries of this new and unified state called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also created new and specific conditions for the development of the nation. The different nationalities of the jagiellonian state, Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, and Armenians played an important role in the lively exchange of cultural experience on the basis of a sometimes uneasy partnership. Poland guaranteed privileges to the lords, both spiritual and temporal, to the gentry, and to the patricians, estates that had emerged in the course of the fourteenth century. These were united by common sentiment and desire for a strong political foundation. The urban and rural populations of both Polish and non-Polish speakers were bound together by loyalty to the Crown and its territory. Like other groups in late-medieval Europe they saw such a political union as advantageous.

The history of attitudes to marriage is a fashionable subject and has been so for some time. This does not mean that it is an overworked subject, for the field is large enough to provide work for many labourers. A corner of it which has scarcely been touched is the development of marriage doctrine in bible commentaries and sermons, two types of source which medievalists will always associate with Beryl Smalley. This paper deals only with the second class of source, but it is nevertheless about exegesis, since the sermons which will be examined have the pericope or Gospel reading of the marriage feast of Cana as their starting-point.

Let us briefly recall the point of departure for the history of the relations between the Church and the Polish nation in the ninth and tenth centuries, that is, at the time when a strong monarchy had been formed between the Vistula and the Oder rivers, within the borders approximating to those we see today. These centuries were decisive not only for Poland, but also for other central and east European countries—for Bohemia, Hungary, Kiev, Ruthenia, and also for Scandinavia. In all these countries the emergence of the state structure went together with the official adoption of Christianity by the rulers and the social élites. The authorities also saw to it that at least the minimum requirements of the new religion were introduced and observed throughout the population. Around AD 1000 the borders of European Christianity had expanded to a fairly impressive size, and therefore this is a moment of special significance in the history of the European community. Only relatively small areas of heathendom remained unaffected, particularly the region of the Baltic coast—and it was in this region where the last stage of European Christianization took place, namely, the baptism of Lithuania in 1386–7, whose six-hundredth anniversary we celebrated recendy.

We know from Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi that Anselm would eat little when he sat down to meals with his monks. Instead of having one of his monks read from an appropriate book at mealtimes, Anselm would instruct the community himself. Indeed, Anselm talked so much that, according to his biographer, it would take a separate book to record all that he said. In fact, Anselm’s sayings were collected, and it is to one of these that I wish to pay particular attention.