Henry III's role in the creation of a new and powerful visual culture in thirteenth-century England remains uncontested, as does the dominant position of Westminster Abbey as its architectural centerpiece. Rivaling the soaring magnificence of the most splendid cathedrals, the thirteenth-century rebuilding of the Benedictine abbey church provided a dramatic setting for the anointing and coronation of English kings as well as for the new shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (see figs. 1 and 2). The Gothic rebuilding of Westminster Abbey is usually thought to have been financed entirely by a single ruler, but there may in fact have been two agents of patronage, abbot as well as king. Rather than having been initially determined in 1245, when Henry III's rebuilding plan is first documented, the project more probably developed and changed over a much longer period, from 1220 to 1245. Fundamental to the problem of Henry's role as patron, then, is the question of whether the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey was conceived as a single project in 1245 or whether the undertaking began earlier and became more ambitious in the course of time. Indeed, we might ask whether the royal persona of Henry III as patron was itself a calculated representation constructed by his advisors and the abbots of Westminster and documented by such biased chroniclers as Matthew Paris.

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.

‘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.

Lorenzo Valla in his De Linguae latinae elegantiis is highly critical of previous Latin grammatical studies. In particular Valla seeks in this linguistic treatise to revise for his contemporaries the teachings of Donatus, Servius, and Priscian which he found in conflict with his ideal of classical Latin usage; and in general he seeks to complement the extant grammatical tradition of antiquity. In Book VI of the Elegantiae Valla treats topics explicitly drawn from ancient grammatical sources, which he further explicates and clarifies. Moreover, many of the topics of Books I–III are drawn from these same sources, as Valla's frequent citation of them indicates. In contrast with ancient and imperial grammarians, Isidore of Seville is named only twice in the Elegantiae. In the preface to Book II (II. praef. 41). Valla brands him ‘indoctorum arrogantissimus, qui quum nihil sciat, omnia praecipit.’ He mentions Isidore once more when rejecting an ‘inept’ etymology of oratio from oris ratio (VI. 36.217). Despite the paucity of explicit references to Isidore in the Elegantiae, however, a comparison of Valla's and Isidore's linguistic discussions suggests that Valla intended a direct response to Isidore's verbal distinctions (differentiae), definitions, and etymologies in his own section on signification, Books IV and V of the Elegantiae.

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 an important study which appeared in 1956, Professor E. A. Thompson discussed imperial policy in southern Gaul during the first half of the fifth century. According to Professor Thompson the purpose of the Romans in settling four groups of barbarians in southern Gaul between the years 418 and 442 was to control the Bacaudae who, he contends, threatened to overthrow the existing social and economic order. By focusing all his attention on the Bacaudae Professor Thompson distorts Roman policy by attributing to it a precision which it lacked. A less selective study of the evidence suggests that Rome's policy in southern Gaul (and probably throughout the Empire as well) was directed toward control of all the potentially and actively hostile elements in the Empire rather than, on balance, being preoccupied exclusively with the activities of the Bacaudae.

In Etymologies 8.9, Isidore presents a detailed classification of the diverse group of ritual experts he calls magi. Well organized, erudite, flexible enough to include a wide range of specialists, and, as its record of influence demonstrates, enormously useful as a template for later medieval classifications, the “De Magis” offers what can rightly be called the first definitive western Christian taxonomy of unauthorized practitioners. Although Isidore relied heavily on a wide range of pagan and Christian sources for the contents of the chapter, their selection, revision, and arrangement—the elements of his taxonomy—were all his own.

The major sources for an inquiry into the customs of the Spanish military Order of Calatrava are the difiniciones or statutes enacted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The difiniciones were formulated by the Cistercian abbots of Morimond, or by their representatives, and, on two occasions, by the masters of Calatrava.

The legislative authority of the abbots of Morimond resulted from the incorporation of Calatrava into the Order of Citeaux in 1187. At that time, the Cistercian general chapter affiliated Calatrava with the abbey of Morimond. Henceforth, the abbots of this monastery possessed the right of visiting the knights and of regulating their observances. Oftentimes this right was delegated to the abbots of Spanish Cistercian monasteries affiliated with Morimond.

The composite volume now known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College [CCCC] 190, contains on pages 143 to 151 a mixture of liturgical exposition and prescription. The Latin passages constitute neither a polished work nor, like much else in the manuscript, an obvious antecedent to Old English texts, and so the group has never attracted much notice. I offer here the first discussion and edition of the passages in the belief that they shed new light on the sources and applications of liturgical commentary in late Anglo-Saxon England. Of equal or perhaps greater interest, the excerpts also include portions of the ordo for a pontifical mass on Christmas Day. The ordo, as we shall see, resists close dating or localization, but the very type of document has rarely survived in pre-Conquest English manuscripts and so merits attention. Both the expository and ordinal passages occasionally hint of access to unusual sources at some late Anglo-Saxon church, possibly Worcester cathedral during the pontificate of Wulfstan I (1002–16).

The two poems edited here celebrate the English victories in 1346 over France (Crecy) and Scotland (Durham) in the early part of the Hundred Years War. Together with another on the siege of Calais in 1346–47 (Cantica leticie) they are by a writer I have labeled the “Anonymous of Calais.” They were first printed in 1859, but Wright's edition is flawed not only by errors of transcription and a clear failure to follow the sense (notably by accepting Valeys “Valois” at Crecy 272, where Kaleys “Calais” is essential), but also by his textual procedure, which implies that there was a single authorial original from which the manuscript witnesses deviated. I have tried to show here that there are two distinct versions, one an adaptation of the other.

The vast number and variety of sequences, those liturgical interpolations which in the middle ages commonly followed the repetition of the Alleluia in the Mass, and the freedom of their development, show that they were an outlet for the creative talents of musicians and poets. A sample of sequences from successive periods allows the literary historian to trace the development of rhyme and accentual meter, and a musicologist has described the sequence ‘as the parent of oratorio and the grandparent of modern drama.’ But while a view which encompasses centuries reveals to us variety and change, the compositions of any given time were largely shaped by inherited traditions. Not the least value of studies on the early history of the sequence is their demonstration of the close connection between various Alleluia melodies and their sequences and the way in which appropriate texts were fitted to melodies for specific feasts.

In July or August 1474 in Senigallia, a town on the coast of the Adriatic sea, a translation into Hebrew was completed of the Ars brevis, a work by the medieval Christian philosopher, mystic, and missionary Ramon Llull. Within a couple of years, this translation had been copied a number of times, and from the colophon of one of these copies, it appears that this work was rated very highly by its Jewish readers as an aid for achieving mystical experience. Any interest shown by the adherents of one faith in the texts of another is important for shedding light on common intellectual interests and contacts. This translation is of especially great significance in that there appears to have been in Italy in the fifteenth century a circle of Jewish scholars willingly engaging with a Christian text in order to achieve divine illumination. Here, I will try to shed some light on this group of Jewish savants and to situate their interests within the wider context of the Renaissance.

In the annals of medieval medical as well as cultural history the name and authority of Hippocrates of Cos knows no rival other than his later disciple, Galen. Yet there has so far been no systematic attempt to gather together, with any degree of completeness, the names and locations of manuscripts of the individual treatises that circulated in the Latin West before 1500 under the name or aegis of the famed physician of Cos. The present investigation of this subject, that is of the constituents of a ‘Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in Latin’ or of a ‘Hippocrates (Ypocras) Latinus,’ was begun nearly four decades ago, particularly in the ill-fated years 1938 to 1939, while on a sojourn in Europe before the outbreak of World War II. The intention, then as now, was to provide the basis for determining the extent to which there was continuity in the transmission of Greek medicine, albeit in Latin dress, from antiquity to the early and later Middle Ages. The research was thereafter continued sporadically whenever there was an opportunity to examine manuscripts in European depositories. In recent years the work has been greatly facilitated by the published results especially of the researches of two late scholars of medieval medical manuscripts, Augusto Beccaria and Ernest Wickersheimer, as well as by the cataloguing of various manuscript collections. However, there still remains the task of drawing out the individual works appearing under Hippocrates' name together with their commentaries, not only in the pre-Salernitan, but also in the succeeding centuries before about 1500. To this endeavor the present investigation is directed.

L'immense mérite de Mgr André Combes d'avoir édité en cinq volumes une grande partie des écrits du Docteur supersubtil et d'avoir étudié dans de nombreux articles les questions annexes à cette édition ne peut cependant pas cacher le fait, aujourd'hui incontestable, que tous les problèmes que nous pose l'œuvre de Jean de Ripa et qui se sont déjà posés à son éditeur ne sont pas encore résolus ou le sont d'une manière provisoire et peu satisfaisante. Parmi eux il y en a un qui domine tous les autres puisque, une fois bien posé et bien résolu, les autres le seront: c'est celui de la chronologie des écrits du docteur franciscain, présent dans toutes les préfaces précédant les textes édités et dans la ‘Présentation de Jean de Ripa’. Il est lié tout naturellement à deux autres demandant, eux aussi, une élucidation: celui du genre littéraire ou de la ‘nature’ des écrits de Jean de Ripa, et celui de ses socii et adversaires.

In a description of a trip through the Midi of France in 1835, Prosper Merimée devotes a lengthy paragraph to the analysis of the Christ in Vézelay's Pentecost tympanum (fig. 1). He marvels at the carving of the figure's feet and “blessing” hands, as well as the placement of the thighs in relation to the torso. Later in his treatment of the abbey church and its sculpture, the author notes that figures on the nave capitals convey a “savage zeal” (zèle farouche) by means of posture and facial expressions. Gestures, in the widely construed, medieval sense of the word, clearly struck the celebrated French author as a salient feature of Vézelay's sculpture. Merimée sympathized with Romantic visions of the Middle Ages as a period less tainted by the stifling effects of civilization, and perhaps his fascination with the dramatic body movement carved throughout the abbey church reflects the belief that these were unfettered by the artistic or social constraints of the early nineteenth century. Yet throughout his description of Vézelay's sculpture, he never attempts to explore the meanings that the carved body might have held for a medieval audience; their meaning is not considered to be historical, but rather to be self-evident. The operative assumption that gestures in medieval art are transparent in meaning anticipates much subsequent scholarship.

Most twentieth-century readers who know of Pier della Vigna at all know of him through the intermediary of Dante's Inferno. As the suicidal tree who bleeds out words with the sap from his broken branches, Piero is one of Dante's most memorable creations, a figure whose name, like those of Francesca da Rimini and Ugolino da Pisa, is for us associated more with one fictional frozen moment than with the realities of a lifetime. And yet, to Dante and his contemporaries, Piero was neither fictional nor obscure. His fame was sufficient, for example, that Dante never felt the need to name him in Inferno 13: enough that he once held ‘ambo le chiavi del cor di Federigo’ (Inferno 13.58–59).

It has been said of Meister Eckhart, the most eloquent proclaimer of German mysticism, its deepest thinker and its only creatively gifted speculative mind, that his genius lay in his being imbued with but one single truth, a truth ‘monumental in its simplicity, profound in its implications, impressive in its sincerity.’ This one central idea, from which all others of the Master are derived and towards which all are orientated, is that of the generation or birth of the Divine Word, or Son, in the soul. Anyone who has not grasped that the generation of the Son through the Father in the Tittle spark of the soul’ (‘daz vünkelîn’) constitutes the sole motive, subject-matter and purpose of Eckhart's sermons and gives to them in various formulations, which are merely variants of the one great theme, a certain grand one-sidedness, has failed to understand the Master. To him there is lacking the knowledge of the unitive and orientating centre of Eckhart's intellectual heritage, whose meaning, inaccessible to him, becomes ever more and more entangled in an inextricable medley of contradictions and obscurities, until he is unable to see the wood for the trees. He does not comprehend that all the tracks of this mystic's speculative thought lead toward one predetermined goal: the mystic union of the intellect and will of man with the Godhead through the birth of the Divine Logos in the soul.

In the north of England, as the thirteenth century was drawing to a close, an enterprising and pastorally zealous cleric was engaged in the composition of the most extensive preaching codex in the English language since Aelfric's Catholic Homilies. The text now known as the Northern Homily Cycle (hereafter NHC) was left untitled by an anonymous author who wrote in his native dialect and was well versed in the lore of the north country. He used a rhymed octosyllabic line throughout. His plan encompassed a free rendering of the Gospel pericope for the particular Sunday (the homilies are chiefly dominical), a complementary exegesis drawn from the Fathers, and an exemplum, reflecting a shrewd sense of his audience and the fashion of the time. In these exempla he revealed a catholic taste by selecting stories of saints and monks, stories from antiquity and the east, pieces of local Northumbrian folklore, legends of the Virgin, accounts of miraculous beasts, risqu6 fables, and child-like pious tales.

Scholars tracing the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the fourth century tend to pass over the Catechetical Homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) rather quickly, with the observation that, from the perspective of systematic theology, Cyril made no new contributions to the doctrine, and even warned against going beyond the texts of Scripture when speaking of the Spirit. But such lack of attention to Cyril as a theologian leaves several questions unexplored. Cyril's homilies were a central part of the preparation of adult converts for baptism, a task crucial for the Church's survival; in the baptismal rite the converts would receive the Holy Spirit. Given the foundational nature of Cyril's homilies in forming the members of the Jerusalem church, might it not be useful, when tracing how the understanding of the Holy Spirit developed in the fourth century, to consider how Cyril uses Scriptural material concerning the Spirit? Which Scriptural texts on the Spirit does he employ? Are there any texts later considered significant which he omits? What is Cyril's purpose in citing these texts on the Spirit and how does he present them to his hearers? Even though he confines himself to presenting Scriptural material, what understanding of the Spirit is communicated by his shaping of that material? Is there any sense in which the understanding of the Spirit inculcated by Cyril's preaching prepares the way for the conceptual doctrinal distinctions concerning the Spirit's nature and divinity made in the next generation?

A comprehensive theory which can reduce massive amounts of detailed evidence to simple and pleasing clarity has the ability to survive long after critics have damaged or destroyed essential portions of its arguments or evidence. A radically new comprehensive thesis may arise to displace it, but even then quibbles with details of the new continue to breathe life into the old. Such is at least partially the case with study of the prophets' episode in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Adam (Ordo representacionis Ade). Perhaps the single most edited piece of twelfth-century literature, the play has an established importance: linguistically, dramatically, theatrically, and theologically, it deserves the close attention it has been given. And not only is it important, it is also an enjoyable and imaginative work that delights the reader as much as it fascinates the scholar. However, it is a victim of being assigned a fundamental role in a comprehensive theory regarding the development of medieval vernacular drama.