Repeatedly in recent times attention has been called to the frequent use of the Christus medicus theme by St. Augustine. When a lucky archaeological discovery, made at Timgad in the spring of 1919, brought to light the fragment of an inscription, containing an invocation to Christ the Physician, P. Monceaux, in discussing the rare find, noted not only the popularity of the concept in Christian Africa in general since the days of Tertullian, but also its extremely frequent use by St. Augustine in particular, calling it ‘un thème dominant dans la prédication du grand évêque d'Hippone.’ He listed eight examples from St. Augustine's sermons, in which the notion of Christ the Physician, employed allegorically or metaphorically, to describe Him as the Divine Healer of mankind's spiritual diseases, occurs rather conspicuously. Monceaux's statement was repeated by J. Carcopino, H. Leclercq, and L. Olschki, all of whom refer to the texts collected by him. M. E. Keenan pointed out two allusions to Christ as the Divine Physician in St. Augustine's letters though the passages quoted by her refer rather to deus medicus than to Christus medicus. In a later study on ‘Augustine and the Medical Profession,' she excluded expressly allusions to Christus medicus ‘because of their frequency and unvarying character.’ The collection of pertinent texts has considerably been enlarged by J. Mohan who, in studying the titles applied to Christ by St. Augustine in connection with his Christological and soteriological doctrine, devotes two pages to discussing the Christus medicus metaphor, used by the great Doctor of the Church to explain the Mystery of the Redemption. The author owes the additional texts especially to Dom G. Morin's monumental edition of those of St. Augustine's sermons which have been discovered after the Maurists’ edition. P Mention must also be made of the valuable collection of texts by A. Koch in the section ‘Christus der Arzt’ of his Homiletisches Handbudi. Finally, in the list of pertinent texts given by the ThLL, s.v. medicina and medicus, St. Augustine easily holds the first place among those Patristic writers of the West who made use of the Christus medicus figure.

The custom of medieval commentators on classical authors of prefixing to their works a schema generally called an accessus has long been known. In such a prefatory note they treated of items such as the following: vita auctoris, titulus operis, intentio scribentis, materia operis, utilitas, and cui parti philosophiae supponatur In different works the number of these items might be curtailed or expanded, but the common purpose of providing an introductory summary to the work in question, is present in all forms of the accessus.

Students of the history of Greek procedure generally hold that public administration of justice originated in a prehistoric habit of settling disputes between individuals by voluntary waiving self-help and resorting to arbitration. This ancient custom is supposed to have been gradually developed into a system under which the parties were denied the right to seek realization of their claims by private force and compelled to submit their cases to authorities designated and empowered to try the claims and hand down binding judgments. Litigants are believed to have been forced by an ever increasing pressure of public opinion, as well as by the growing power of the rulers, to refrain from armed feud and blood-vengeance, and to seek the decision of the princes who by virtue of their social and personal preponderance were predestined to act as arbitrators. After the consolidation of the state, their jurisdiction, according to the prevailing theory, became a legal institution and passed, after the abolishment of the early monarchy, to the aristocratic city magistrates, and later, in the democracies, to the popular courts. As an intermediate stage, the existence of a system of ‘obligatory arbitration’, indirectly enforced by the public disapproval of those not complying with it, has been suggested for the type of society known from Hesiod's Works and Days.

The history of Latin Aristotelianism reaches roughly from Boethius to Galileo — from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Whereas the early Middle Ages knew only a part of Aristotle's logic, the whole Aristotelian corpus became known in the period around 1200. From the middle of the thirteenth century to the end of the Middle Ages, and in some circles even beyond, the influence of these works was decisive both for the system of education and for the development of philosophy and natural science.

The years between 1146 and 1148 were signalized in the annals and chronicles of Medieval Europe by Christian campaigns on all fronts against the surrounding pagans and Moslems. The most important of these was directed towards the Holy Land, against the Moslems, who had recently seized Edessa. It consisted of no less than five expeditions. The two largest armies, commanded by the Emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France, followed the same route overland across the Balkans to Constantinople; both met with crushing defeats in Asia Minor and finally reached the Holy Land, as best they could, by land and sea. A third force, under Amadeus III of Savoy, moved down Italy, crossed from Brindisi to Durazzo, and joined the army of Louis at Constantinople late in 1147. In August of the same year a naval expedition led by Alfonso of Toulouse left the South of France and arrived in Palestine probably in the spring of 1148. At the same time, a joint Anglo-Flemish naval force sailed along the north coast of Europe, assisted the King of Portugal in the capture of Lisbon, proceeded around the peninsula early in 1148, attacked Faro, and presumably reached the Holy Land later that year. Meanwhile, in the northeast, four armies co-operated in a campaign against the pagan Wends across the river Elbe: a Danish army joined the Saxons under Henry the Lion and Archbishop Adalbero of Bremen in an attack on Dubin; another, larger, army led by Albert the Bear of Brandenburg and many other temporal and spiritual lords advanced against Demmin and Stettin; a fourth expedition, finally, under a brother of the Duke of Poland attacked from the southeast. In 1148, on the south shore of the Mediterranean, a powerful fleet under George of Antioch extended the control of Roger II of Sicily over the entire littoral from Tripoli to Tunis. In the West, four campaigns were directed against the crumbling power of the Almoravides. The Genoese in 1146 sacked Minorca and besieged Almeria. During the following year, the Emperor Alfonso VII of Castile advanced south through Andalusia and captured Almeria with the aid of a strong Genoese fleet, which in 1148 sailed north and joined the Count of Barcelona in his campaign against Tortosa. In the previous year, Alfonso Henriques of Portugal had captured Santarem and secured the assistance of the Anglo-Flemish fleet for an attack on Lisbon, which fell late in 1147.

The ideas expressed by the names of Microcosmus and Macrocosmus have never lost their attraction for speculative minds since the time they first made their appearance in early Greek philosophy. There have been ages in which these ideas receded more or less into the background, others in which they played a rather dominating rôle. It seems worth while to inquire into the nature of these ideas and to study the spirit of those ages which felt them congenial to their total mentality. One might also try to determine those notions and principles with which the idea of the microcosm came to be associated during its long history. Even a superficial survey of the ages to which the notion of microcosm particularly appealed, and of the ideas with which it entered into combinations, seems to show that this idea might be considered as a kind of “symptom”, a characteristic to be found mainly with a certain type of historical mentality.

It is a widely held view that by the beginning of the Christian era the staging of full-length dramas had become very rare or had ceased altogether, and that any plays that were written during this time, like the ten 'Senecan’ plays that survive, were probably intended as no more than closet dramas. But the question of whether such plays were ever staged (and hence the question of whether they were intended to be staged or were even stageable) is complicated by the fact that the word ‘tragedy’ was also applied to other forms of dramatic performances: to the ballet of the pantomime artist (tragoedia saltata) and to short concert productions (tragoedia cantata). There was also the citharoedia, a solo performance which consisted of a tragic aria accompanied by the lyre. Finally, the traditional kind of tragedy could be recited rather than staged. Each of these kinds of performances could take place in or out of the theater, with varying degrees of elaboration. When, therefore, an ancient writer speaks of the performance of a tragedy, it is not always clear just what type of production is being alluded to. When, for instance, Dio Cassius says that the Emperor Caligula just before his assassination (A.D. 41) wished to put on a ballet and enact a tragedy (ϰαὶ ὀϱχήσασθαι ϰαὶ τϱαγῳδίαν ὑποϰϱίνασθαι ἠθέλησεν) and announced that the revels would be prolonged three more days for the purpose, what does he mean ? Was there to be only one kind of performance or two? That is, were the pantomimus and his hypocritae to dance and act a single tragedy, or was a story to be rendered first in dance, and then the same or another story acted out in dialogue and song? If the latter supposition is correct, was the tragedy to be a large-scale play or a modified and shortened concert tragedy? We know from Suetonius that the same play could be conceived of as being performed in different ways. He says that on the day before Caligula was killed, the pantomimus Mnester danced the same tragedy that the tragoedus Neoptolemus had acted in the games at which Philip of Macedon was killed. Of course, in judging this matter we must also consider the question of how accurately the conceptions and practices reported by Suetonius (ca. 120) and Dio (ca. 220) correspond to those of Caligula's time.

The conflicts commonly known as feuds, private wars (guerres privées), or vendettas constituted an important type of recurrent political process in Northern France during the later eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries, as well as in earlier and later periods. Because the conflicts to which medievalists have applied these terms could take different forms and cannot be routinely distinguished from other sorts of disputes and because at least one of the most common medieval terms for ‘feud’ — namely werra or guerre — covered such a wide and variable field of meaning, no rigorous definition of the medieval French feud for our period can now be formulated, or, perhaps, should ever be proposed. Nevertheless, the conflicts analyzed in this study of feuding and peace–making in the Touraine during the years around 1100 had several identifiable traits in common. The combatants were adult or at least adolescent males who came from relatively restricted and elevated social circles. A few were the lords of castles. The others, at least some of whom were explicitly identified as ‘noble,’ can generally be identified as the tenants or clients of castellans and/or as the men of a particular castle. All these men carried on feuds as members of armed groups, not as isolated individuals. While taking many different actions in feuds and striving for various goals through this political process, their avowed objective throughout these conflicts was to gain revenge for an alleged injury. This they tried to achieve by expressing, in conventionalized and well–understood ways, their hatred and loathing for their enemies and their anger. Nevertheless, because the opposing parties to feuds were never complete strangers to one another, but belonged to the same loosely defined regional community, conflicts of this kind could, in theory, be ended or at least temporarily halted in such a way as to create or restore amicable relations between groups that had previously been at war. Whether in practice such settlements could actually be established and create real social peace is another matter.

Olympiodorus of Thebes is an important figure for the history of late antiquity. The few details of his life preserved as anecdotes in his History give glimpses of a career which embraced the skills of poet, philosopher, and diplomat. A native of Egypt, he had influence at the imperial court of Constantinople, among the sophists of Athens, and even outside the borders of the empire. His History (more correctly, his “materials for history”) is lost, surviving only as fragments in the narratives of Zosimus, Sozomen, and Philostorgius, and in the rich summary given by the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius. These remains comprise the most substantial narrative sources for events in the western Roman Empire in the early fifth century. Besides its value as a source, the History is important as a monument to the vitality of the belief in the unity of the Roman Empire under the Theodosian dynasty. Olympiodorus wrote in Greek, and knowledge of his work is attested only in Constantinople, yet his political narrative, from 407 to 425, concerns only events in the western half of the empire. To understand the significance of these facts, it is necessary to set the composition of Olympiodorus's work in its proper context. Clarifying the date of publication is the first step toward this goal. Internal and external evidence suggests that the work was written in 440 or soon after, more than a decade later than the date of composition usually accepted. Taken with thematic emphases evident in the structure of the History, this revised dating explains why an eastern writer should have written a detailed account of western events in the early part of the century. Olympiodorus's account is a characteristic product of the highly literate class of eastern imperial civil servants, and of their genuine preoccupation with the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire at a time when both were threatened by the rise of the new Carthaginian power of the Vandals.

There exists a large, remarkably homogeneous literature on the conflict between paganism and Christianity in the last decades of the fourth century. This study is a preliminary attempt to re-examine that conflict and point out new lines for interpretation of familiar evidence. A redefinition of our conceptions of what paganism was at this period will be followed by a close study of the men and events around whom the traditional narratives of its last revivals have been constructed. A concluding section will outline the ways in which, according to the new definitions proposed here, paganism may be said to have survived its apparent destruction.

The noted Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth, in a seldom quoted but highly provocative essay, argued some forty years ago that medieval European Christendom conceived of the Jew not as an infidel who had failed to perceive the truth of Christianity but rather as a deliberate unbeliever, one who knew the truth but refused to accept its consequences. Only if the Jews of first-century Palestine had recognized Jesus as their redeemer, Roth claimed, could medieval churchmen have sought proof for Christian beliefs in the Talmud and Midrash; and only a people deemed willfully evil could have been charged with the unnatural atrocities that medieval Europeans attributed to the Jews: host-desecration, well-poisoning, and ritual murder. To be sure, cautioned Roth, not all medieval Christians could have viewed the Jews in precisely this way. Popes and emperors often expended considerable energy to controvert such popular opinion. ‘But it must have been a very widespread conception, particularly among the less educated; and it explains a good deal in the medieval religious mentality which otherwise remains incomprehensible.’

Two passages in the sermons of Bishop Caesarius of Arles († 542) have aroused the special interest of philologists and students of the history of religion alike. The first passage is found in the concluding section of a sermon in which the bishop scathingly criticizes some superstitions and heathen customs which, to all appearances, were still rife among the common people of his day.

In an article published in 1927, Herbert Meyer showed that the Germanic legal system possessed from an early epoch, perhaps from its very beginning, in the form of friedelehe a type of marital union which was characterized by the legal equality of husband and wife, in contrast with the muntehe in which the wife was legally subject to her husband. This important discovery implied that the distinction made in Roman law between marriage with manus and “free marriage” no longer stood alone. In fact the coexistence, in many known legal systems, of several types of marital relation—differing from one another in their effect upon the relationship between the wife, her husband and his family—may now be considered as established. The theory was first proposed by Meyer himself, who called attention to similar phenomena in a number of legal systems, Indo-European as well as non-Indo-European, in addition to the Roman and the Germanic; and it was later extended by Koschaker in his broad investigation into the “Eheformen bei den Indogermanen.”

The tradition of Roger Bacon's Opus maius has many confusing aspects. No single MS contains all parts of the work, and several parts are transmitted separately, out of their original context and in different versions. Several reasons can be given for this confusion. One reason is that Bacon himself incorporated the same material into different projects and on each occasion adjusted the material to its new environment. Similarly, as he informs us, the text of the Opus maius itself was the outcome of several drafts. Another reason is the sheer bulk of the Opus maius. When Bacon sent it off to the pope he had to divide it into four separate volumes.

This is the first of several essays investigating the continuity of literary theory and of the principles which may account for its development. While critical terminologies change as they respond to problems emerging from the immediate historical process, a continuity, nevertheless, may be observed in the necessity for literary theory to take account of certain persistent relationships which underlie all intellectual disciplines. Among others, for instance, is the epistemological relation of the concept itself to the materials out of which it is formed and to the functions which it is subsequently to fulfil. Although the type of materials and functions will vary with the subject under consideration, the relation of the mental construct to its sources of sensation and to its role in the formation of knowledge remains relatively constant. The relation of the poet's mind, for instance, to its ethical materials, as described by Sidney, is strikingly near to the relation of the natural philosopher's mind to his data as described by Francis Bacon. Bacon seeks a ‘middle course [ratio media]’ between the rationalistic spider and the empirical ant, and finds that the bee ‘gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.’ The bee goes about the true business of the scientist and represents ‘a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational, (such as has never yet been made) …. ’ The ratio media in Bacon's material holds a position analogous to that of poetry in Sidney's: the balance between philosophical precept and historical example. This middle way is new, Bacon says, in the scientific method; it defines the intention of literary discourse, however, from its very origins, as I shall try to show, as well as a relationship which literary theory continually attempts to reestablish.

In an excellent article, ‘Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought,’ Ernst H. Kantorowicz has recently called attention to the importance of the concept of patria in the rise of the national monarchy and state in the later Middle Ages. No correction is needed, nor, perhaps, any addition. But since he modestly admits that he did not mean to exhaust the subject and does not examine the two laws, and since I had begun to note occasional remarks in the canonists and legists about the patria in association with theories of public law and the state, I wish to add some illustrations of the legal thought on the subject in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. These illustrations will supplement, moreover, the essay by Halvdan Koht on nationalism in the Middle Ages.

The theory and fact of the Roman emperor's position were strikingly at variance in the fourth century. ‘Quod principi placuit legis habuit vigorem’ may hav been the established doctrine, but when he spoke to his proconsuls, the emperor said rather, ‘You must order the proceedings [of civil suits] to be on luded on the third day, or at the latest on the fourth day, or at any rate on the fifth’; or, to the civil service, ‘Let the greedy hands of the officials now forbcar, let theln forbear, I say. The stutter and shrillness do not fit an autocrat, nor the repetitions; but repetitions are characteristic of the Codes. An entire decree might have to be re-enacted, in almost identical form, eight or ten time, evidently because no one had paid any attention to it. Against this merely ornamental legislation, against ‘the ruler who lays down a law and is reckoned unable to enforce it,’ Libanius might protest, yet, three times imperatively summoned to the capital, he simply remained in Antioch. A contenlporary, Valerianus v. c., flouted one decree after another, one judicial decision after another, and flouted, too, the authority of the praetorian prefect, the proconsul, the urban prefect, and the imperial secret police, one of whom he allegedly killed with his own hands. Between the emperor and his subjects, and between his theoretical omnipotence and his actual powers, the essential link was the bureaucracy. Plainly, it was not doing its job. It is the argument of this paper that part of the difficulty lay in the failure of all ranks of government to get through to each other.

Les auteurs latins du XIIe siècle s'imposent de plus en plus à l'attention des historiens de la philosophie et de la théologie médiévales, tant pour leurs propres mérites que par leur influence sur les grandes synthèses du XIIIe siècle. Beaucoup de leurs oeuvres ont un caractère scolaire trés marqué. Nombre d'entre elles ont été enseignées avant d'être livrées au public sous forme de travaux littéraires. Il importe donc pour les comprendre pleinement de les remettre dans leur cadre originel et de les éclairer par ce que nous savons de l'organisation scolaire de cette époque.

In the following study I propose to reconstruct the many-layered Occidental background for a German word: the concept of world harmony which underlies the word Stimmung. This task implies a survey of the whole semantic “field”, as it was developed in different epochs and literatures: the concept and the words expressing it had to be brought face to face, and in the words, in turn, the semantic kernel and the emotional connotations with their variations and fluctuations in time had to be considered. A “Stimmungsgeschichte” of the word Stimmung was necessary. I hope that this historical development will spontaneously, if gradually, emerge from the mosaic of texts to which I wished my running text to be subordinated: the consistency of the texture of verbal and conceptual associations and motifs through the centuries seems to me to be herewith established. “Avez-vous un texte?” was the insistent question which the famous positivist Fustel de Coulanges was wont to address to his pupils when they made a historical statement. The student in historical semantics must ask: “Have you many texts?”, for only with a great number of them is one enabled to visualize their ever-recurrent pattern. I realize that the medieval art of tapestry (which Péguy has revived in literature), with its possibility of showing a constant motif along with the labyrinth of interwoven ramifications, would be a more adequate medium of treatment than is the necessarily linear run of the words of language. And, in any case, I shall be obliged, in the notes, to anticipate or recapitulate the events which cannot be treated at their historical place.

A number of recently published studies have drawn attention to the ‘radical moisture,’ a concept developed in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages to help explain the nature of life and the occurrence of aging and of fevers. These studies have examined the broad history of the concept over a span of two thousand years; they have, however, not presented in detail the sequence of the transmission and evolution of the concept in the Middle Ages. It is my intent to focus upon the history of the radical-moisture concept in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to try to establish the particular stages by which it entered medieval medical doctrine, and in particular to examine the importance of Avicenna's Canon for western physicians in consolidating their first disorganized impressions of the concept. I shall illustrate the stages in the transmission process by referring to the use of the concept at the University of Montpellier, for that school has left us a number of texts from the thirteenth century that reveal how the introduction of new Arabic or Greek medical works could alter the medieval academic physician's approach to a familiar topic; they also reveal the way in which personal tastes and interests could lead colleagues to react differently to new materials.