In a recently published article, V. L. Kennedy discusses the career and writings of a medieval theologian who, after the excellent spade work done by Hauréau in 1884, has not received much attention on the part of modern scholars: Peter of Roissy, chancellor of Chartres in the early thirteenth century, one time a renowned preacher in Paris, and author of scriptural glosses, of sermons, and of a Manuale de mysteriis ecclesiae (or Speculum ecclesiae). Father Kennedy brings to light new documents bearing on the life of Peter and presents us in particular with a careful analysis of his main work, the Manuale. After listing the manuscripts and establishing the chief differences between the two redactions of the treatise—notably, the three parts of the first edition were rearranged into four and enlarged by a fifth part, De sacramentis, when Peter revised and re-issued his book—Kennedy goes on to examine some of its characteristic features, to discuss its literary and canonical sources, to publish a sample edition of its section on Extreme Unction, and finally adds a complete index of its hundreds of rubrics.

The purpose of the following reflections is not polemical, in spite of the fact that the criticism of any philosopher of the past may seem prejudiced to his modern disciples. My intention is rather to point out that the traditional interpretation of William of Ockham as a nominalist and as a skeptic is correct. The reason for insisting on such a point at this time is the series of publications which Father Philotheus Boehner has been contributing to the study of Ockham, and in particular the article which appeared in the first volume of Traditio.

In the seventh bolgia of the Inferno, Dante encounters the thieves, who are punished by undergoing an horrific series of Ovid-like metamorphoses in which men are changed into snakes or unidentifiable amalgams of matter. Since theft violates particular justice, which is a dynamic process that coordinates relations, I will argue that Dante properly makes metamorphosis and the lack of relation it creates between the forms that are changed the fitting punishment for thieves. Ovidian metamorphosis, however, can only image the mutations they experience because Dante's sinners have undergone a transformation even before they are changed into snakes. For particular justice, as Aristotle says, is only part of a more general kind of justice which is complete excellence. In the Inferno, this global justice is the final cause of Hell (‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore,’ Inf. 3, 4), and the principle of retribution that establishes the balance between the punishment and crime of those in it. This general justice, I shall argue, also effects a metamorphosis in the damned prior to their particular punishments, a metamorphosis of unbecoming which makes each of them a perverse parody of what God had originally made them. Every sinner in Hell is undergoing a deformation, a disordering movement away from form which unbalances the vital relationship between body and soul that had made him or her human. More precisely, even though we learn from Statius in the Purgatorio that the damned retain the rational soul, it no longer functions as the form of the body, for it has ceased to be that determining element which allows us to understand the one it is in is a member of the species man. Indeed, as the particular transformations of Agnello and Buoso will make clear, the substantial form of all the damned has become less the intellectual soul than the shape of their matter, from which the intellect can no longer abstract any intelligible form. And as their increasing corporeality suggests, the sinners throughout Hell are being transformed into creatures of ever greater density, who lack inner depth, creatures devoid of an animating essence whose powers persist despite outer change.

Plautus' Trinummus has won much praise from those who seek a strong ethical line in comedy and believe that, in the rare instance of this Plautine play, they have found it. Such critics classify it as an exception from the usual irreverence of the playwright, along with the Captivi. More than 200 years ago, Lessing extolled the Captivi as the finest play, not just of Plautus, but of antiquity. The Trinummus came a close second in his estimation, and he demonstrated his affection for both plays by translating and commenting on the Captivi, and by adapting the Trinummus for the German stage in 1750, at the youthful age of twenty-one. Ritschl chose the Trinummus as the first Plautine work to bring out in a careful critical edition, and his edition elicited one of the finest reviews of Theodor Bergk in 1848. The apparently noble ethics of this play encouraged E. P. Morris to edit it for American school and college students, at the end of the nineteenth century. In this century, affection for pronounced ethics has somewhat declined. Therefore, although critics continue to perceive the same emphasis, they are less willing to extol the play as a masterpiece. E. F. Watling, in his Penguin translation of 1964, rather tepidly summarizes the Trin. as ‘a cool leisurely comedy, which offers an agreeably convincing, if partial, picture of Graeco-Roman family problems.’ A decade later, Erich Segal provocatively labeled it as Plautus' only boring play, precisely because of its unusual ethical contents.

A considerable amount of work has been done recently on Malory. This interest in the author of The Tale of King Arthur has been related in part to the advances in Arthurian scholarship which have formed a major portion of medieval studies in this century. In the whole Arthurian field perhaps no area has been so persistently studied as the legend of the holy grail.

In 1887, on the basis of a Berlin manuscript, a German philologist, Valentin Rose, published the Greek text of the Life of St. David of Thessalonica. Before that date some scholars had conjectured that a Life of this Saint existed; but their expectations were finally realized only in 1887 when Rose's edition came out.

The medieval sources for the study of the organization and customs of the Spanish military Order of Calatrava have never been published. For information on this matter scholars have relied upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century difiniciones enacted by the general chapters of the Order. With the hope of stimulating interest in a subject which has long awaited analysis, the difiniciones or statutes of Abbot William II of Morimond, given in 1468, are printed here. This is the first in a series of projected editions of all the texts pertinent to the organization and customs of the Order in the Middle Ages. Abbot William's difiniciones, like those of his predecessors, issued during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contain useful details concerning the monastic practices of the knights of Calatrava.

One of the last shades whom the pilgrim Dante encounters in Hell is the pitifully nostalgic and vengeful Master Adam. By his own admission, the lute-shaped grotesque has been burnt at the stake for counterfeiting the gold florin and rained into the tenth bolgia along with the swinish impersonators, the reeking liars, and the leprous alchemists stacked against each other like pans. Although various historical models for the now immobile, water-logged sinner have been suggested, he is most commonly identified as the shade of Adam of Brescia, a false coiner employed by the Counts of Romena to debase the monetary standard of the Florentines. This deduction corresponds well with the evidence of the text, for Master Adam both names the wretched souls for whose sake he has left his body burnt and locates the place where he sinned amid the cool green hills of the Casentino. Yet Dante's portrayal of the hydroptic contains elements which seem to allude to a context larger than that defined by the historical Adam of Brescia whose counterfeiting of coins led him to the stake. For as probable as the historical and geographical identification may be, it does not fully account for the counterfeiter's metamorphosis into a water-filled lute, for his nostalgic fixation on his pleasant homeland, or even for his eternal confinement with the deformed shades of the falsifiers of the body, the word, and the goods of nature. When these and other details of the passage are studied against the bodies of extra-literary knowledge available to Dante, however, they reveal that the Master Adam encountered by the pilgrim is not only the shade of an historical counterfeiter, but also a type of the unredeemed and unredeemable Old Adam.

The history of Christianity shows roughly two ways of remembering the apostles: as a collegium of twelve and as individual authorities or saints. In the earliest centuries, the reference to Christ's disciples as a group predominates. Both in the visual arts and in writing, “the twelve” are undiscriminated, forming a collective representation of testimony to Christian teaching. Prescriptive writings from the first four centuries dealing with matters of ecclesiastical organization, doctrine, and worship may serve as an example, such as the first-century document entitled “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles,” better known as Didache, and the second- to fourth-century related sources Doctrina apostolorum, Didascalia apostolorum, and Constitutiones apostolicae.

Canonical bigamy posed a barrier for late medieval men who were or had been married to a widow or unfaithful wife and wanted to retain or be appointed to clerical rank. Western church norms from the twelfth century onward permitted only the papacy to dispense from the obstacle for promotion or readmission to the sacred orders of sub-deacon, deacon, and priest. And yet, papal administrative records from the period indicate that actual dispensations were hardly ever granted to “bigamous” recipients. What accounts for this discrepancy between theoretical freedom and practical restraint? The article discusses the historical evidence and suggests that besides theological reservations the risk of political conflict with lay jurisdictions may have persuaded most of the popes not to make use of their dispensatory power in cases of bigamia.

This comparative study examines the treatment of named vernacular poets from the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the subsequent literary cultural histories of their traditions. Both societies developed sophisticated bilingual intellectual cultures. After a brief survey of historical poets and anonymous secular texts from both vernacular literatures, this essay examines two accounts that involve vernacular poets from Latin texts written by clerics. Muirchú maccu Machtheni wrote Vita Sancti Patricii (ca. 690) and briefly mentioned the presence of the poets Dubthach maccu Lugair and Fiacc Finn Sléibte at the pagan court of Lóegaire mac Néill in Tara in the fifth century. Bede devoted a full chapter of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (ca. 731) to the poet Cædmon at the monastery of Whitby sometime in the second half of the seventh century. The presence of these three vernacular poets in the works of two clerics suggests their perceived potential contributions to the Church. But their treatment in later cultural history differs markedly between the self-referential Gaelic world and more reticent Anglo-Saxons. In the Gaelic tradition Dubthach and Fiacc are recorded in law tracts, hagiography, martyrologies, genealogies, prose narratives, and poems. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition Cædmon does not exist outside of Bede's account. It is suggested that the legally recognized social rank, formal training, and professional status of poets in Gaelic society helps explain the discrepancy in subsequent cultural acknowledgement.

This paper reassesses the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. Through wide-ranging comparative analysis, it identifies probable departures from the antecedent tradition and argues that these departures are best understood not in impersonal terms, as Christian reactions to a pagan tradition, but in terms of a singular poet's sense of decorum, which was not possessed by all Christian authors throughout the Middle Ages. Focusing on interpretive controversies related to matters such as slavery, kin-slaying, the posthumous fate of pagans, and violence orchestrated by women, this paper argues that a series of ostensibly unrelated problems in the poem's critical literature could be resolved with a single coherent explanation: namely, that Beowulf was composed by a poet who sought to preserve as much as possible from the antecedent tradition, while not hesitating to obscure indecorous features and to express value judgments alien to the inherited material. The Beowulf poet's sense of decorum is shown herein to be idiosyncratic yet coherent and pervasive, responsible for various minor departures from tradition and for the selection of the untraditional protagonist around which the poem is structured.

In recent decades, transformations in medieval Christian liturgical practices have been explored for what they can tell scholars about cultural change. Shifts in ritual can indicate changing values and beliefs as well as mark the power of external influences. One relatively momentous shift in liturgical practice was the decision of Alfonso VI, king of Castilla-León at Burgos in 1076, after years of pressure from Pope Gregory VII, to begin the transition from the use of the Old Spanish liturgy (also called the Mozarabic, Visigothic, or Hispanic rite) within his domain in favor of the Roman liturgy used in the rest of Latin Christendom. This innovation is viewed as but one manifestation of a much broader “Europeanization” of medieval Spain that took place in the eleventh century, a movement that began in other Iberian Christian kingdoms, but reached its culmination in the reign of Alfonso VI, with his French brides, Cluniac monks, and receptivity to papal influence.

At first sight Aelfric's Vocabulary appears to be a well-ordered word list, topically arranged under appropriate Latin subtitles. In this it differed none from the Nominale, which was really a Latin-English lexicon largely used in England to teach boys Latin during the Middle Ages. The Nominale, or Vocabulary, contained Latin words together with the English meanings topically arranged: names of trades, herbs, plants, animals, etc. There was no alphabetical arrangement except in a few isolated instances. The Glossary differed from the Nominale or Vocabulary in that it was a collection of glosses which originated as marginal or interlinear explanations of words or phrases in the Latin authors. Any schoolboy who writes the meanings of the Latin words between the lines or on the margin of his Caesar or Vergil is perfectly familiar with the glossing process. However, the analogy stops here: the present-day schoolboy employs this gloss but momentarily. Should he forget the meaning of the Latin word when it occurs again, he is not required to go over the glossed portion of his text to find it; he turns instead to the vocabulary at the end of his book, or goes to a dictionary.

Sulcard, a monk of Westminster in the eleventh century, is the author of the first history of his monastery, the unprinted Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii. In this brief tract he describes the foundation of Westminster in the days, as he claims, of King Æthelberht of Kent, and the patronage and endowment extended by various benefactors, notably Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury and King Edward the Confessor. Sulcard also records the marvellous dedication of Westminster by St. Peter, patron of the church, and two other miracles worked in Westminster by the prince of the apostles. Another chapter is devoted to King Æthelred II and Alfred the Ætheling. It has nothing to do with Westminster and was obviously inserted to bridge the gap in the history of the monastery between the reigns of Kings Edgar and Edward the Confessor. It does, however, contain some information on Æthelred's siege of Rochester in 986 and a brief reference bearing on the question whether Edward or Alfred was the elder of Æthelred's two sons by Emma. The purpose of this paper is to examine the content of Sulcard's Prologus and to print for the first time the entire text.

Because Robert Grosseteste's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is now seen as having provided the framework for a dynamic study of Aristotle's moral philosophy, more significance must be attached to what itself became the standard translation in the Middle Ages. That Grosseteste was responsible both for the full translation of Aristotle's text and for the translation of the Greek commentaries which accompany the Ethics in twenty-one known manuscripts modern scholars are now in agreement. Grosseteste's work on the Nicomachean Ethics has been dated confidently to the 1240s, arguably to 1246–47, and scholars have tended to stress the rapidity with which the Aristotelian ethics were assimilated in the thirteenth century, in contrast, for example, with the slow progress recorded by John of Salisbury on the Posterior Analytics in the twelfth. These results of recent research seem, it should be notd in passing, strangely at odds with the verdict of Roger Bacon, that there was comparatively little work on the Ethics in his period. He, Grosseteste's most ardent admirer, appears not to have known that this master translated the text and comments: ‘Tardius communicata est Ethica Aristotelis et nuper lecta a magistris et raro.’

Legislative documents from the rulers of Germanic states established in former Roman territories are frequently the work of men of Roman descent. Thus Leo of Narbonne was probably the main helper of the Visigothic King Euric, and the Gallo-Roman Syagrius, of the Burgundian Gundobad. The Ostrogoths had Roman jurists in their service; one of these wrote the Edictum Theoderici. Cassiodorus is the author not only of the Variae, a selection of documents composed by him as chancellor of Theoderic the Great, but also of the Edictum Athalarici. The Merovingians Chlodewig and Childebert I employed Gallo-Roman administrators; the patrician Parthenius was an official of the Austrasian King Theudebert I. The need for Roman officials in Germanic governments disappeared largely with the growth of genuine Germanic political and legal institutions. Charlemagne's leading helpers were therefore no longer descendants of the old senatorial nobility which survived in Gaul and Italy, but mostly men of Germanic origin. On the other hand, of all the brilliant scholars of Saxon, Lombard, Spanish-Gothic, and Italic origin in Charlemagne's cosmopolitan entourage, one man alone achieved great political prominence: Alcuin, the Saxon nobleman from the British kingdom of Northumbria. A little-known phase of his activities in the empire of Charlemagne will be investigated here.

One of the many charges leveled against Richard III after his downfall was that of attempted or intended incest with his niece Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of his brother Edward IV. Richard's opponents had proposed a match between Elizabeth and Henry Tudor (who as Henry VII eventually married her); and, in order to circumvent this plot, so the rumor went, Richard desired to marry her himself, once his own wife (Anne Neville) was out of the way. Queen Anne did in fact die in March of 1485, and whatever his intentions had been, Richard soon felt constrained to put an end to the speculation by denouncing it as a slander.