In The Glory of the Martyrs, a collection of miracle stories completed by the early 590s, Bishop Gregory of Tours included a chapter on the Burgundian king Sigismund. A Catholic convert from the Arian Christianity of his father, Sigismund had founded a monastery at Agaune, the present St.-Maurice, Switzerland (Wallis/Valais), in the year 515. After he died in 523, at the hands of Chlodomer, one of the sons of Clovis, his body lay in a well at St.-Péravy-la-Colombe near Orléans (where the Franks had thrown it) until the abbot Venerandus brought it back to St.-Maurice in 535/36 for burial. Over the next fifty years or so, Sigismund gained the reputation as a saint and as a source of healing power over fevers. About Sigismund's posthumous fame, Gregory recorded that “whenever people suffering from chills piously celebrate a mass in his honor and make an offering to God for the king's repose, immediately their tremors cease, their fevers disappear, and they are restored to their earlier health.” Gregory's reference to a mass in honor of Sigismund is as unusual as is the very existence of such a celebration, for the Missa sancti Sigismundi is an early and peculiar example of a new development in the Latin liturgy in late antiquity, the missa votiva or votive mass. Votive masses differed from traditional forms of eucharistic celebration because they could be offered for a particular purpose and at the special request of a member (or members) of a congregation. Unlike the Missa sancti Sigismundi, however, most other early votive masses had generalized titles such as missa votiva or missa pro vivorum et mortuorum. The mass in honor of St. Sigismund is, as far as I can tell, unique in its appeal to the intercession of a particular saint for a specific purpose—the cure of fevers.

Mr. Thomas E. Marston, Curator of the Classical Collection in the Yale University Library, having already been the owner of three 15th-century manuscripts of Juvenal and Persius, which he donated in 1936 to the Yale University Library, acquired in 1953 a much older copy of Juvenal alone. This manuscript, having remained for five hundred years in private collections in Italy, first at Osimo, then at Iesi, had never been collated. Now, with Mr. Marston's generous permission, it has at length been studied and it is the findings of this study that this paper presents. It seemed best, inasmuch as the manuscript affords little new light on the tradition of the text, to restrict this report to sample readings, sufficient to establish the character of the manuscript; a complete collation, however, will be deposited for use in the Yale University Library, as well as with Mr. Marston.

The Thebaid of Statius was one of the most widely read classical texts of the Latin Middle Ages. Commentaries on it however are rather rare. Of some 300 manuscripts of the work described in the files of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, Paris, only about thirty contain glossae, argumenta, or marginalia. The majority of the additions to the original are of a late date: two-thirds fall within the period 1100-1300, while the rest, with only three exceptions, are later. In this census, moreover, there are only three commentaires intégraux, that is, autonomous commentaries which do not consist of glosses on isolated words or phrases. Of the three, one has been attributed by P. Courcelle to Rémi of Auxerre; a second is thought to have been written in the thirteenth century by a certain Martianus de S. Benedicto; and the third has been printed under the authorship of Lactantius Placidus.

Muse of the unique
Historical fact, defending with silence
Some world of yours beholding, a silence
No explosion can conquer, but a lover's yes
Has been known to fill.
W. H. Auden, ‘Homage to Clio’

The Clio and Calliope evoked in the prohemia of Books II and III of Troilus and Criseyde are handily glossed in Chaucer editions as Muses of history and epic poetry respectively, but without citations of sources for these attributions. Stephen A. Barney's notes in The Riverside Chaucer suggest that in both evocations Chaucer is following Statius rather than Dante, and both he and B. A. Windeatt mention the marginal gloss ‘Cleo domina eloquentie’ in MS Harley 2392 of Troilus. Vincent J. DiMarco's note to the name Polymya in Anelida and Arcite identifies her as Muse of ‘sacred song,’ after her name-sense ‘she who is rich in hymns,’ but DiMarco does not elaborate on her pertinence to the context of the poem. There is little in current Chaucer criticism on schemes of attributes for the Muses; and yet without an idea of what values for the Muses Chaucer is drawing upon, it is difficult to appreciate their thematic force in Troilus.

A student of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas once made the comment that if the Summa theologiae is, as its prologue indicates, the book of the pupil, then the Quaestiones disputatae is the book of the master. And with equal enthusiasm another scholar remarked that though he was eighty years old and had been devoted to study from his youth, he had drawn more profit from the three or four years devoted to the study of the Quaestiones disputatae than from the rest of his life. The rich and detailed treatment of the Disputed Questions has not lacked admirers, yet in the history of Thomistic literature that admiration has been tempered by a difficulty in understanding the unity and organization of certain groups of those questions, notably the Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei.

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.

This article offers a study and critical edition of a group of passages (here called the “Schism Extracts”) that were compiled from the apocalyptic prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen and heavily annotated in response to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). The article argues that the Extracts were created by someone with ties to the University of Paris to illuminate a French perspective on the Schism and that they circulated primarily within a Parisian milieu—both among masters at the university and among members of religious houses in and around Paris. The article outlines the main contents and themes of the Extracts and the manuscript contexts in which they are found, including five prophecy collections. While one prophecy collection is known to have been compiled by the Parisian master Simon du Bosc, it is here argued that three of the other collections were produced by Pierre d'Ailly or someone within his circle of associates. Many of the prophetic writings selected for these collections thematically concern the eschatological and reformist role of France and a future holy angelic pope (the pastor angelicus). These include the writings of John of Rupescissa, and parallels between the Extracts and John's reading of Hildegard suggest that the compiler of the text was well-versed in John's apocalyptic thought.

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.

The twelfth-century legal compilation known as the Usatges de Barcelona holds an important place in the history of Catalonia. Recognized as authoritative by kings and parliaments alike from at least the thirteenth century, the Usatges were integrated into the official collection of Catalan law commissioned by the Corts and the new king of Aragón, Fernando de Antequera, in 1412–13. The work of the jurists who carried out this task was eventually fixed in print (in Catalan) in 1495 as the Constitutions y altres drets de Cathalunya, which was reissued in 1588–89 and again in 1704. The Usatges thus formed part of the law of the region for over 500 years, until the suppression of Catalan local law in the Decreto de Nueva Planta of 1716; thereafter, they survived — and still survive — as a focus of Catalan nationalism and regional pride. For medieval historians, the Usatges usefully supplement Catalonia's abundant documentary evidence, evidence unaccompanied before the thirteenth century by significant narrative sources. Individual articles cover such diverse topics as composition payments for injuries, guidelines for judicial proceedings, inheritance rules, military obligation, the status of Jews and Muslims, marriage, rape, treason, and public highways. Drawn from and influenced by a wide variety of sources — including the Visigothic code, Roman law, comital charters, and royal decrees — they provide valuable information about legal traditions and reasoning in Catalonia.

A spate of recent articles attests to a growing interest in Eve in criticism of Old English literature. However, these same articles demonstrate the narrowness of this interest, as they all focus on Eve in one poem — Genesis B — which is not even an entire poem, but rather a small (albeit significant) interpolation into another poem. Other Old English writings have been little studied: in particular, several prominent occurrences of Eve during the Harrowing of Hell survive in the Old English Martyrology; Blickling Homily 7; a homily De descensu Christi ad inferos in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 121; and the poem Christ and Satan, but have received little comment. In each of these texts Eve supplicates Christ when he descends into hell to free the souls of the biblical patriarchs and prophets after his crucifixion; furthermore, six Old English homilies record Eve's appearance during the Harrowing, although not her active involvement. The Evangelium Nicodemi most fully describes the Harrowing of Hell; Eve's appearance within these texts, however, does not derive from this apocryphon. Moreover, while these episodes incorporate ideas drawn from patristic exegesis, they do not derive directly from patristic writings either; nevertheless, Eve's role in these texts may be an Anglo-Saxon modification of the patristic contrast between Eve and Mary, whereby Eve is portrayed as a type of Mary instead of as her antithesis.

Early in the twelfth century Alfonso I ascended the throne of the young Aragonese kingdom. His brother, Pedro (1096–1104), had already established the momentum of the Aragonese reconquest by overpowering the Moorish kingdom of Huesca. With the accession of Alfonso, however, the movement of expansion was greatly accelerated. Although the early years of his reign were marked by a paralyzing conflict with Castile-León, by 1118 his career of conquest was fairly launched. The Moorish kingdom of Zaragoza fell near the end of that year, and its neighbor, Tudela, followed two months later. Calatayud and Daroca were conquered in 1120. During the winter of 1125–1126 Alfonso's troops ranged freely through the Moslem lands of Valencia, Córdoba, and Granada. Near the end of Alfonso's reign, the kingdoms of Lérida and Valencia were menaced by Aragonese arms, and their end appeared imminent. The king's sudden death in 1134 inaugurated a period of confusion in which many of his advances were wiped out, but his activities had already made him a legend and had made Aragón a major power in the Peninsula.

The expression πάθει μάθο (177) and the final words of the parodos (τόδ’. ἕϱϰς) pose problems that have not been solved. At first sight they seem unrelated, but I think they are related through the ‘Hymn to Zeus.’ I also think that we can better understand the way the chorus are using πάθει μάθος by looking at the context of the ‘Hymn to Zeus' and at its structure as a prayer. And since the ending of the parodos echoes several sentiments in the ‘Hymn to Zeus,’ a more exact understanding of the ‘Hymn’ should allow us to try a new approach to understanding the meaning of the end of the parodos.

Although interest in the influence of prophecy and eschatology on the crusade movement and on cross-cultural conceptions of righteous conflict has recently revived, to date there has been little consideration of the reception, transmission, and reinterpretation of multifarious prophecies by networks of individuals involved in the promotion of various crusades from roughly 1187 to 1240. This study tracks the circulation, adaptation, and impact of influential prophecies publicized by papal legates, by crusade recruiters trained in Paris, and by their colleagues in the Victorine, Praemonstratensian, and Cistercian orders, culminating in the crusades of Frederick II (1213–1229). Royal, imperial, noble, episcopal, and papal courts, as well as visionaries, regular religious, secular clergy, preachers, and prelates, played key roles in validating and publicizing predictions. The preservation and reinterpretation of prophecies by scholars, clerics, scribes, and historians working across Latin Christendom (and in the wider Mediterranean region and Central Asia) testifies to the cross-cultural transmission and reception of specific prognostications adapted to speak to local needs and concerns and changing circumstances. This article identifies manuscripts of prophecies which circulated both independently and in association with the crusading histories of Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, written during and used for the promotion of Frederick II's crusades. It concludes that prophecies and their promoters played essential roles in facilitating cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations, religious debates and conversion attempts, and in the fostering, contextualization, and commemoration of the act of pious warfare. Functioning as a common language, prophetic and eschatological expectations enabled Muslims, Eastern Christians, Jewish communities, and Latin Christians to justify their theoretical or actual roles on the orbis terrarum and to define and negotiate with other cultures. Moreover, they could be endlessly adapted both to fit and to shape existing past, present, or future circumstances. Prophecy and eschatology were not fringe phenomena or praxes, but presented holistic methods of making sense of and adapting to events and negotiating between one's own and other cultures, methods that both competed with and complemented historical and theological interpretations of the world (and texts) and rational, scientific, and philosophical modes of thought.

‘It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a Pun’
LEWIS CARROLL

The name of the English Dominican Robert Holcot was still familiar to European intellectuals in the seventeenth century, thanks in part to the wide diffusion of his challenging Questions on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, but even more to the ready availability of his lectures on the biblical book of Wisdom.1 The latter commentary clearly was, as Fr. Joseph Wey observed, a ‘medieval best seller’;2 but few historians investigating late medieval thought or early modern access to it have recently studied the work. One who has done so, the late Beryl Smalley, has drawn attention to the verbal ‘pictures’ (Holcot's term) and extended plays on words that were surely among the pleasures that scribes and readers found in the book for at least three centuries.3 Any reader inclined to ‘look grave at a pun’ and not yet aware that the authors of Sentences commentaries commonly embedded their own cognomens implicitly (and often obscurely) in the biblical tags they chose as their incipits must have found cause for distress with the opening words of Holcot's Wisdom commentary.

The legate and legation have long interested medievalists, the general focus being on papal legation approached by pontificate, by region, or by historical era. Although study has fluctuated over the years, the past decade has witnessed a renewed interest. This recent work underlines the subtlety and the complexity of medieval thought concerning both legation and the larger topic under which it may be subsumed, representation. Among recent students of papal legation is Professor Frances Underhill, who has inspected the administrative devices utilized by papal legates in England during the reign of Henry III. Of special interest is the work of Professor Richard Schmutz, who has examined the classification of legates by earlier students of papal representation and has found their categorization of legates wanting. Secular legation has received some notice as well. Professor Donald Queller, for example, has reaffirmed and expanded his earlier suggestions that legatine practices did not play a prominent role in developing secular diplomacy and that there was a sharp legal distinction between ambassadorial nuncii and procuratores as regards legal volition and power. In addition, some attention has been directed lately to the problem of legal terminology and to the place that terminology has in descriptions of power and in descriptions of the transfer of power. Most of these legatine studies discuss to a greater or lesser degree both the theory and the practice of legation. Many consider, however cursorily, the possible influences which Roman practices and Roman legal theory may have had both on the theory and on the practice of papal and secular legation in medieval Western Europe. Yet none has taken up in detail either the character of the legate or the theory of legation in medieval Roman law. It is accordingly the purpose of this paper to analyze legatus both in the Corpus Iuris Civilis and in Accursius' synthesis of legistic opinion and interpretation, the Glossa ordinaria.

The Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530–600) is known today for his Holy Cross hymns, for the classicizing epithalamium that he wrote for the wedding of the Frankish king Sigibert, and for his panegyrics of the royal and powerful in Merovingian society. Yet despite the attention that has been lavished on Fortunatus's other major works, his ambitious four hundred line poem De Virginitate (8.3) has been noticeably neglected, perhaps because of its subject matter. A highly original work nevertheless, this poem was written in the late 560s for his patroness, the royal nun Radegund. Most probably, it was recited by the poet at the installation of Radegund's “spiritual daughter” Agnes as abbess of the Convent of the Holy Cross, which Radegund had founded at Poitiers. It is a work equal in importance to Fortunatus's episcopal panegyrics and other ceremonial poems for church occasions.

Im Jahre 1959 hat K. Schneider in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaff die Ergebnisse der Erforschung des antiken Purpurs zusammenfassend dargestellt. Ein Überblick über die Forschungsgeschichte zur antiken Purpurfärberei zeigt, daβ die grundlegenden Erkenntnisse bereits 1842 von W. A. Schmidt erarbeitet wurden. Die Darstellungen von J. Marquardt—A. Mau, K. Faymonville, M. Besnier, H. Blümner, L. Brühl, W. Born und R. J. Forbes bieten Zusammenfassungen der Thesen Schmidts, fügen ihnen aber kaum wesentlich Neues hinzu. Von ein paar eigenen Akzentuierungen abgesehen, gilt das auch von den Arbeiten A. Dedekinds. Sie sind sowieso gröβtenteils lexikologischer Natur. Kein Urteil kann ich mir über die griechisch geschriebene Untersuchung von P. G. Moatsou erlauben; trotz intensiver Bemühungen war sie nicht zu bekommen. Soweit ich sehe, hat sie auf die Forschung praktisch keinen Einfluβ ausgeübt. Auch K. Schneider erwähnt sie nicht.

In discussing the idea of musical World Harmony we have had occasion to mention the tetrachord and the fourth (interval) in their symbolic or allegoric impact. The number 4 is a constitutive element in Pythagorean cosmology since the speculations on the “well-tempered” state—of the soul, of the body, or of the universe itself—rest on the harmonious combination of four elements.

Monsieur l'abbé Jean École, professeur à l'Université catholique d'Angers (France) et membre du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique vient de rééditer chez Monsieur Georg Olms, à Hildesheim (Allemagne), l'Ontologie de Christian Wolff. Le titre complet de cet ouvrage est, on le sait, Philosophia prima seu Ontologia, methodo scientifica pertractata, qua omnis cognitionis humanae principia continentur, editio nova priori emendatior. Le texte qu'on nous présente est donc celui de 1736. En son Introduction, M. École nous renseigne sur les diverses éditions de l'Ontologia, nous donne quelques précisions sur la fortune du mot ‘ontologie,’ sur les caractères les plus marquants de l'Ontologia de Wolff: universalité en raison de son objet, primat de l'essence, rapports avec la pensée des scolastiques, d'une part, la philosophie de Leibnitz, d'autre part, sur la méthode de Wolff et les auteurs qu'il consulte. Viennent ensuite la Dédicace de l'Ontologia au roi Frédéric, la Préface (1729) de l'Ontologia, enfin l'Ontologia elle-même dont les articulations principales sont les suivantes: Prolegomena. Pars I: De notione Entis in genere et proprietatibus quae inde consequuntur. Pars II: De speciebus entium et eorum ad se invicem respectu: Sectio I; De ente composito; Sectio II; De ente simplici; sectio III; De respectu entium ad se invicem. Un Index rerum praecipuarum, des Varietates et editoris adnotationes, un Index auctorum ad quos Wolffius remittit, un Index auctorum ad quos editor remittit, un Index locorum a Wolffio citatorum, un Index locorum ab editore citatorum, un Index scholasticorum canonum, un Index generalis enfin, ajoutent à l'intérêt de cette réédition dont ils font un remarquable instrument de travail pour tous ceux qu'attirent la Métaphysique et son histoire.