The allegories of Alain de Lille, though their historical importance is generally acknowledged, have been more admired, and at times deprecated, than closely examined, and there has been a remarkable divergence of opinion as to their intrinsic significance and literary quality. The De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus present a remarkable blend of rhetoric, metaphysics, and dogma which led Barthélemy Hauréau to call Alain ‘le plus fecond et le plus brillant de tous les mystiques de ce temps,’ and Emile Mǎle to call him ‘le plus grand poète latin du moyen ǎge.’ So sensitive a critic as Huizinga, however, while recognizing the richness and subtlety of Alain's language, nonetheless relegated him to the second rank among the poets of his century. His very virtuosity seems finally to have exasperated C. S. Lewis who, despite certain concessions, dismissed Alain the poet as a ‘cold-hearted stylist,’ and it appeared now frivolous, now pedantic to the more sympathetic Raynaud de Lage.

In the mid-thirteenth century, Louis IX of France established the enquêteur, a roving commissioner whose assignment was to hear complaints against the local officers of the crown and take remedial action. This new official, known variously as the enquêteur-réformateur or (later) simply as réformateur, was an outgrowth of Louis' desire to protect the rights of his subjects against all encroachments. Although they were originally intended as a check upon royal fiscal officers, historians have long agreed that these enquêteurs were employed quite differently under subsequent French kings. By the reign of Philip IV (1285–1314) their assignments often stressed the investigation of alleged usurpations of royal rights. Perverting the function envisioned by St. Louis, they now sought to remedy abuses by the king's subjects as well as those by royal officials. They became another arm of the fiscal administration, searching for new or neglected sources of revenue for the crown.

In the second century, A.D. (c. 177), the Christian philosopher and apologist, Athenagoras, inveighing against the pagans for immoralities forbidden by their own codes, incorporated in his harangue an expression which was to have a long and interesting history in Christian literature.1 These are his words:

The present town of Bertrée lies about mid-way between Liège and Louvain on the undulating plateau of Hannut, toward the center of the ancient region of the Hesbaye, where the rich soil, temperate climate, and relative flatness have attracted settlers since the earliest times. It lies south of the Roman road (later known as the chaussée Brunehaut) between Boulogne and Cologne and is surrounded by the remains of Roman and Gallo-Roman habitations, tombs, and cemeteries. Nearby there were roads to Nivelles and Bavay. In the Middle Ages it belonged both politically and ecclesiastically to the province of Liège, though it was situated almost in an enclave between the counties of Louvain to the north and west, Looz to the north and east, and Namur to the south and west. Nothing specific is known about its history, however, before Walter of Trognée established a priory there in 1124.

(Barcelona, El Escorial, Gerona, Huesca, Lérida, Madrid, Montserrat, Pamplona, Poblet, Seo de Urgel, Silos, Tarazona, Toledo, Tortosa, Vallbona de las Monjas, Vich)

This article is mainly concerned with Office Books, but does not include books for the Mozarabic rite. A few books for the Mass etc. were included as a result of earlier incorrect descriptions; these were inspected and eliminated without further investigation.

The Carolingians regarded much of Italy as a military frontier following their overthrow of the Lombard kingdom in 776. Although there was little national Lombard resistance to Frankish rule, other factors — which will be noted later — forced the Franks to keep up their military establishment in Italy. In some ways this military establishment followed the pattern of Carolingian arrangements in other conquered territories, in other ways the Italian situation was quite unique. Since the Carolingian failure to solve the problem of Italian unity was in at least a degree due to the Carolingian failure to meet the challenge of the Italian military frontier, the study of this problem throws some interesting light on the turbulent conditions in northern and central Italy before and after its incorporation in the German Holy Roman Empire.

The South English Legendary (hereafter SEL) is an anonymous thirteenth-century vernacular liber festivalis, following the calendar written primarily for a ‘lewid’ audience. Beyond that limited assertion there still remain fundamental unanswered questions as to its source, place of origin, and authorship. The situation is only somewhat better concerning the date of composition. Indeed, in the face of so many vexing and unanswered questions concerning the SEL, I hope to be able to give a more precise date for the original composition than has been hitherto established.

Montfaucon's edition of St. John Chrysostom and Migne's Patrologia after him put among the dubia six sermons De fato et providentia (Πεϱὶ εἱμαϱμένης τε ϰαὶ πϱονοίας). In the Admonitio we read: ‘Et vero cum de fato Chrysostomus disserit, alio orationis utitur modo: unde forte nascatur quaedam νοθείας suspicio.’ Henry Savile, in his edition (1612), rejected the view of Fronton du Duc, who had written of these orations: ‘Videntur concionum a Chrysostomo habitarum ἀπανθίσματα potius et florilegia, seu morales digressiones, quam integrae homiliae: necdum tamen areolae et loca unde sunt decerptae, nobis occurrerunt.’ Savile's rejection reads: ‘Non assentior Frontoni Ducaeo has πεϱί πϱονοίας orationes ἀπανθίσματα esse: neque enim memini ea quae hic afferuntur alibi apud hunc nostrum legisse eodem modo dicta.’

In this article I propose to examine the Trinitarian controversy that developed in the years 1308 to 1325 between the Dominican Durandus of St Pourçain (ca. 1275–1334) and his order, especially in the connection between this controversy and the growth of a Dominican sense of corporate identity. The connection is not at first obvious, but we shall see how the evolution of Durandus's theological thought reflects to a great degree the doctrinal transformation of his order, a transformation which is also illustrative of the doctrinal preoccupations of fourteenth-century Scholasticism.

Modern scholars of medieval philosophy have had access to the work of Abū Ḥâmid Muhammad al-Ghāzalī (1058–1111) since 1933, when Joseph T. Muckle published an edition of the great Muslim theologian's Maqāsid al-falāsifa (“The Opinions of the Philosophers”). In this work, al-Ghāzalī (known to the West as Algazel) summarized ideas proposed by Avicenna (940–1036) in his Danesh Nameh. Algazel's Maqāsid al-falāsifa was composed of three parts, the Metaphysics, Physics, and Logic; medieval authors read and referred to Algazel's work accordingly, as three separate works.

An assiduous interest in the plain sense of Scripture and shared interpretations of particular biblical passages can be observed in certain twelfth-century Jewish and Christian commentaries composed in northern France. While Hugh of Saint Victor and Rashbam engaged in independent endeavors to shed light on the sensus literalis and the peshat of Scripture, Andrew of Saint Victor attributed his knowledge of particular rabbinic interpretations to encounters with contemporary Jews. Yet points of convergence in Jewish and Christian exegesis can be observed even before the work of the Victorines and Rashi's disciples. The purpose of this study is to examine the midrashic interpretations transmitted in northern France around the beginning of the twelfth century in both the Glossa Ordinaria and Rashi's biblical commentaries. Interpretations are found in both corpora on occasions when their late-antique sources, such as Midrash Genesis Rabba and Jerome's Hebrew Questions on Genesis, themselves transmit similar insights. By analyzing an exposition found in both Rashi and the Gloss, the narrative of Abraham in the fiery furnace, this study seeks to clarify the nature and extent of this relationship. It thereby enables a more detailed understanding of the ways that midrash reached twelfth-century Jews and Christians and of how Rashi and the Gloss ensured the wide dissemination of these interpretations.

Studies about Christian perceptions of Islam and other non-Christian cultures in the Middle Ages in recent years have tended to focus on individual authors and their works. New research in the field of manuscript philology, particularly its focus on the idea of the “whole book,” however, suggests some new interpretive vistas that can sharpen our understanding of how medieval readers engaged with, and responded to, texts about the non-Christian Other. This article takes as its subject a twelfth-century miscellany manuscript from the Westfalian monastery of Grafschaft that constitutes a remarkable dossier of hagiographical and exegetical texts relating to Muslims, pagans, and holy war. This codex, Darmstadt Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Cod. 749, offers a window onto how works dealing with these subjects were read not only on their own terms, but in dynamic relationship to one another. Focusing on the associative resonances between the different works in a single manuscript allows us to understand how one monastic community in northern Germany sought to place the twelfth-century Crusades in a broader historical and theological context. The results of such an approach complicate the traditional Christian-Muslim binary we usually encounter in studies of Crusading or medieval views of non-Christians, underscoring how one community of medieval readers thought about the problem of religious conflict in several temporal, geographic, and conceptual dimensions.

The human face has the capacity to generate expressions associated with a wide range of affective states. Despite the fact that there are few words to describe human facial behaviors, the facial muscles allow for more than a thousand different facial appearances. Some examples of feelings that can be expressed are anger, concentration, contempt, excitement, nervousness, and surprise. Regardless of culture or language, the same expressions are associated with the same emotions and vary only in intensity. Using modern psychological analyses as a point of departure, this essay examines descriptions of human facial expressions as well as such bodily “symptoms” as flushing, turning pale, and weeping in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The aim is to analyze the manner in which facial signs are used as a means of non-verbal communication to convey the impression of an individual's internal state to observers. More specifically, this essay seeks to determine when and why characters in these works are described as expressing particular facial emotions and, especially, the range of emotions expressed. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders are in the forefront of the analysis and yield well over one hundred references to human facial expression and color. The examples show that through gaze, smiling, weeping, brows that are raised or knitted, and coloration, the Sagas and þættir of Icelanders tell of happiness or amusement, pleasant and unpleasant surprise, fear, anger, rage, sadness, interest, concern, and even mixed emotions for which language has no words. The Sagas and þættir of Icelanders may be reticent in talking about emotions and poor in emotional vocabulary, but this poverty is compensated for by making facial expressions signifiers of emotion. This essay makes clear that the works are less emotionally barren than often supposed. It also shows that our understanding of Old Norse-Icelandic “somatic semiotics” may well depend on the universality of facial expressions and that culture-specific “display rules” or “elicitors” are virtually nonexistent.

It is a commonplace that Aristophanes' heroes stage successful revolts against whatever they perceive prevents them from attaining their goals or from fulfilling their potential. Nothing so restrictive as political obstacles, or bodily restraints, or even divine directives remains immune, so it seems, from a triumphant revolt launched so humorously and so uniquely by such splendid comic creations as Dikaiopolis, Pisthetairos, and Lysistrata, to name three of the most famous Aristophanic heroes. In the process, political and military heroes who revere their presumed control and power are mastered; there fall those natural functions which seem to exercise periodic dominion over varied phases of our lives; and even the Olympian gods are compelled to succumb to the imposing demands of comic vision, fantasy, and ultimate heroic triumph.

The early thirteenth century saw the rise of a new exegetical technique: divisio textus, or text division. Commentators engaged in subtle structural analyses, parsing texts into increasingly smaller units, and at times represented these structures as complex tree diagrams. For a case study of this technique, this essay presents a previously unnoticed series of such marginal diagrams in MS Assisi, Bib. Com. 51 that depict the structure of the first three chapters of the Book of Job. Following the manner in which the author analyzes the narrative functions of character description, dialogues, and other aspects, the essay reconstructs the narratological principles embedded in these diagrams, and compares them with other divisions of Job by thirteenth century theologians. It sets the diagramming of divisiones textus in its the broader context of medieval horizontal tree diagrams and discusses the peculiar implications of the spatialization of biblical narrative. Appendices include full transcriptions, translations and auxiliary materials for comparison.

In the quest for the source of Chaucer's Parson's Tale investigators have discovered a number of texts that contain elements identical or similar to parts of Chaucer's treatise, though it is now generally conceded that none of the works thus far examined is in any sense a direct source of Chaucer's ‘Tale.' Among the larger units of the treatise Chaucer translated, none have so successfully eluded attempts to discover derivation as the remedia against the vices, contained in the tractate on the seven deadly sins (X[I]387-957). Earlier researchers have found in the postulated sources almost nothing that bears a close resemblance to the materials and their ordering in these sections. But these remedia contain, for the most part, doctrine that was established in the ethical tradition during the twelfth century and that proliferated widely during succeeding centuries: the ultimate source of this doctrine is the well-known Moralium dogma philosophorum, a treatise whose influence on ethical thinking during the late Middle Ages, particularly in the matter of the virtues and their ramifications, is enormous.

Though the Green Knight describes his challenge before Arthur's court as ‘a Crystemas gomen’ (283), and though some scholars have responded to this and other references in the poem and treated it as an entertainment or as essentially about games, most modern studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight concentrate on the difficult questions of moral behaviour which the poem raises. Though it is certainly full of violent movement and physical action, though it sets forth a world of arresting concrete specificity and colourful variety, the poem's most crucial moment (if it can be said to have one) occurs in the early morning quiet of the hero's bed-chamber when Gawain accepts the green girdle and agrees to ‘lelly layne’ (1863) it from Bertilak. It is a point at which the hero makes a clear moral decision to drop his skilful verbal defence against the Lady's propositions and to allow himself to be acted upon: ‘he Jmlged with hir ‘repe …] ooled hir to speke … he granted … hym gafe with a goud wylle …] oe leude hym acordez’ (1859-63). Most scholars agree with Gawain's own subsequent judgment that his moral behaviour was, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘fawty and falce’ (2382); but how his moral faultiness is to be measured and assessed, and how in conceptual terms it is to be analysed and described, are more difficult questions.

The writings of Augustine pose an interesting problem for the philosopher. Very soon after one begins reading them, there appears the old and apparently non-philosophical admonition: ‘Unless you believe, you will not understand.’ Is the autonomy of philosophy being threatened by this demand? Is reason being told that it must accept certain statements as true on authority other than its own? And if so, why?

The Rare Book Room of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries has recently acquired an early fourteenth-century manuscript (Lat. 95) of a hitherto unknown Apparatus on the Clementines. The author is Stephanus Hugoneti (from southern France, possibly Narbonne), whose work as a canonist has gone unknown, and whose ultimate though brief emergence from historical obscurity as bishop of Bologna has hardly been noticed.