Es ist eine bekannte Tatsache, dass das Mittelalter zahlreiche, oft weitreichende und den Gang der Geschichte beeinflussende Fälschungen hervorgebracht hat. Die lange Reihe der Falsifikate reicht von den spätantiken Symmachianischen Fälschungen über die Konstantinische Schenkung, die Pseudo-Isidorischen Dekretalen, bis zu den zahllosen gefälschten Urkunden bekannter und unbekannter Verfasser des hohen Mittelalters und den gefälschten Viten zur Erhöhung des Ruhmes einer Kirche oder eines Klosters, Fälschungen, die aus betrügerischen Absichten, aus politischen Erwägungen, aus genealogischen Bestrebungen, aus Nachahmungssucht und dem Wunsche, echte oder falsche Reliquien zu deuten, aber auch aus edleren Motiven erwachsen sind. Das discrimen veri ac falsi ist deshalb zu einer der vornehmsten Aufgaben der kritischen Geschichtswissenschaft geworden und wurde vor allem in der Urkundenlehre zu höchster Feinheit entwickelt.

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.

Despite G. R. Owst's important studies, medieval English sermons have been examined only sporadically, and too often, as Siegfried Wenzel has noted, such investigations have treated sermons merely as structural analogues for the works of Chaucer and others. Fortunately, in recent years Wenzel himself and others have reaffirmed Owst's principal concept: sermons are mirrors reflecting the social and literary milieu of their time. This renewed interest in the sermon as historical document, however, may encounter a criticism made of Owst's own procedure, namely, a tendency to select items of significance from a wide range of material without adequate attention to the immediate context of each. The printing of a complete sermon, with its mixture of historical allusion, literary motif, and social commentary—a potpourri of the interesting, the dull, the unusual, and the commonplace—provides not only a necessary balance in method, but a better perspective of the sermon as a literary construction in its own right.

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64), the man who succeeded Calixtus III to the apostolic chair in 1458, was destined to become one of the best known pontiffs of the later Middle Ages. His popularity not only rests upon his own extensive literary and historical production, but upon the extensive historical literature subsequently devoted to this fifteenth-century figure. Multiple interpretations and assessments of his character and contributions abound. Caught up in the severe conceptualization of nineteenth-century renaissance scholarship, Aeneas Sylvius emerged as a slightly tarnished dilettante who only partially exemplified the typical Renaissance man with his clear-cut and self-reliant aesthetic and moral characteristics. In this spirit Georg Voigt raised grave suspicions as to Aeneas' integrity in both his private and public life. Jacob Burckhardt, who could only appreciate the pope's multiplicity from the standpoint of the representative artistic types exemplifying Italian humanism, failed to find the ‘whole man’ in the versatile Italian. As historiography moved towards a more diffuse view of the Renaissance and saw it as a shift of balance and change in emphasis rather than an abrupt change, the image of Aeneas Sylvius was gradually freed from such narrow interpretations. The struggle was long and intense for the scholarly tyranny of Voigt, though not always verified by a re-examination of the documents, was argumentatively infectious. Today, a half century of detailed research has added many additional perspectives to our knowledge of Aeneas Sylvius and has clarified many particular problems related to both his earlier life and later pontificate. Future studies will not differ too substantially from this pattern. The inconsistency accompanying the maturation of human character; the conflict between the theological-political values of any one man and the current aspirations of domestic and international ambition; the transitory character of the age—all these factors will continue to hamper assessments of Aeneas Sylvius.

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.’

William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to his death in 1249, was one of the first theologians of the thirteenth century to take into serious account the philosophical works that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the early decades of the thirteenth century. William showed a great deal of openness toward the works of those to whom he referred as “Aristotle and his followers,” and obviously drew upon them, even going so far as to adopt the Avicennian arguments for the existence of God as the being that is necessary through itself, and to claim that the Avicennian expression, “necesse esse per se,” is the proper name of the first principle. On the other hand, he also firmly rejected many Aristotelian doctrines when he found them to be in opposition to the faith.

‘Non solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli mi sono ingegnato d'andare.’ Boccaccio defends the Decameron from envious critics, in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, by denying ambition. He is writing, he says, in the humblest style, in the vernacular, in prose; his little stories have no titles; his readers are idle women: in short, far from attempting any literary heights, as he writes the Decameron he walks through valleys. Some valleys, though, are gardens. At the end of the Sixth Day, the seven women of the story-telling brigata seem to act out Boccaccio's metaphor for his own project. They slip away from their male companions and walk to a secluded spot which Elissa knows about, the Valle delle Donne. Before returning to the rule of king Dioneo, the ladies amuse themselves in the circular valley, admiring its natural beauty and swimming naked in the pool at its center. The excursion is, like the very different Introduction to the Fourth Day, a brief digression from the sequence of one hundred stories, yet it provides a unique point of entrance into the poetics of the Decameron.

In that flowering of new monasticism which began in the eleventh century and continued into the twelfth, along with so many other rich and complex developments, to make the twelfth century a great one, the new Order of Citeaux was the most influential and significant. This was no less true in England than on the continent; in fact, the Cistercian Order very probably enjoyed even greater advantage and renown in England than those other orders founded contemporaneously. Its ‘great and powerful influence over the religious and social life of the country,’ even until the dissolution, is beyond doubting. Starting with Waverley (1128) in Surrey, Rievaulx (1132) and Fountains (1132) in Yorkshire, and, for Wales, Tintern (1131) and Whitland (1140) in Monmouthshire and Carmarthenshire respectively, the Order spread with such astonishing rapidity that it numbered 40 in England and Wales by the end of 1153, not counting the abbeys of the Order of Savigny, which became part of the Cistercian Order in 1147 and numbered 12 in England and Wales, with Furness (1123) in Lancashire greatest among them. Beyond this era of settlement, between 1164 and the end of 1198, 11 were established (if we include the short-lived Wyresdale), and between 1201 and 1281 an additional 12 abbeys. But the expansion was then at dead end, and the two remaining abbeys were founded much later in an environment sharply contrasting with that sought by early Cistercians: St. Mary Graces (1350), near the tower of London, so strange a location for a Cistercian abbey, and St. Bernard's College, Oxford (1437), for Cistercian scholars who formerly used Rewley (1281) while studying at the University. In all, including the two latecomers, the abbeys numbered 77 in England and Wales.

The Life of the Peloponnesian saint, Peter of Argos, which was first published in the original Greek in 1888, is very little known in spite of its historical interest. If I am not mistaken, I was the first among scholars to make use of it, in 1898 in my Russian study, The Slavs in Greece. In 1908 a monograph in Modern Greek came out in Athens on the subject of Peter of Argos, written by Ch. Papaoi-konomos: . This monograph has remained entirely unknown to European scholars; strangely enough, it was mentioned neither in the detailed bibliography of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, nor in the Vizantisky Vremennik, nor in the , where Greek publications are listed with reasonable accuracy. For myself, I was unable to find the book anywhere in America, and it was only recently that I received it directly from Greece. Since 1915 the indefatigable Greek scholar Nikos A. Bees has employed the Life of Peter of Argos in several studies, of which I shall speak later. Up to this time, nothing on the Life of Peter of Argos has been written in English.

In the past three decades, the origins of Renaissance humanism have received much sensitive scholarly analysis. Although the novelty of humanism is still rightly stressed, the real contribution of medieval thinkers to its evolution has been brought into sharp focus. In no sphere has so high a claim been made for intellectual continuity as in political ideas, with Walter Ullman's assertion that Renaissance civic humanism owed its shape to its medieval antecedents. It is not my purpose to judge how far such a claim is justified. But since almost all historians would now agree that scholastic political thought made at the least a small contribution, there is a point in tracing the means by which Aristotelian ideas percolated into the schools of rhetoric, the cradles of civic humanism. It is in this context that Guido Vernani's commentary on the Politics should be examined.

Throughout the Paedagogos, the Stromata, and the Quis dives salvetur? Clement of Alexandria uses the term ‘indifferent’ (ἀδιάφοϱος) or one of its derivatives. In all of these instances except three, the term is found in the moral sense redolent of Stoic usage. The present study attempts to treat by a comprehensive analysis of the term the meaning of ‘indifferent’ in Clement, its significance for his moral ascesis, and certain problems that arise from its use. Because of the marked similarity between Clement's usage of this term and that of the Stoics a brief discussion of the Stoic notions of indifference is necessary as a background to Clement's teachlng. It is hoped that such a study will provide a concrete example of the adaptation of Stoic morality to practical Christian asceticism.

Le terme ‘mozarabe’ (musta'rib = arabisé) n'apparaît qu'au xie siècle, dans le Léon. Il désigne un phénomène limité d'influence culturelle — notamment en art — par suite de l'émigration vers le Nord de Chrétiens ayant d'abord vécu dans le Sud de la Péninsule ibérique, sous le pouvoir musulman. C'est improprement que l'on a étendu ce terme à tous les Chrétiens d'Espagne durant la période qui précède les premiers succès décisifs de ce qu'il est convenu de nommer la reconquista. Non seulement ceux des royaumes du Nord, qui n'ont assimilé que quelques thèmes décoratifs, quelques éléments musicaux et quelques symboles culturels arabes, mais une partie de ceux qui sont restés dans les régions islamisées et qui se sont cramponnés durant un certain temps à leur culture latine, n'ont pas à être qualifiés de la sorte.

Although we still lack a critical edition of Caxton's Golden Legend or any modern edition of the Gilte Legende, several scholars have contributed notable studies on the English versions of the Legenda Aurea. As far as Caxton is concerned, these studies have been confined to assessing his personal contributions, to deciding which French and English versions he used, and to discussing how he may have adapted the French, English and Latin texts of the Golden Legend which he had in front of him. It has of course also been recognised that a large section of Caxton's printed edition (corresponding to pp. 105–244 of Ellis's edition) was taken from a non-Legenda source and that much of this section is based ultimately on the Bible. But nothing has been done to examine this section in detail to determine where Caxton got his material and how he arranged it. This paper is devoted to an investigation of some of the problems involved in this part of the Golden Legend in order to provide a basis for further study and also to contribute to our understanding of Caxton's method as editor.

In the late winter of 378–7, the Athenian assembly passed a decree on the motion of Aristoteles which formalized the results of much earlier diplomatic activity and invited those states concerned with their freedom and autonomy to join Athens and her allies in a novel and permanent alliance. This Decree is often called the ‘Charter of the Second Athenian Confederacy,’ and it is rightly regarded as ‘the Queen of Fourth Century Inscriptions’ for the crucial information which it provides on one of the most important political and diplomatic developments of that epoch, a development that soon led to a resurgence of Athenian imperialism. The detailed provisions of the Decree are of inestimable value, particularly as the only extant contemporary history of this period, the Hellenica of Xenophon, contains not so much as a passing reference to the Decree itself or to most of the significant steps which led up to it. This glaring omission in Xenophon's account has attracted both the curious attention and often the unfavorable criticism of virtually every modern scholar who has investigated fourth century Greek history. The only other major extant account of the establishment of the confederacy, that of Diodorus, provides some details, but it contains inaccuracies, especially errors of chronology. The modern historian therefore must seek to recover the origins and background of the confederacy from a variety of sources which are often incomplete and sometimes biased. A century of scholarship has elucidated many problematical aspects of this Decree, but several questions connected with it still demand discussion. It is my purpose in this article to examine some of these questions with reference to Greek diplomacy, propaganda, and imperialism in the early fourth century.

Statements in Latin concerning such topics as wisdom, truth, and virtue, attributed to the Proverbia Grecorum (less often the Parabolae Gregorum), are found in a number of early medieval manuscripts. They are of interest because of their stated connection with the Greeks, which pertains to the knowledge of Greek and Greek learning in the early medieval West, and because of the obscure vocabulary many of the proverbs contain, which relates to the study of the latinity of early medieval, especially insular, scholars. New findings concerning the origin and transmission of these statements have increased their importance because they have revealed connections between them and other important early medieval Latin texts, notably the Collectio canonum Hibernensis and certain florilegia found in the miscellaneous Collectaneum of Sedulius Scottus. The Proverbia Grecorum have been edited and studied in detail only once, by Sigmund Hellmann, in 1906. Since then new statements attributed to the Proverbia Grecorum have been found, and the characterization of early medieval Latin culture has been significantly revised. Hellmann's text, furthermore, has been found to be faulty in a number of places. Therefore, there is a need for a full re-edition and study of this proverb collection. This has been undertaken in the present work. Following this essay, which defines the current state of knowledge of the Proverbia Grecorum, there is a critical edition of all statements identified as Proverbia Grecorum. This is followed by a commentary in which parallel texts are cited, and points of linguistic interest are noted.

The prominence of the public assembly is one of the most striking features of the reign of Louis the Pious. Both the chronicles and the imperial biographers refer again and again to the frequent public gatherings at which much of the business of the empire was transacted. This business varied in nature and importance, just as the assemblies varied in their location and duration. However, there seems to have been no major category of public business which was systematically kept from the purview of the public assembly.

The figure of Louis IX of France is frequently surrounded by an aura of the unreal. Since he has been honored by the Church and succeeding generations as St. Louis, the tendency has often been to place him on a pedestal and to make of him a plaster statue rather than the vigorous king who ruled France for 44 eventful years in the midst of the thirteenth century. Above all, it is often imagined that a saint-king would surely be something of a pawn in the hands of the clerics, and especially the papacy.

L'Essai que nous présentons constitue le premier chapitre d'une étude plus compréhensive sur l'Idée d'évolution chez S. Irénée. Encore qu'elles soient amputées d'une introduction aux fins de définir ce terme d'évolution, nous croyons que les pages qu'on va lire ont un sens par elles-mêmes et que leur intelligence reste entière, même si l'on ajourne provisoirement le contexte total où les situer. Notre propos se donne donc comme une enquête sur la mentalité d'Irénée et ses orientations théologiques possibles. Si prévenu qu'on puisse être contre le critère psychologique en critique, nous le croyons cette fois urgent et nous tentons de lui attribuer la fonction précise de caractériser une oeuvre dont les sources demeurent, par ailleurs, hypothétiques et plus ou moins invérifiables.

Das Verzeichnis der Römerbriefkommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra war ursprünglich als Anhang einer Dissertation beigegeben worden, die sich mit der mittelalterlichen Exegese von Röm. 13. 1–7 befasst. Das Verzeichnis wurde überarbeitet und ergänzt. Notwendig wird sich auf weite Strecken Übereinstimmung mit dem Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi F. Stegmüllers ergeben, dem ich vor allem für die Handschriften wertvolle Ergänzungen verdanke. Mit einigen Ausnahmen sind hier nur die Autoren aufgenommen worden, deren Kommentare durch Handschriften sicher bezeugt sind, während in dem Repertorium F. Stegmüllers auch alle unsicheren Daten verwertet worden sind. Aus der griechischen Kirche ist der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes verzeichnet, weil er in der Übersetzung Rufins eine bedeutende Rolle in der exegetischen Tradition der lateinischen Kirche spielt. Sofern die behandelten Autoren ausser dem Römerbrief auch andere paulinische Briefe kommentierten, sind die Angaben über Handschriften, Drucke etc. auch auf diese Kommentare ausgedehnt worden. Die Literaturangaben beziehen sich in erster Linie auf Fragen der Paulinenkommentare und der exegetischen Methode. Für die Incipits und Explicits verweise ich auf das Repertorium von F. Stegmüller.