Treating of the passage in Exodus which prescribes, among the holy vestments for Aaron and his sons, “linen breeches, to cover the flesh of their nakedness from the reins to the thighs,” Cyril of Alexandria remarks:

Their breeches are of linen, an excellent covering for the ugliness and unseemliness about the thighs. For all things connected with holy men are most honorable, and there is nothing unseemly in them. Now the linen placed upon the parts of the body about the thighs intimates that the cooling of the pleasures of the flesh is most becoming holy men: for linen is cool. But the heat that rouses the foulest desires is foreign to every holy man.

For most of Chaucer's readers the Parson's Tale provides a conclusion to the Canterbury Tales that is at best drab, at worst a betrayal of all that is thought to be most Chaucerian. Even sympathetic readers find it something to argue away rather than interpret, a strategy that finds its logical fulfillment in the unsympathetic claim that Chaucer is not really responsible for the tale at all. Manly expressed this view with admirable forthrightness: ‘the Parson's Tale… was probably never composed by Chaucer, the two uncomposed fragments of penitential treatises found in our MSS under that designation being at best only loose materials, translated by Chaucer for future use, and copied by his literary executor as the Parson's Tale only because Chaucer's chest contained no other piece of prose that seemed appropriate to the Parson.’ While few contemporary critics would have the temerity to engage in these bibliographical speculations, many of Manly's assumptions are in fact still with us. On the question of originality and date, for instance, Professor Donaldson has recently described the tale as ‘apparently translated by Chaucer from the Latin of some manual directed at helping priests in the performance of their spiritual duties,’ and adds that 'scholars generally agree that the translation was made at an earlier stage in Chaucer's career. ‘ On the work's coherence — or lack of it — another recent commentator has approvingly quoted a remark first made in 1901 by Mark Liddell: ‘none of the Latin, English, or French treatises on this subject that I have seen (and I have examined a great number in the hope of finding the source of Chaucer's work) is so confused and disproportioned as Chaucer's is.’ Similarly, in commenting on ‘the disjointed nature of the links' between the part on penance and that on the sins, Morton Bloomfield speculates that this ‘indicates an early stage in the combining. Chaucer, who left the Canterbury Tales unfinished, would probably have provided the proper links, but he did not have time. ‘ While this view of the Parson's Tale as journeyman's work completed early in the poet's career is not entirely unanimous, it is close to a consensus.

The treatise De re militari by Flavius Vegetius Renatus was the bible of warfare throughout the Middle Ages — the soldier's equivalent of the Rule of St. Benedict. The surviving manuscripts exceed 140; there were five separate translations into French within the century following 1284, many more into other languages, and nine incunabula. In contrast to Byzantium, where a succession of authors since Urbicius (ca. 500) strove to keep military literature up to date, the Latin civilization of the West was content with a single book. Vegetius, who explicitly omitted cavalry from his exposition, became the philosopher-schoolmaster of Western chivalry. Hrabanus Maurus, John of Salisbury, and Egidius Colonna copied large extracts into works of their own, and so did Machiavelli. Vegetius is among the authors whose popularity in the Renaissance more than equalled their medieval fame. The testimonials continued to mount up through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an epoch that was perhaps the highest point of Vegetius‘ influence, and reached even to the Napoleonic age, when Marshall de Ligne (best remembered for a witticism about the Congress of Vienna) pronounced a memorable encomium: ‘A god, says Vegetius, inspired the legion, and I say that a god inspired Vegetius. It is he who by his seven orders of battle made us understand the warfare of the Ancients and taught the greatest generals of our time to imitate them.’ What other book without literary distinction was as prized in the Age of Enlightenment as it had been by Bede?

Merovingian and Carolingian sources refer to a subordinate official, called a centenarius, and his jurisdiction, called a centena. In the Carolingian period, the centenarius was selected by the count (comes) to exercise administrative, police, and judicial functions within the centena or hundred, a subdivision of the county (pagus or comitatus). Other terms for the count's deputies and their jurisdictions are also attested; in the south vicarii administered districts called vicariae, and in the far west the subdivision of the county bore the name condita, a word probably of Celtic origin. For most of the kingdom, however, the principal officials of the count were called centenarii and their jurisdictions, centenae. In the Merovingian period also, the centenarius acted as a subordinate of the count, and like his Carolingian namesake exercised judicial and police duties; the term centena is attested in sixth-century Merovingian sources but probably acquired clear territorial significance only in the late Merovingian or early Carolingian periods.

However much Procopius' judgment of Byzantine diplomacy must be corrected, his outraged statement cannot be said to be entirely without justification. Subsidies did form one of the principal tools of Byzantine relations with the barbarians, and the results obtained therefrom were seldom commensurate with the sums expended.

By the end of the thirteenth century the royal writ of summons to Parliament usually specified that communities send representatives with “full power” to consent to whatever should be ordained by the king in his court and council. This “full power” was the famous plena potestas which was stated in the mandates carried by knights and burgesses to Parliament and by delegates of cities and towns to Cortes and States General, and which is still current in proxies for stockholders' meetings. It has, of course, like almost every word of the terminology in documents relating to representation, challenged interpretation: on the one side is the argument of J. G. Edwards, who confines himself to England, that plena potestas implied an almost political or sovereign consent which limited the royal authority; on the other, the assumption that it was an expression of involuntary consent to the acts and decisions of the royal government. In general, of course, whatever modern scholars have decided as to the right of consent has resulted either from modern conceptions of representation or from a strict interpretation of the terminology in the sources for the history of assemblies. No one has examined plena potestas in the light of the legal theory and procedure of the thirteenth century It is possible that by studying how legists and canonists viewed the meaning of plena potestas—for it, like most of the terminology in the mandate, came from Roman Law—we can find at least a relatively new approach to the problem of medieval consent.

In reconstructing the social and economic history of the early Middle Ages, perhaps the single, most salient obstacle to our research is the scant amount of information we possess concerning the household economy of the lay family, how the family managed its lands and divided its labors among its members. Our sources, overwhelmingly ecclesiastical in provenience, tell us fairly much of the organization of Church properties, and, through a few surviving royal records, we have some information too about royal estates. But at all times in medieval Europe, non-royal lay families owned or controlled the larger portion of the soil. We must try to learn more about how these propertied families managed their estates, and how internal family structure may have been affected by, or in turn may have influenced broader economic and social changes.

In 1255, in his commentary on the fourth book of Peter Lombard's Sentences, Thomas Aquinas rejected a solution to the problem of sacramental causality, one that was enjoying a certain degree of popularity in the mid-thirteenth century. The opinion that Thomas rejected was that the sacraments effect grace not through an inherent, created virtue but rather through a pact, covenant, or ordination of God that guarantees grace to the person who receives the sacraments, if the latter are properly administered and the recipient places no obstacle in the way of their effectiveness. This type of sacramental causality, termed causality sine qua non, was usually illustrated, Thomas informs us, with the following example. A king might decree that any person possessing a certain leaden coin would receive 100 pounds. In such a case, it would not be the leaden coin that causes the reception of the 100 pounds, but rather the arbitrary acceptation of the token by the king. For Thomas, the leaden coin would be only the occasion for the reward, not its cause. Therefore Thomas rejected this solution which, it seemed to him, would make the sacraments nothing more than the occasion or accidental cause of grace. He sealed his rejection by equating such causality with the way in which the racial color of the builder of a house could be said to be the cause of the house. Thomas maintained this position throughout his life, and, although he altered his solution to the problem of sacramental causality, he in no way altered his rejection of the type of causality based on the example of the king and the leaden coin.

These pages continue the inventory of Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries which was begun in Traditio 23 (1967) 313–413. The commentaries have been arranged alphabetically according to the author's first name, with a brief bio-bibliographical note and indication of manuscripts and editions.

The (‘The Meanings of the Philosophers’) of Abū al-Ghazālī († 1111) is the first part of a composite work in which the author — the theologian of Islam par excellence — takes a considered stand with regard to the teachings of the philosophers, especially al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. In the first part his purpose is simply the presentation of their doctrines in logic, metaphysics and physics. The second part, the famous Tahāfut al-falāsifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), aims at exposing their self-contradictions on many points — the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of singulars, etc.

To propose a unified religious allegory in what hitherto has been accepted rather generally as two distinct Old English poems, and universally as secular poetry carrying no meaning beyond the literal, is to risk being categorized as a ‘pan-allegorist’ in literary theory and an evangelist in temperament. Let me begin, therefore, by protesting that if the corpus of Old English poetry should ever be unmasked as a series of impeccably Christian allegories, no one will be more astounded or dismayed than I. It would be difficult to deny, however, that the great scholars who laid the foundations for our study of this poetry were, in most instances, more interested in Germanic antiquity than in Latin Christianity; and that as a result, a disproportionate number of our own major discoveries are likely to come out of the once-neglected Patrologia Latina. If this observation is accurate, we may do well to suspend temporarily our belief in certain universal negative conclusions—like, for example, the familiar pronouncement that Old English poets characteristically do not employ allegory—and to inquire whether some of the ‘secular’ poems that have puzzled us for so long may not become less puzzling in the light of early Christian thought. Much as we may revere the spirit of Germanic antiquity, we shall do it small service by attributing to it attitudes or works that it might not have cared to claim.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux is an unwilling enigma. No zealot in the Church's history has spoken more eloquently about right rule in the Church; none has been more fierce in his condemnation of the ecclesiastical truant. And yet, when this has been said, there remain the persistent questions of what Bernard actually conceived to be right rule in the Church, which truancy he would wholly exorcise and which merely prune. Oddly enough, in regard to his policies for reform, Bernard has become almost as well known among modern scholars for his ambiguities as for his doctrines. There now exists a rather bewildering garden of Bernardine studies from which a student can pluck an interpretation of his papal theory as Gregorian, anti-Gregorian, hierarchical, egalitarian, proto-Protestant, or any one of a variety of other hues. It will be the purpose of this paper to present the major interpretations of the De consideratione now extant and to attempt, where possible, to eliminate theories which are clearly specious, in the hope that future studies can proceed amicably and constructively.

Among the various aspects of the operation of canon law in medieval England, the history of the Anglo-Norman school of canonists which flourished in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries remains largely unexplored. Modern historians have frequently emphasized, to be sure, the eager interest which English churchmen of the twelfth century took in problems and issues of canon law; and it can now be considered an established fact that the English Church throughout this period was well abreast of the developments which everywhere resulted from the growing centralization of ecclesiastical procedure, from the work of Gratian and his school, and from the ever-increasing number of authoritative responses and appellate decisions rendered by the popes in their decretal letters. The importance of the system of delegate jurisdiction in the cases referred back by Rome to the country of origin has been noted, and so has the conspicuous number of twelfth-century English collections of decretals, which testifies to a particular zeal and tradition, among Anglo-Norman canonists, in supplementing Gratian's work by records of the new papal law. The problem, also, of the influence exercised by Roman and canon law on the early development of the Common Law is being discussed with growing interest among students of English legal and constitutional history.

These pages continue the inventory of Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries published in Traditio 23 (1967) 313–413, 24 (1968) 149–245, 26 (1970) 135–216, and 27 (1971) 251–351. The commentaries have been arranged alphabetically according to the author's first name, with a brief bio-bibliographical note and indication of manuscripts and editions.

For St. Augustine the saeculum—the sum total of earthly human existence — was malignant. Not only was it so, he thought, since Adam's fall, but it would remain so until the Last Judgment. Since the Fall this world was no place in which to rejoice; only otherworldly liberation could be had ‘from this life of misery, a kind of hell on earth.’ Historical events, aside from the Incarnation, remained for Augustine ‘a chaos of human sin divided by acts of divine power.’ With Christ, history had entered into its sixth and last earthly age and there was no hope for any greater earthly future. In the City of God (20.7) Augustine rejected as a ‘ridiculous fable’ the view that the thousand-year kingdom of Christ in Revelation (20.1-6) would be a future earthly kingdom, interpreting it instead as a figure for the life of the Church in the present. ‘There are no verbs of historical movement in the City of God,’ Peter Brown assures us, ‘no sense of progress to aims that may be achieved in history.’

There is something immediately appealing about a wandering bard such as the sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, who left his native Italy to seek the hospitality and patronage of the kings and bishops of Merovingian Gaul. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fortunatus attracted the attention of a succession of scholars such as Thierry, Caron, Dostal, Meyer, and Koebner, but it is now over fifty years since the last full-scale treatment of the poet was written: that of the Abbé Tardi in 1927. As a consequence of this, a number of rather questionable biographical details, as they are given in these standard accounts of the poet, have come to be somewhat uncritically accepted. Some re-examination of the evidence for Fortunatus' travels and career is long overdue. My aim here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the poet's career, nor indeed a full biographical sketch, but rather to discuss critically some key issues within these accounts of Fortunatus' career, in the light of the elements of autobiography found in Venantius' poems. As we shall see, an outline of the various stages of his career, both before his arrival in Gaul and during the many years of his residence in his adopted homeland, may be pieced together with the aid of the scattered evidence contained in his poems, yet this evidence is often obviously incomplete and is at times frustratingly ambiguous. Still, we can best proceed in the reconstruction of Venantius' career and travels by investigating what may be established, or brought into question, by the evidence of the poems themselves.

James the Venetian and Greek is slowly emerging from the darkness which has shrouded his name and personality for seven centuries. He now appears as a learned canonist who would be called upon to give advice on important matters, and as the most active and successful pioneer of Latin Aristotelianism in the tweltfh century. He was probably the first to translate into Latin Aristotle's Physics, De anima, Metaphysics, and parts of the Parva Naturalia; he translated anew, after Boethius, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistici Elenchi; some commentaries on this latter group of works were either written or translated by him; he also rendered into Latin a prologue to the Physics. Ten generations of Latin-speaking scholars and philosophers read the Posterior Analytics almost exclusively in his translation; his versions of the Physics, De anima, three books of the Metaphysics, and some of the Parva Naturalia held the ground almost unchanged for more than a century, and, not substantially revised, for two more centuries. Our philosophical language owes to him many of its technical terms. Hardly anything is known of the circumstances of his life, and only vague hypotheses may be formulated on his possible connections with other learned men of his time, particularly with John of Salisbury. It may well be that his interests developed in the atmosphere of Constantinople, saturated with Aristotelian studies, in or around the university where the pupils of another Graeco-Italian philosopher, Ioannes Italos, were keeping alive and renewing the traditions of the fifth and sixth-century commentators of Aristotle.

Who was Gratian? It is hardly necessary to justify the interest of such a question. The Concordia discordantium canonum is one of the most influential law books of all time — a teacher's case book which became, for over 700 years, the law of the Catholic Church; a book which is at the roots of Western legal thought, ecclesiastical and lay; a vast storehouse of prior legislation and judgments, a set of masterful hypotheticals, and a rich commentary distinguished by its shrewdness and wisdom. In any time, in any land, its author would be honored for his achievement and sought after for his skill. His book was composed in a literate age in a milieu which valued learning, and even more than learning, valued law. Surely the composer has left some traces of himself and not vanished into the mists of myth.

Fasting as a religious practice is a world-wide phenomenon, and can be found in the religions of almost all the peoples on earth. It cannot be traced back to one common motive. Nor did it come into existence within one single people or religion, and spread from there to the rest of mankind, but it sprang up independently among completely different peoples and religions. Of course, as has happened in every field of cultural life, transmissions of individual practices of fasting from one people to another, from one religion to another, took place.

Among the range of moral concepts that the Middle Ages derived from Aristotle, few exercised greater influence than the doctrine of habitus (a term ordinarily translated as ‘habit,’ but more properly meaning ‘state’ or ‘condition’). In the thirteenth century, such prominent thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Godfrey of Fontaines, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham placed habitus (derived from the Greek term ἅξις) near the heart of their studies of ethics. It is largely possible to explain thirteenth-century interest in the concept of habitus on the basis of the appearance of Robert Grosseteste's full translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Grosseteste's Latin version, taken in conjunction with a growing interest in the field of ethics among arts masters, rendered the technical vocabulary of Aristotelian moral thought into a commonplace of scholastic philosophy.