By their exchange of articles in the Studi Gregoriani, M. Fliche and the Canon Arquillière have reopened the question of what actually happened when Pope Gregory VII received Henry IV at Canossa. Both scholars assume that Henry approached the Pope, excommunicate and stripped of the royal office; but they differ widely in interpreting Gregory's reception of the penitent King. Taking issue with views Arquillière had expressed in his work Saint-Grégoire VII, Fliche maintained that when Gregory released Henry from excommunication he also reinstated him in the royal office. In response, Arquillière reaffirmed his earlier position that only the ban, and not the sentence of deposition, was lifted.

On 20 March, A.D. 698, eleven years after his death, the grave of Cuthbert, holy man and bishop of the Northumbrian diocese of Lindisfarne between 685 and 687, was opened and the body was found to be incorrupt. It has been argued in modern times that this was possibly due to the monks' technique of embalming, or to the salty condition of the island soil, which literally pickled the saint's body. However, the bishop at that time, Eadberht, proclaimed a miracle. Cuthbert's body was reinterred with rich gifts in a shrine above the church floor so that the saint could be easily accessible to the faithful. Thus began the cult of Saint Cuthbert which culminated in the building of the magnificent cathedral of Durham.

The French word macabre was first used as an ordinary adjective by the French Romantic writers of the last century: Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel say ‘c'est macabre’ for anything lugubriously grotesque. Sachs quotes fantaisie macabre from Émile Montégut. The word was not included in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (1694) up to the seventh edition of 1878, but is now to be found in the eighth in the connections danse macabre, récit macabre, plaisanterie macabre. Bal macabre is not recorded, but often used. In the printers' craft-language macabre is said to be used for a Mort, that is, the accidental omission of one or more words of a text by the compositor. The medical students and servants of the dissecting rooms at the French universities call the bodies dissected les macabres. The bargees on the Seine employ the word for corpses seen drifting on the water. Parisian grave-diggers call the bodies of the poor people buried at minimum cost mauvais macabés. In the Auvergnat patois, [chant] macabre is a bag-piper's melody. In the Bergamask dialect macabret is said to mean the Devil-an easy transition from ‘Death.’ In Cervières (Burgundy) a certain sword-dance is called Bachuber, obviously either a wrong transcription of an aurally recorded macuber or a local mispronunciation of an adopted word. Macabre is found as a loan-word in English, Dutch, and German: Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish.

The pejorative phrase of the title, penned by Eóin MacNeill in his article ‘Beginnings of Latin Culture in Ireland’ has clung tenaciously to the study of Hisperic texts. Indeed, it was repeated some twenty-odd years later by Bieler in his ‘Hibernian Latin’. However, the belief that Hisperica Famina and the texts related to them — the Lorica of Laidcenn, the Rubisca (possibly by Máeldub of Malmesbury), the St. Omer Hymn, some of the writings of Aldhelm, and a few other works — are the products of a literary decadence rests squarely on the assumption that they spring from southwestern Britain, especially Wales, around the middle of the sixth century; to cite MacNeill:

In a letter of 1404 to the Sienese professor Francesco Casini, the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati expressed appreciation for the addressee's commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, comparing it favorably with the Greek (XI/XII century) commentaries of Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus, and with the Latin ones of Albert the Great, Albert of Saxony, Gerard of Odo, Walter Burley, and Jean Buridan. He invited Casini not to neglect the works of Henry of Friemar, a minor fourteenth-century figure. Furthermore, Salutati remarked that Casini had even surpassed Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, whose commentaries were doubtless the most widespread in the Latin West of Salutati's time. As Luca Bianchi has pointed out, Salutati's letter highlights the degree to which Italian humanists depended on the scholastic tradition (whether Byzantine or Latin) when approaching Aristotle's Ethics; even Donato Acciaiuoli's famous commentary, published in 1478, draws heavily on Eustratius, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas. This was actually seen as one of its greatest merits by later commentators.3 However, Salutati's comments invite yet another observation: namely, that Salutati is unable to point to any specifically Italian tradition connected with this work. In fact, although Salutati does name two Italians (Thomas and Giles of Rome), they too, like all the other commentators mentioned, spent most of their lifetimes in northern Europe; for most of them, the center was not Italy but Paris. This is why Salutati heaped so much praise on Francesco Casini — finally an indigenous Italian tradition might develop; its beginnings were promising indeed.

The French Franciscan, Peter Aureoli, was born shortly before 1280 near Cahors in the south of France. He studied in Paris, but the date of his arrival there, 1304, quite likely would have made him too late to hear the lectures of Duns Scotus on books 1 and 4 of the Sentences. After teaching at Bologna (1312) and Toulouse (1314), Peter finally returned to Paris where he lectured from 1316–20. In July 1318, his friend John XXII sponsored him for the licentiate in Theology. The request was granted and Aureoli took the oath of Magister actu regens on 13 November 1318. Elected provincial of the Aquitaine Franciscans toward the end of 1320, he was nominated archbishop of Aix-en-Provence before he exercised the former office. Pope John XXII consecrated him on 14 June 1321, but before Peter could settle into his new task he died, probably on 10 January 1322.

In the study of Carolingian Christianity, biblical commentaries are a vast and largely untapped resource. Exegesis, whether for teaching or homiletical purposes, dominated the ninth-century school tradition; in this world, nearly all theologians were primarily expositors of the Bible. It is one of the ironies of historical inquiry that the non-exegetical treatises of such figures as Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus have been studied to the exclusion of their biblical commentaries. Although this situation is beginning to change, much remains to be done, beginning with the crucial work on the texts. Meanwhile, in the absence of critical editions of any of the major works of the Carolingian exegetical tradition, all scholarship in the field is a mere suggestion as to what might be discovered when the primary materials have been better presented. This study is no exception. The two treatises discussed here have received practically no attention from modern historians, and are printed only in the uncritical editions of the Patrologia Latina. It is my hope that this analysis will encourage further inquiry into Carolingian exegesis by showing some ways in which two commentaries, the first in the Latin tradition on the book of Lamentations, reveal the theological and pastoral concerns, and the exegetical methods, of two generations of ninth-century monastic authors.

John of Legnano (ca. 1320–1383) was the foremost professor of law at Bologna in the last half of the fourteenth century. Although he has received recognition for his early study on the ethics of warfare, his importance today might better be ascribed to the breadth of his writings, to his close connections with the papal and civic affairs of his day, and to his role as the chief apologist for Urban VI at the outbreak of the Great Western Schism.

When in 1922 Clemens Blume published the fifty-fifth volume of the Analecta Hymnica, almost a hundred years of development in the field of Latin hymnology reached its final stage. Although the idea of collecting hymns was not an outcome of the growing interest in literature in the nineteenth century, the first extensive work in this field was not begun earlier than about the middle of that century. A study of the origins of this research and of certain aspects of the work in its earliest stages, while not to be attempted here, would be of great interest — and instructive as well; for it appears that many errors and many misconceptions of the subject go back directly to the lack of a methodical and scientific approach on the part of the earlier hymnologists.

If Peter John Olivi was given less than his due by previous generations of scholars, the present generation seems bent on making it up to him. Recent writers have identified him as a father of fourteenth-century nominalism, as a major architect of the dogma of papal infallibility, as a trail-blazer in economic thought, and as an astute reformer whose advice, if heeded, would have saved the church a good deal of subsequent trouble. In the process, Olivi's image has been substantially refurbished.

Due especially to the pioneering work of Lottin, philosophers and theologians interested in the medieval discussion of the human conscience are today well aware that the Scholastic debate was framed principally in relation to two words, conscientia and synderesis. In the now classic formulation of the distinction between those two terms by Thomas Aquinas, synderesis is understood as the special habitus of the practical intellect whereby human beings know the basic principles of morality, whereas conscientia is the act whereby the practical reasoning powers of a human being apply the fundamental principles to the particular matter at hand. It is also generally acknowledged by scholars today that the argument about the relationship between conscientia and synderesis began many years prior to Thomas's work, that the medieval debate was originally spurred by the introduction of the strange term synderesis into the conversation, and that the term entered the discussion by means of an enigmatic passage in Jerome's Commentary on Ezekiel. Finally, most scholars acknowledge that the appearance of synderesis in the medieval manuscripts of Jerome's commentary is in all likelihood a corruption of the Greek word syneidēsis, which is the standard correlate in Greek Patristic literature for the Latin conscientia.

The are several reasons why the problem of early-Georgian, and particularly early-Iberian (East Georgian), chronology has been a vexing one. In the first place, the early-Georgian historical works contain almost no direct chronological indications, i.e., dates, but rather offer quite numerous relative indications, i.e., synchronisms, lengths of reigns and lives, regnal years, the distance between events, etc. Secondly, in these historical works, hard facts of history often lie buried under a superimposition of myth, legend, and epos, or are occasionally fused with the picture of other historical facts, occurring at different epochs, that is projected on them. And, thirdly, the attempts at establishing such a chronology, which have not been wanting, have tended to be somewhat vitiated by misconceptions upon which they were based. Thus, early in this century, the imaginative attempt of S. Gorgadze was ruined by the fact that he preferred the evidence of the king-lists (Royal List, I, II, III), which form a later addition to the seventh-century Conversion of Iberia, to that of the more authoritative and older (eighth-century) History of the Kings of Iberia by Leontius of Ruisi, which contains a still older historical tradition. Gorgadze, accordingly, tended to neglect what chronological indications are found in Leontius. And in our own days, another such attempt was made by P. Ingoroqva, which cannot be described as entirely successful.

In the eleventh century, all over Christendom, government was in a rudimentary stage. Because it was rudimentary there is not much evidence to show how rudimentary it was. A danger is that modern scholars are tempted to read what scraps of evidence they have with a prejudice they are only partly aware of; and to see chancellors and chanceries in the light of what they would expect them to have been, much as their colleagues have done with parliaments and popular liberties.

According to medieval legend, Gratian, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor were bro7thers. What united these men in the medieval imagination were the three great works they produced, respectively, over the course of the twelfth century: the Decretum, the Sentences, and the Historia scholastica. The two Peters, in particular, were connected. Stephen Langton, one of the most prominent teachers of Scripture and theology at Paris during the last decades of the twelfth century, praised both Peters for their mastery of Sacred Scripture. The joint ascendancy of the reputations of Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor can also be seen in the tradition of medieval chroniclers such as Otto of St. Blaise, who wrote that “in those days Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor shone forth as distinguished masters at Paris.”

On November 24, 1199, Innocent III sent an extraordinary letter to the Sicilian people announcing the appearance of another Saladin in the German adventurer Markward of Anweiler. By his alliance with the Saracens of Sicily and his atrocities against Christians, Markward had set himself against the Cross and opened a way for the conquest of Italy by the Infidel. So desperate was the situation that the Holy Land itself would best be relieved by defense of the Regno, for if southern Italy should fall to the Saracens, who could believe in Christian power to restore Jerusalem? The pope, therefore, granted to all who would resist Markward the same indulgences won hitherto only by Crusaders in Palestine.

The observation has been made frequently enough in the recent and, indeed, not so recent scholarly literature to have assumed the status of a received truth: the Venerable Bede, esteemed for both his saintliness and his scholarship, simply did not like Isidore of Seville. Although Bede knew Isidore's major works, at least, and used them extensively, he was less respectful of Isidore, we are told, than he was of his other authorities. On only three occasions does he refer to Isidore by name, and each time it is to correct him. Part of the explanation, it has been suggested, lies in their sharply differing attitudes towards antique literary culture. Whereas Isidore was a product of the ancient world, says Riché, Bede decisively turned against its cultural and educational legacy, rejecting the approach, sanctioned by both Augustine and Gregory the Great, that enlisted the liberal arts in the service of Christian thought. He also, Riché goes on to say, was distrustful of the broadly-based scientific curiosity evinced in Isidore's works. Despite his acknowleged accomplishments, Bede's own scientific interests were, like those of other educated Anglo-Saxons, strictly limited. Natural philosophy writ large was suspect because of the irreligious aberrations to which it might lead. To C. W. Jones and a number of more recent commentators, the crux of the matter is Isidore's incompetence, not his excessive zeal. In Bede's view, Isidore simply did not work to a high enough standard. Hence he turned to other authorities, scarcely containing his disdain of the Sevillian. “The weakness of Isidore's treatment of cycles is manifest to the elementary student,” Jones points out; “it would be more than irritating to Bede.”

A review of the scholarship on the sources of the Old English Christ III makes it increasingly clear that the poem is related to the homiletic tradition, a term used here to refer to both sermons and homilies. This relationship is apparent in three main ways: first, several long passages directly translate known homilies; second, a number of other passages are homiletic in their hortatory tone and their direct apostrophes to their audiences; and third, the constant rearrangement of biblical material to make specific thematic points suggests that the poet was working from homilies rather than directly from the Bible. One example of this third kind of evidence may be instructive since it has not been specifically noted. In describing how man's former deeds are revealed after the general resurrection, the poet writes:

Many Old English homilies consist of exhortations to repentance, illustrated by devotional commonplaces that recur in varying forms in different contexts. Such are some items of the Blickling and Vercelli collections (for example, Blickling 5, 8, 10, and Vercelli 2–4; 8–10; 20–21) which are not translated as a whole from identifiable Latin originals. This field of Old English studies was opened more than fifty years ago by Max Förster; and other scholars, principally K. Jost and R. Willard, have investigated the Latin literature in which these commonplaces circulated. Detailed work on the origin and distribution of some central themes has recently been published by J. E. Cross.

V. H. Galbraith declared of the Modus tenendi parliamentum: “[Its] claims for the representative elements in parliament would be sufficiently challenging if they belonged to the end of the century. Put back to the reign of Edward II they astonish us.” Like all scholars since, Galbraith was puzzled about where exactly to “put” the Modus. Dating the text, even roughly, has remained so difficult that it now forces us to ask, as the final section of this essay suggests, fundamental questions about how we do history itself. But even more important than the Modus's status as a famous historical crux is what Galbraith aptly called its capacity both to “challenge” its contemporaries and to “astonish” us today. In the unusual dignity it accords the lower grades of parliament, in its unusual concern for the rights and working conditions of the parliamentary clerks themselves, and in many small touches of clericist idealism (like the notion of giving free parliamentary transcripts to those too poor to pay for them), the Modus stands as an extraordinarily socially generous document. This is a work that makes parliament a matter of record, and of public record.