Unlike today, when he is mostly remembered for his historical work, the Venerable Bede's renown in the Middle Ages was founded on his biblical exegesis. One reason that his comments on the Bible had such prominence was that Bede referred to both the Latin and Greek texts, and in western Europe outside of Italy during the eighth century; the ability to read Greek marked one as practically unique. Two eighth-century lives remark on Bede's Greek. In the Brevis commemoratio de Venerabili Beda, probably written by a disciple named Antonius, we learn that Bede studied both Latin and Greek: ‘Et cum in Latina erudiretur lingua, Graecae quoque peritiam non mediocriter percepit.’ Also, in an anonymous life, we read: ‘Cumque Latinae aeque ut vernaculae linguae in qua natus est percepisset notitiam, Graecae quoque non parva ex parte attigit scientiam.’ This belief, that Bede was able to read Greek, was uncritically accepted for centuries.

A scenario well known to Beowulf scholars alleges that after Beowulf has slain the monsters and gone home, Hrothulf, nephew of the Danish king Hrothgar, will murder prince Hrethric to gain the throne when the old king dies. This story, that many Anglo-Saxonists assume is integral to the ancient legend of these kings, is a modern misreading of the poet's allusions to events associated with the Scylding dynasty — a legendary history that the poet arguably takes care to follow. The present essay, in two parts, first shows how the idea of Hrothulf's treachery arose and became canonical under the influence of prestigious English and American scholars, then finds fault with this idea, refuting its “proof” from Saxo Grammaticus and showing how some Anglo-Saxonists have doubted that Beowulf supports an interpretation making Hrothulf a murderer. But when the poet's allusions to future treachery are ambiguous, at least for modern readers, in order to exonerate Hrothulf fully one must go to traditions about the Scylding dynasty outside the poem. Scandinavian regnal lists (including one that Saxo himself incorporates) consistently contradict the event the Saxo passage has been used to prove, as they agree on a sequence of Scylding rulers with names corresponding to those of persons in Beowulf. Attention to this traditional sequence exposes Hrothulf's murder of Hrethric as a logical impossibility. Moreover, the early medieval method of selecting rulers suggests that neither did Hrothulf usurp the throne of Denmark. In sum, careful scrutiny of the best Scandinavian evidence and rejection of the worst reveals Beowulf's “treacherous Hrothulf” to be a scholarly fantasy.

The Old English Elene has generally been considered Cynewulf's most successful poem; but while critics have admired specific passages in it, they have generally either ignored or patronized the poem as a whole. Thus Kemp Malone writes that in Elene, Cynewulf ‘told his tale simply and clearly as Old English poets go. Here he doubtless owed something to his Latin source ….’ The most recent editor of the text, Gradon, remarks that apart from the descriptions of the battle and the sea voyage, ‘there is little in Elene that can be shown to be original … a glance at Holthausen's composite text shows that, poetic circumlocution apart, there is little not to be found in some version of the Acta Cyriaci.’ One recent critic to deal with Elene, S. B. Greenfield, in his Critical History of Old English Literature, argues for a more sympathetic view of the poem, suggesting that ‘the struggle between good and evil that preoccupied Cynewulf is here [in Elene] presented thematically as a contrast between darkness and light, both on a physical and spiritual level’; he goes on to argue that the central episodes of the poem (i.e. Elene's quest for the cross) have a distinct literary if not necessarily poetic power.’ But Greenfield does not develop these suggestions in detail and it would, I think, be a fair summary of his discussion of the poem to say that where previous critics have been cool, Greenfield is lukewarm.

The mysteries and challenges presented by the Latin poem known as De Sodoma are many and varied. The identity of its author will likely never be known. Date and place of composition can only be expressed in terms of probabilities, and portions of the poem are extremely difficult to read and interpret. I am currently involved in the preparation of a critical edition, with translation and commentary, of both De Sodoma and its shorter, perhaps superior companion-piece De Iona, in the hope that this might pave the way for easier reading. In the present discussion I also address problems of readability, returning to that aspect of the poem which first attracted my attention and which, on balance, seems to offer the greatest help comprehending it: its relation to Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the poet of De Sodoma makes explicit and dramatic reference to the tale of Phaethon as told by Ovid, Ovid's text functions at a yet more basic level. In my view, the defining characteristic of De Sodoma is its structure as an Ovidian episode. This structure sets it apart from earlier Latin Biblical epics, canonical school texts by the time De Sodoma was composed. Read against the backdrop of its Ovidian model, the poem reveals a unity and coherence which has previously not been recognized, and extends our appreciation of the interests of some early medieval audiences and of the learning and artistry of at least one early medieval poet.

The year 1494 marks the beginning of a series of French invasions of Italy. These invasions were to lead soon to a struggle among France, Spain, and the Empire for the control of the whole Italian peninsula. After 1519, when Spain and the Empire came under the scepter of one sovereign, Charles V of the Hapsburg dynasty, the contest for supremacy in Italy assumed the aspect of a great dynastic duel between the French Valois monarchs (Francis I, 1515–47; Henry II, 1547–59), and the Hapsburg rulers for the domination of Europe. This contest finally ended temporarily with the Spanish victory of St. Quentin (1557), and the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) which gave Spain supremacy not only in Italy but in Europe.

Neither of the two general councils of the western Church held between the Second and Third Lateran (1139, 1179) produced a large body of legislation: the genuine canons of the Council of Rheims (1148) number eighteen; those of Tours (1163) about ten. But in the great collection of Mansi this meagre store is eked out by an equal weight of additional canons, sixteen for Rheims and ten for Tours. Mansi looked on them with no great favor, but offered no criterion by which their validity and value might be judged. The Rheims canons, so far as I am aware, have never been submitted to critical study. The Tours canons, on the other hand, were examined and shown to be spurious by Seckel in a valuable appendix to his article on the sources of the canons of the English council of 1175, which he published in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht in 1899.

‘Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord’ (Gen. 10.8). This scriptural passage is familiar to many, but to historians of medieval astronomical literature Nimrod assumes a different profession. He stands as the principal character in a mythological astronomical handbook, the Liber Nimrod, cast in the form of a dialogue between the astronomer Nimrod and his disciple, Ioanton. This metamorphosis of Nimrod the Astronomer and his emergence into the medieval West is an interesting topic in its own right and one which this essay will examine.

Latin palaeography of the pre-Carolingian era must surely rank high among the branches of medieval studies which have made dramatic progress in recent decades, and preeminent among the contributions to that progress is of course Codices Latini Antiquiores by E. A. Lowe, of which nine volumes have already appeared and the final two are well under way. But Dr. Lowe is not the kind of scholar who is content merely to compile a corpus which is a model of usefulness and filled with intriguing discoveries; fortunately for us he is also moved from time to time to offer essays in which he gives a broader historical interpretation. Such a book is English Uncial, which the Clarendon Press of Oxford published in 1960, including a substantial introduction, a series of comments on specific manuscripts, and 40 excellent plates. Here the author returns to a phenomenon he has examined several times before, the use of the most calligraphic of classical book hands, scriptura uncialis, in England, beginning late in the seventh century, contemporary with the perfection of the Insular ‘national' scripts.

Like the undergraduate who read Macbeth twice in high school — ‘once for the truth and once for the beauty’ — modern scholars seem content to restrict their reading of Pearl to an isolated consideration of either its artistry and appeal to emotion or its theology and appeal to the intellect, in spite of impressive efforts of Professors Fletcher and Wellek to resolve the elegy-allegory dispute. Even the poem's most recent editors betray their partisanship: E. V. Gordon, who repeatedly refers to the narrator-dreamer as ‘the father,’ maintains that ‘Without the elegiac basis and the sense of great personal loss which pervades it, Pearl would indeed be the mere theological treatise on a special point, which some critics have called it’; and Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann, in a veiled though determined effort to defend Sister Madeleva's view that Pearl is not a mere pathetic elegy, as some critics have implied, offers a disarmingly literal interpretation—asserting, rightly I believe, that Pearl is ‘an homiletic poem teaching that the soul must not be attached to earthly treasure if it is to attain the Kingdom of God.’ We have returned to the position of Sir Robert Cotton's librarian, who, out of touch with the sensibilities of late nineteenth-century scholars, characterized the first poem in MS. Cotton Nero A. x. as ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum, in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur.’ I will attempt to show that the poet's treatment of ‘many things concerning religion and morals’ is, like Dante's Comedy (never to my knowledge categorized as either a mere theological treatise or a mere elegy for Beatrice), a carefully structured poetic account of a spiritual itinerary culminating in an ecstasy of mystical contemplation.

A singular merit of John Boswell's provocative Same-Sex Unions has been to refocus the attention of a wide range of scholars from differing disciplines on the significance of manuscript sources for adelphopoiesis, a Christian ceremonial in the eastern Mediterranean for the ‘making of a brother'. It seems fair to say that the balance of scholarly opinion has rejected his claim that these rites were, in effect, marriage ceremonials for men. The ceremonials seem to have been used to create a ritual brotherhood in which one man ‘adopted’ another as his ‘brother’. This still leaves a large question to be considered: precisely what kinds of social institutions or arrangements did these rituals seek to confirm? I propose to investigate this problem in the context of evidence relating to the social structures of Roman and post-Roman societies, both to elucidate the social bonds reflected in the rites of adelphopoiesis and to suggest why this peculiar type of personal attachment is strikingly absent from the annals of western Roman imperial society.

The names of John Buridan (1300–after 1358) and Nicholas of Autrecourt (1300–after 1350) are often associated with the so-called Ockhamist statute of 1340 at the University of Paris. For a long time the discussion centered upon the question: Was this statute directed against Ockham or Autrecourt? Puzzling also was the part Buridan played, who presumably was rector at the time that the statute was promulgated. Should he, as an alleged ‘Ockhamist,’ be accused of patricide or did he defend Ockham against the attacks of Autrecourt?

Ockham's doctrine of intuitive cognition lies at the heart of his epistemology. As Philotheus Boehner and Sebastian Day have quite rightly observed, one of the central aims of this doctrine is to answer the question how the intellect can have certain knowledge of contingent states of affairs (including the existence or non-existence of material particulars). A number of scholars, including Etienne Gilson and Anton Pegis, have charged, however, that far from achieving this goal, Ockham's doctrine (and especially what he says about the logical possibility of intuitive cognition of non-existents) leads to scepticism. Coming to Ockham's defense, Boehner and Day have rejected these criticisms as resting on misinterpretations of Ockham. I believe Boehner and Day have done much to clarify what Ockham actually meant. I should like to reopen the discussion, however, because I believe not all the consequences of Oekham's doctrine have been accurately drawn.

The more spectacular a prediction is, the more frustrating it becomes when the prescribed date passes and nothing happens. This essay will discuss not so much the predictions of yesterday but rather the awakening of the morning after. False predictions left a gap and created the need for explicit or implicit responses to the failed prediction, a need that could be filled by modifying the calculations or condemning fresh speculation. This essay shows how people managed to reconceptualize the order of the world after a.d. 800 = a.m. [annus mundi] 6000, the beginning of the supposed seventh, ultimate millennium. As we consider the intellectual progress of the ninth century, we also need to look at the link between the Carolingian reform and the release of apocalyptic tension or post-apocalyptic exhaustion. This investigation builds on recent contributions to the field of medieval eschatology, especially those of Wolfram Brandes, Richard K. Emmerson, Johannes Fried, Richard Landes, Bernard McGinn, and others. It focuses on selected sources, and particularly on exegetical texts, to show that overcoming the eschatological crisis caused more than a shift in the system of counting years, from annus mundi to ab incarnatione Domini. Questions about dates led to general reflections about time, the past and the future. The significant shift, therefore, was from counting time to a philosophy of time.

The name Boethius of Dacia evokes today an image of a radical thinker, who championed the cause of philosophical freedom, even at the expense of his religious beliefs. His writings have earned him, together with his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, the title of leader of the ‘Latin Averroists’ or ‘Heterodox Aristotelians.’ Boethius’ treatise on the highest good has contributed greatly to the modern opinion of Boethius as a radical thinker. M. Grabmann, who rediscovered the De summo bono, considered the work to be a clear expression of the anti-Christian tendencies inherent in ‘Latin Averroism’; and P. Mandonnet saw the short treatise to be the most radical expression of a program of the natural life, the purest rationalism, and a total denial of the Christian order. More recently, this view has been modified by F. Van Steenberghen and his students, who argue that Boethius of Dacia is indeed a Christian thinker, and in no way excludes ‘supernatural beatitude’ from his notion of the highest good. They point out that, as a teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, Boethius’ main concern is the summum bonum which can be attained on earth. As a result, the De summo bono is a characteristic product of the Arts Faculty at Paris.

Forbidden language, like forbidden knowledge, has always had its attractions. Of its many varieties, the inordinata locutio of blasphemy, speech which violates fundamental norms in the way it represents God, has held no small appeal for people in times of widespread religious practice. The late Middle Ages offers no exception to these two commonplaces of modern thought, judging from the number of civil statutes designed to extirpate blasphemy and from the stringent measures drawn up by influential clerics like Jean Gerson. This animus against blasphemy among the lettered, both lay and clerical, means that few blasphemous utterances, few of the words judged as blasphemous by someone other than the speaker, have come down to us. Preachers and compilers of catechetical handbooks, like theologians and glossators, are as silent about the actual words of blasphemers as they are eloquent about their temerity. Even the collectors of exempla, whose tales provide so much information about religious life, rarely record so much as a blasphemous phrase in their repertoire of tales about blasphemers. Perhaps these late medieval writers shared the reticence of the author of the Book of Job, who, according to the Priest (ps.- Jerome), wrote benedixerit for maledixerit, inverting the literal sense ‘quod non fuit ausus scriptor historiae ore suo in Deum dicere verbum blasphemiae.’

That medieval culture included misogynous aspects has long been recognized. Only through the study of its specific lineaments in particular works, however, can the nature of that misogyny at particular junctures be understood. The content of antifeminist or misogynistic rhetoric varied greatly over time and space during the Middle Ages, although most medieval writing that directly attacked women drew on the classical and patristic traditions exemplified by Juvenal and Jerome. Misogyny, of course, was never the whole story, only a part of a complex cultural valuation of the feminine. Nevertheless, it clearly was an important theme in much medieval writing. Medieval writers used misogynistic topoi for purposes other than attacking women, but in doing so they perpetuated conventions that had an impact on women in medieval society. This article looks at the misogynistic aspects of one work, John of Bromyard's Summa predicantium.

All primitive decretal collections composed in England are conventionally classified in three main groups, described as the English, Bridlington, and Worcester Families respectively. These names are admittedly matters merely of convenience, and are open in all cases either to question or qualification. The Worcester Family (the most advanced of English primitive collections in technical construction) is named after the Worcester Collection, on the mistaken assumption that this, authentically Worcester, composition is the oldest surviving member of the group; whereas in fact a hitherto undiscussed manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, reveals an earlier derivation from their common origin, and there are good reasons for doubting if the family archetype was dependent in any way on the Worcester school of canon lawyers. Six members of this once-numerous family are known at present in manuscript, and two of these are also familiar in published analyses. All are technically primitive in composition, being either divided into books or libri simply, or in the most mature examples subdivided also into titles or tituli, but without the systematic device of dismemberment of the longer decretals. In systematic collections the longer letters, dealing frequently with several different and quite unrelated topics within the limits of a single decretal, are dissected into their component chapters, which are arranged analytically according to subject matter and distributed under various headings. None of the Worcester Family is systematic in this sense, though some record an advanced stage of technical development within the primitive conventions.

In my mercy dispaire thou noght,
Sen I the so dere haue boght,
And ensaumple thou take
Of synfull Mary maudelayne,
That with syn was gastly slayne
And sythen gan it for-sake.

Monseigneur Duchesne's study of the legend of the coming of Saint Mary Magdalen to Gaul left very little to be said on the subject.' Jean Misrahi has opened with this statement a brief note followed by an unpublished version of an early legend of Mary Magdalen and this can indeed be applied mutatis mutandis to many areas of the Magdalen traditions. Still, other features connected with this cult are insufficiently investigated and this is true, in the first place, of the rich and extensive group of medieval Latin hymns celebrating Mary Magdalen.

In the third question of the Prologue to his Lectura secunda, Adam Wodeham asks whether intuitive cognition can be naturally produced or conserved when its object is either non-existent or absent. This question was written in reply to Peter Aureol, and in it Adam argues that Peter's definition of intuitive cognition has skeptical consequences. In fact, as Wodeham knew, Aureol held that intuitive cognition was unerring, and he was arguing not for skepticism, but merely against Scotus' definition of intuitive cognition.

The appearance of Hans Urs von Balthasar's corpus of Maximian studies in a new and reworked edition, after the lapse of more than twenty years, deserves more than usual attention. I must confess that I am a little embarrassed in undertaking the task. For, having myself written on Maximus after he had published his work, I had it constantly before me and more than once have criticized some of his positions, without fully grasping all that he wished to convey or the breadth of the background against which he was operating, even though, as he himself suggests (KL 14), we are in basic agreement in our understanding of Maximus and of the Maximian synthesis. Nonetheless, our approaches to Maximus do differ. A clear understanding of that difference will facilitate, I think, a surer appreciation of von Balthasar's own work and will also lead to a better grasp of the significance of Maximus and of the problems that confront the student of the Confessor. May their number increase!