The Pore Caitif is a late fourteenth-century Middle English manual of religious instruction intended for the use of the laity. That the compiler himself applied this title to his manual is extremely doubtful. It seems, rather, to be a convenient label of identification of the treatise drawn from his characteristic way of referring to himself: ‘This tretis compilid of a pore caitif'; and again, ‘I my silf caitif and wrecche.' This pseudonym behind which he cloaked his identity must have been transferred, however, at a fairly early date to serve as a title for the treatise, because it appears in several late fourteenth-century manuscripts and in a will proved in 1422.

When Venantius Fortunatus agreed to the request of Radegund and Agnes to versify the Vita Sancti Martini (VSM, pr. 29–30), he was well aware that he was not the first to write such a poem. About a century earlier Paulinus of Périgueux had versified Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin (Vita) and books 2 and 3 of the Dialogues (Dial.), which contained supplementary stories about Martin's life. Fortunatus cites Paulinus's poem in the introductory section to the VSM (1.20–21) and, as frequent parallels in language demonstrate, clearly knew his predecessor's work well. But, as successive scholars have noted, the two poems, though sharing the same subject matter, create a very different impression. The VSM is unusual in Fortunatus's poetic corpus in its use of the hexameter and its narrative content. In this paper I will analyze the structure and style of Fortunatus's single venture into hagiographical epic in order to demonstrate the special qualities he brings to his narrative of the life of Saint Martin. I move from considering narrative structure, in the poem as a whole and in individual episodes, to a close analysis of style, concluding with a discussion of the function and distinctive features of the scenes in heaven with which books 2, 3, and the Martin portion of book 4 conclude. In so doing I will argue that the particular qualities of Fortunatus's poem, far from being extrinsic rhetorical flourishes, contribute to the poem's efficacy as an epic of meditation on Martin and his powers.

The formative role of the Appendix Concilii Lateranensis in the development of twelfth-century decretal collections is already familiar to historians of canon law. This important collection begins in its vulgate edition with the canons of the Lateran Council of 1179, followed by forty-nine titles, which, with the exception of the final two, are systematic in technical style. The collection as preserved in the editio princeps, based by B. Laurens on a manuscript now lost, was built up in a series of successive stages, the basic work being completed within the limits c. 1181–5, and the final form including material as late as 1188–90. But the concluding title in this editio princeps, or vulgate edition, is not discovered in any of the surviving Appendix manuscripts, and has been shown by Holtzmann to depend on an excerpt from the lost register of Alexander III. It must be assumed, therefore, that this title had no place in the original collection, but was a special supplement to the manuscript on which Laurens based his edition, being discovered elsewhere only in the material at the end of Orielensis I, a related work. Since the collection in its earliest version (c. 1181–5) was the fountainhead of the main tradition of decretal transmission, its provenance and authorship are clearly of historical interest.

It seems to have been something of a Christian commonplace, at the turn of the fifth century, to taunt the ancient pagan oracles for being unable to predict their own demise. “Where are the frightening and shadowy spectres of Hecate,” asked Gregory of Nazianzus in his Epiphany sermon of 380 or 381, “and the subterranean tricks and prophecies of Trophonius, or the mutterings of the oak of Dodona, or the sophistries of the Delphic tripod, or the prophetic drink of Castalia? The only thing they could not prophesy was this: their own falling into silence.” Commenting, some thirty years later, on the stinging challenge to the prophetic powers of the pagan gods in Isaiah 41:22, Jerome observed “that after the coming of Christ all the idols have fallen silent. Where is Delphic Apollo and Loxias, Delian and Clarian [Apollo], and the other idols that promised knowledge of the future and deceived mighty kings? Why were they able to foretell nothing about Christ, nothing about his apostles, nothing about the ruin and abandonment of their temples? If, then, they were not able to foretell their own downfall, how could they foretell the good or bad fortunes of others?”

The medieval wall paintings of Longthorpe Tower (near Peterborough, England), discovered by fortunate accident over thirty years ago, have been the object of several critical investigations; because of their delicate and fragmentary condition, however, it has been impossible to arrive at an exact interpretation of the entire program. Two of these fourteenth-century paintings appear to treat the Seven Ages of Man and the Labors of the Months. Of particular interest is a third large painting (see plate), which depicts the wheel of the five senses. Much attention has been given to elucidating the significance of the five animals positioned on the rim of the wheel and to interpreting the meaning and function of the male figure who stands behind the wheel and appears to govern its motion. The problem of interpretation is not new. Indeed, the unknown artist provided a written guide to these wall paintings, but unfortunately the remnants of these inscriptions, found by the circumference and spokes of the wheel, are now indecipherable. Critics are in general agreement that the painting represents the five senses, and most cite the passage in Thomas of Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum, which pairs specific animals with individual senses.

The most important source for our knowledge of the Gallican liturgy is the so-called Expositio Brevis Antiquae Liturgiae Gallicanae. It is preserved in a Codex of the Abbey of St. Martin at Autun, at present in the library of the Seminary of Autun, the only manuscript of this valuable document which we possess. The Expositio consists of two letters, the first of which describes the rite of the Gallican Mass, while the second deals with diversa ecclesiae carismata, that is, with the Baptismal rite, liturgical vestments, antiphons, responses, etc. The question naturally arises as to the authorship of these valuable letters and also as to when they were written.

Some years ago I published in this journal the first fruits of my investigations into the fortuna of Galen in the Middle Ages. These concerned the Vatican codices. Since then, I have examined some 600 MSS on microfilm and learnt of other texts from published catalogues of manuscripts. My earlier strictures on Diels stand: he is inaccurate and incomplete. The present paper lists only manuscripts or portions of manuscripts not inventoried by him or by Thorndike and Kibre (TK). The resultant analysis will eventually be published in the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, edited by Professors P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz, the first volume of which appeared in 1960.

The martyrs whose suffering and death is recorded in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis have been revered for almost two millennia. The Church has signaled its high regard with the inclusion of Perpetua and Felicitas in the canon missae. The praise for these young Carthaginian converts was immediate. Beginning with Tertullian and including luminaries like Augustine and Quodvuldeus, leaders of the African church acknowledged these youthful Christians as models of Christian self-sacrifice; their triumph, the courage of spirit over the dread of death. For Tertullian, their act of confident self-immolation was the apogee of Christian fortitude. In his discussion of the location of the eternal dwelling place for those who die in Christ, Tertullian, in De Anima, called the young Roman woman Vibia Perpetua “the most courageous martyr” of the Church. His comment, at least partly intended to stiffen the resolve of his threatened congregation, is difficult to reconcile with the normative status accorded at this time to the figure of Stephen in Acts (cf. Acts 6–7). His remark might be a flight of characteristic hyperbole. It might suggest, however, that the traditional role of the proto-martyr Stephen was not yet canonical in Carthage. Conversely, if Tertullian has already moved from orthodoxy, it might represent a deliberate attempt on his part to elevate the narrative of the Passio over the incident in Acts, thus privileging Montanist belief in the power of the Holy Spirit's continuing revelation. There is certainly evidence for the latter position in the anonymous editor's opening remarks in the Passio itself.

Pondering the narrative of creation given in Genesis in his De sacramentis Christianae fidei, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142) raises the question of whether creation was instantaneous or required a literal six days. Hugh opts for the latter. Though instantaneous creation was of course possible, he argues that God created in six days, proceeding gradually through increasing degrees of form and beauty, so that the rational creature “might discern how great was the difference between esse and pulchrum esse,” between “being” and “beautiful being.” God's intention, Hugh declares, was that rational creatures would be “warned not to be content with having received being [esse] from the Creator,” but would strive for “beautiful being” (pulchrum esse). The primary task of the human being in Eden, therefore, was twofold: first, a discernment, an exegesis that rightly interpreted the pulchrum esse of creation to be a manifestation of divine Beauty; second, a realization of pulchrum esse within itself. In large measure, for Hugh, the ensuing Fall entailed a failure to fulfill this original exegetical and ethical calling.

In what ways can two different things be alike? One way, which is perhaps the easiest to explain, involves the sharing of a common nature, or tertium quid, such that two different things are the same in a certain respect. For example, Socrates and Plato are alike in being human, cats and dogs are alike in being animals, and swans and snow are alike in being white. Scholastic theologians believed that no creature could be like God in this way, whether in this life or in the next. In a strict sense, in their view, God and creatures have nothing in common, for God has no accidental qualities to share and does not belong to any genus.

In the early spring of 1129, the priory of Notre-Dame at Argenteuil, a house for women some thirteen kilometers northwest of Paris on the Seine, was ‘restored’ to the abbey of Saint-Denis. This restitution took place at a council held by the papal legate in France, Matthew, cardinal bishop of Albano, at the Parisian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The nuns of Argenteuil, accused of scandalous living, were replaced by monks of Saint-Denis. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1122–51) considered the recovery of Argenteuil one of his foremost achievements.

Early in the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon divided philosophical knowledge into four areas: theoretical, practical (i.e., moral), mechanical, and logical. He further divided mechanical knowledge into seven arts, parallel to the liberal arts, giving last place to theatrica, which he defined briefly as ‘scientia ludorum.’ It proved to be the most controversial of his seven categories. Some twenty years ago W. Tatarkiewicz studied Hugh's idea, its sources, and its appearance in a few subsequent texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance; later Nancy Howe added a reference from Petrarch. Since then, the concept of theatrics has seldom been treated in itself, although we now have substantially more evidence of its pervasiveness in medieval thinking, as a result of further scholarship on the Didascalicon and on the history of the mechanical arts. Drawing on these sources and on previously unreported material, this study attempts to describe in some detail the progress of theatrica during roughly the first three hundred years after its appearance in the works of Hugh. The medieval history of this idea does not tell us much about the theater, but it does tell us quite a lot about medieval attitudes toward play, entertainment, and performance, topics that learned circles did not often discuss extensively or dispassionately.

Toward the end of his Troilus and Criseyde (5.1457-1533), hereinafter TC, Chaucer has Cassandra set about interpreting for her young brother Troilus his dream of seeing Criseyde (5.1233-42) in the arms of a boar and in due course includes a twenty-six line summary of the last eleven books (II-XII) of Statius' Thebaid. This summary occupies TC 5.1485-1510, i.e., stanzas 213-216, except for the end of stanza 216, where Cassandra passes on to other matters. In all manuscripts of TC (essentially sixteen) except British Museum MS Harleian 2392 (siglum H4) and Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 163 (siglum R), there are inserted between TC stanzas 214 and 215, and accordingly as near the middle of Cassandra's summary as is practicable, twelve Latin hexameters outlining in very sketchy fashion the twelve books of the Thebaid at the rate of one hexameter per book. This Latin twelve-line argument will be referred to hereinafter mostly as Arg. with line number.

If one takes standard overviews of the history of natural science or natural philosophy as his measure, the object appearing in the title of this study would literally appear not to exist. For, apart from a few scattered encyclopedia entries — which are always of necessity rather summary in character — one searches in vain for studies on the medieval interest in the natural sciences. For the contemporary cosmologist, be he first and foremost philosopher or physicist, the Middle Ages lie in a very deep darkness indeed.

The Latin translation of al-Ghazali's Maqās˙id al-falāsifa was one of the works through which scholastic authors became familiar with the Arabic tradition of Aristotelian philosophy after its translation in the middle of the twelfth century. However, while historians have examined in great detail the impact of Avicenna and Averroes on the Latin intellectual tradition, the place of this translation of al-Ghazali, known commonly as the Summa theoricae philosophiae, remains unclear. This study enumerates and describes the Latin audience of al-Ghazali by building on Manuel Alonso's research with a new bibliography of the known readers of the Summa theoricae philosophiae. It also treats Latin scholars' perception of the figure of al-Ghazali, or Algazel in Latin, since their understanding in no way resembles the Ash'arite jurist, Sufi mystic, and circumspect philosopher known in the Muslim world. Latin scholars most commonly viewed him only as an uncritical follower of Avicenna and Aristotle, but they also described him in other ways during the Middle Ages. In addition to tracing the rise, decline, and recovery of Algazel and the Summa theoricae philosophiae in Latin Christendom over a period of four centuries, this study examines the development of Algazel's identity as he shifts from a useful Arab to a dangerous heretic in the minds of Latin scholars.

The polemics of the investiture contest, both those of German and those of Italian origin, in most cases owe their survival to the copying activity of scribes in the monasteries and cathedral chapters of Germany during the twelfth century. This survival is in itself unexpected: the Libelli de lite continued to be copied at a period when their argumentation and critical apparatus must have appeared unsophisticated by comparison with the canonical and theological textbooks of the mid-twelfth century. The polemics seem to have been preserved not for their erudition but for their literary qualities. Thus the two most famous twelfth-century collections of eleventh-century libelli — that of the Codex Udalrici and that transcribed in the sixteenth-century codex, Hanover, Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek XI. 671 — are found to exploit the polemics for teaching purposes: not for the elucidation of the rights of King Henry IV or of Pope Gregory VII (as their contents might suggest), but as models of epistolary style for the instruction of the twelfth-century pupils of the cathedral school of Bamberg. ‘Codex I’ of the composite Hanover letter collection — which, like the Codex Udalrici, seems to have originated in Bamberg — contains an important group of pro-Henrician and anti-papal materials: the only extant exemplar of the Defensio Heinrici IV regis of Petrus Crassus, the decrees of the imperialist synods of Worms and Brixen, the encyclical of 1089 of the antipope Wibert of Ravenna, and the treatise of Pseudo-Udalric in favour of clerical marriage. However, ‘Codex I’ also includes pro-papal materials: the two letters of Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg in support of Gregory VII, letters of Gregory VII himself concerning German ecclesiastical politics, a well-known letter of Urban II and the decrees of the reforming council of Piacenza of 1095. The eclectic nature of the compilation of ‘Codex I’ suggests that the polemical works were regarded by the compiler primarily as model performances in the rhetorical art of the trivium.

The Book of Kells was probably made at the monastery of Iona at the end of the eighth century. Sometime between 807 and 814, in the wake of a series of devastating raids on the island sanctuary, ‘the giant Gospel of Columkille, chief relic of the Western world,’ was taken to the new headquarters of the Columban community at Kells. Intended as a large liturgical Gospel codex to be displayed on an altar, the Book of Kells was perhaps the last and most ambitious production undertaken by this great Hiberno-Saxon scriptorium. Its sumptuous ornamentation and magisterial format suggest that the manuscript may have been initiated but not finished in time to celebrate the second centenary of St. Columba's death in 797.

In this article, I seek to define the difficult legal phrase utroque iure caruerunt (“and they have been deprived of both laws”), which appears in capitulum XII of the Legatine Capitulary of 786 (a collection of canons promulgated ostensibly by a papal legation sent to England in order to address unspecified abuses), describing a punitive sanction for malefactors who have committed or conspired to commit the crime of regicide. I have been able to identify no parallel occurrence of this phrase in any culturally similar or temporally proximate documents, leaving me with little beyond the text itself to seek evidence for its precise meaning. Since it has been demonstrated recently that Alcuin — a native-born Anglo-Saxon and a Northumbrian — was intimately involved in drafting the Legatine Capitulary (if, indeed, he was not the sole author), and moreover, since this phrase appears in a text composed in the first instance for a Northumbrian audience, I argue that this phrase is deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon legal precedents. I conclude that the phrase signifies that those guilty of regicide should be deprived of both secular and ecclesiastical law, that is, that they should be both outlawed and excommunicated. As such, this phrase represents the first reference to the legal sanction of outlawry in Anglo-Saxon law by more than a century. Additionally, this phrase would appear to take for granted the close cooperation between ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence specifically to punish crime, a feature of Anglo-Saxon law likewise not formally described (according to current thought) until more than a century later. I finish by considering the implications of my argument for the history of Anglo-Saxon law, suggesting in particular that we must revise currently held opinions about the pace of its development, particularly in the Anglian North, where — due most likely to the loss of evidence resulting from the Viking invasions — very little primary-text evidence has survived.

Only since 1932 has the existence been known of the Bridlington Dialogue — or, more properly, Colloquium magistri et discipuli in regulam beati Au- gustini de uita clericorum — a conversation between master and student on the Augustinian Rule. In that year the Bodleian Library of Oxford acquired from the bookdealer E. P. Goldschmidt what is now Bodleian MS. Lat. th. d. 17, a codex which was executed about 1200 and contains the Dialogue on folios 1 to 97v. Nearly twenty years later J. C. Dickinson published some excerpts from the work and discussed it in his The Origins of the Austin Canons and their Introduction into England. Later, Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., under-took to edit the complete Dialogue. Her edition was well advanced when, in 1955, she learned from Winfrid Hümpfner, Ο.S.A., of another medieval manuscript of the text: Durham College Library MS. Β III 8, folios 222v to 253v, written about 1300. In 1960, she published an edition based upon a study of both manuscripts.

In the Spring of 1985, I visited the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to examine in situ Alfred of Sareshel's commentary on Aristotle's Metheora. Although they were listed in the Aristoteles latinus as anonymous, I had already identified the linear and marginal comments in manuscript Selden supra 24 ff. 84r-114r, as another, and to date, the oldest known version of Alfred's commentary on that Aristotelian treatise. That codex also contains a Graeco-Latin version of Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione which is also accompanied by an anonymous commentary (ff. 41r-63r). I decided at the time to transcribe the commentary, and to prepare it for an edition with the aim of publication, a process in which I am still involved.