The use of moral stories or cautionary tales in sermons to illustrate and reinforce homiletic doctrine was widely accepted by medieval preachers. While diffusion of suitable narratives for this purpose was sometimes accomplished by oral means, such tales were more commonly transmitted by compendia or encyclopedias of didactic stories. These compilations were circulated throughout medieval Christendom for use as reference books by the homilist composing a sermon or series of sermons to be read by his colleagues or delivered from his pulpit.

Reading the Poetics in light of Aristotle's most complete statements of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, this essay undertakes to demonstrate how and why Aristotle develops an art of poetry within the context of a science of ethics. It seeks to show, that is, how in direct response to Plato's epistemological and ethical objections to tragedy, Aristotle's argument for the preservation of the literary arts follows from a fundamental conviction that poetry shares not only its object of inquiry but also its method of inquiry with the ethical and legal sciences. Like moral philosophy or ethics, tragedy investigates human action. To this end, it relies on the mechanism of ‘fiction’ (πoíησις), which clearly emerges in the course of the Poetics as the literary counterpart to ‘equity’ in the disciplines of ethics and law. As logical constructs, both fiction and equity are designed to qualify ethical action by negotiating between universal propositions — the general ethical presuppositions of the poet's audience or the advocate's legal code — and particular circumstances — the details of the plot or the events of the individual legal case.

The recovery of the work of an author previously known only through citations and references in other manuscripts is always an exciting event. Although rare in any area of medieval studies, such finds broaden our knowledge of the intellectual development and open up new aspects for study. It was through a fortuitous paralleling of citations in Gregory of Rimini with an anonymous Sentences-commentary at the Franciscan convent in Fribourg that Damasus Trapp, a ground-breaker in fourteenth-century scholastic studies, discovered the Sentences-commentary of an English Benedictine still known only as Monachus Niger. More recently Jan Pinborg has connected the fourteenth-century citations to the Magister Abstractionum with a work otherwise known as the Sophismata of Richardus Sophista. The following discovery, although not at present of the same importance to the field, shares one thing in common with Trapp's discovery. It provides us with yet another text from the same period of Oxford thought and may in fact also be by a Benedictine, a group that was numerically strong at Oxford but from which we have had almost no extant work to study.

Precise differentiations between the pictorial techniques referred to by the terms σκιαγϱαφία and σκηνογϱαφία in the fourth century b.c. have proved difficult to establish. The terms occur most often in illustrative metaphors which compare these techniques with restrictions or deficiencies in various disciplines such as metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, optics, ethics, rhetoric and poetry. It is difficult to judge, however, from the metaphors illustrating these limitations just what these techniques were and how they were evaluated in themselves as types of artistic representation. One might use, that is, a skiagraphic sketch, roughed-out in shadow and shading and probably viewed from some distance, to illustrate the incompleteness of knowledge, or use a carefully contrived skenographic perspective, characteristic of stage scenery, to illustrate the deceptiveness of sophistic argumentation, without regarding either artistic method as illegitimate in itself. This paper will deal primarily with the metaphorical applications of these terms in order to clarify further the nature of the literary styles which were described by comparisons with them. Further clarification of the metaphorical illustrations may, in turn, suggest further consideration; for the history of art.

The study of Latin manuscripts has been of vital importance not only to the student of classical and patristic literature but also to every serious scholar interested in the literature, theology, philosophy and science of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. In this field, the manuscripts contain not merely new variants of well-known texts but an often unsuspected amount of new textual material that never got into print but often had as wide a circulation and importance as some of the printed works. This material is by no means easily accessible. If a collection of manuscripts has no printed catalogue, there is no way of investigating its content except by working on the spot. On the other hand, printed catalogues, when available, permit the location of pertinent material from a distance, and hence are a definite scholarly aid and desideratum. Since even the printed catalogues are often inadequate and sometimes rare, it has seemed useful to compile an annotated bibliography of these catalogues, which would serve as a guide to medievalists and Renaissance scholars in general, and in particular to the contributors to the project of ‘Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries,’ which has been undertaken by a group of scholars under the auspices of several learned societies. The present bibliography was originally compiled for the purposes of that project, and it has been decided to print it, since previous bibliographies of a similar nature were either conceived along narrower lines, like Weinberger's, or were inaccurate, like Richardson's.

The Maitland Memorial Lectures for 1948, delivered at Cambridge University by Dr. Walter Ullmann, were published in 1949, somewhat enlarged, under the title, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London, Methuen & Co., 1949; pp. xiv, 230). In six chapters the author sets forth his views on certain fundamental problems of medieval political history which were given their doctrinal development and practical realization by the canonists jointly with the popes, that is to say, by the legislative authority and the jurisprudence of the medieval Church.

As Professor D. W. Robertson, Jr., has pointed out, the Man of Law's reiterated concern for the ‘fruyt’ of his story as opposed to its ‘chaf is a clear invitation to the audience both to seek the ‘sentence’ of the story and to judge whether or not the Man of Law is successful in his interpretation of his own material. Indeed, the Man of Law stands high among the Canterbury pilgrims in the degree of his involvement with his story, and he is presented to us as one who cannot simply tell a tale, but who feels obliged to react to it sympathetically, to comment on it, and even to interpret it for us. Thus, when it comes time for the Man of Law to tell a tale, he selects the story of Custance, whose humble faith in God's Providence is rewarded by numerous deliverances from death and from fates-worse-than-death, and, lest we miss the terror of impending doom or the moral of Custance's deliverances, the Man of Law intrudes repeatedly in order to emphasize and interpret. These interpretations and emphases are scarcely the serene summations of ‘sentence’ we might expect this providential tale to elicit from an educated man, but are rather a commentary on the narrator's and not the heroine's emotional reactions to the vicissitudes of the story. The Man of Law's specific and general interpretations of the story, as a consequence, become interesting both for their relevance, or lack of it, to the tale, and for their ability to disclose by their degree of pertinence much about the Man of Law's understanding of things providential.

The Spanish reconquest was a complex process, consisting of at least two aspects, the military seizure of Muslim territory and the occupation of that land. Although many historians prefer to regard only the military actions as constituting the Reconquista proper, it is possible that the process of resettlement exerted the greater long-term effect on Spanish society. From this point of view the reconquest can be seen as a centuries-long process of internal migration, in which the Christians continually pressed into the depopulated zones that the Muslims vainly attempted to maintain along their frontiers. Military successes or reversals could temporarily accelerate or arrest the process, but the constant tendency of at least some elements of Christian society to seek their fortune along the frontier was a force which the Muslims were unable in the long run to resist.

The origins of Irish Christianity are unknown. Even the history of the Irish Church during the fifth and sixth centuries is somewhat shrouded in obscurity, and leaves a wide scope for speculation. This is particularly true with regard to the careers of the earliest missionaries of Ireland known to us by name—Palladius and Patrick. Contemporary evidence is extremely meagre in the case of Palladius and conflicting in the case of Patrick; and the more eloquent witnesses of later times often contradict either each other or our primary sources. It is not, then, surprising that the relation between these two missionaries and their respective missions was fervently discussed by scholars during the last one hundred and fifty years. Looking back at the vast amount of diligent labour and learned argument devoted to this problem, one is surprised to find the status quaestionis almost the same at the end as at the beginning. Only in recent years has a way been opened which gives hope to attain reasonable certainty on some at least of the disputed points. With Professor T. F. O'Rahilly's pamphlet The Two Patricks (Dublin 1942) the problem has entered its critical phase. By his lucid statement of the principal issue and its implications, based on a firsthand knowledge of the complete evidence, Professor O'Rahilly has put under a lasting obligation even those who, like the present writer, find it impossible to accept his main thesis. If I offer a different solution of the vexed problem, I do so in a spirit of gratitude to the pioneer whose work alone has made the present study possible.

Little is known of the early history of the court of audientia litterarum contradictarum. Professor Barraclough has suggested that its origins must be sought in the 1150's and 1160's, when under the popes Eugenius III and Alexander III there was considerable development of judicial procedure by rescript. To begin a suit before papal judges, the plaintiff or his proctor produced a letter to the pope announcing the petition, stating the ‘libellus’ or charge, and beseeching him for the cause to be heard at Rome, or, more frequently, for a mandate to judges delegate. It is likely that the plaintiff would have informed the charged party of his action, and that by this time the defendant's proctor, too, would have been instructed in the matter and would be ready to appear at the papal court.

These Notes are the result of a protracted study in the course of which the Byzantine synapte has been examined in more than fifty manuscripts, each of which has again and again for this and other purposes been closely scrutinized. The text which precedes the Notes includes a distinctive —and, as far as I know, entirely new — feature, viz., a twofold recension of the synapte which is explained and justified in the Concluding Remarks following Note II. Immediately after the text itself and the brief comments which have appeared desirable or necessary, there is an Excursus on saints' names in the Τῆς παναγίας bidding at the very end of the synapte. This subject is part of a much larger one, viz., lists of saints' names in liturgical prayers. One thinks first of all of the list which appears in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon and of parallel lists in the East. It is interesting to note, however, that whereas the lengthened medieval lists failed to establish themselves permanently within the framework of the Anaphora in the East or of the Canon in the West, they did succeed in maintaining themselves in the East in certain prayers still found in the Euchology and Horologion.

Thomas More, humanist, statesman, and martyr, was one of the most prolific apologists for the Catholic Church in the early years of the Reformation. In numerous polemical and apologetic works he ranged widely over the issues raised by the controversy. But if his scope was large, he possessed one sure foundation to which all his arguments inevitably returned. This was the faith of the early Church Fathers, those men who interpreted the life and faith of the Church from the time of the Apostles to the end of the pontificate of Pope Gregory I in 604.

Among the many personal faults with which Petrarch, in his dialogue entitled The Secret or The Soul's Conflict with Passion, let himself be charged by St. Augustine, there was one which he found harder to renounce than any other. In reply to Augustine's reproach: ‘You are seeking fame among men and the immortality of your name more than is right,' Petrarch could only say: ‘This I admit freely and cannot find any remedy to restrain that desire.' In fact, throughout his life Petrarch was well aware that ‘to the whole people I have been a favola,' as he declared in the introductory sonnet of his Rime Sparse, and he showed himself constantly determined to perpetuate his fame beyond death, as his Epistle to Posterity and numerous other autobiographical documents demonstrate. His effort bore fruit, for the life of no other literary figure of the fourteenth century, not even that of Dante, was told more frequently and fully by the writers of the Renaissance than that of Petrarch. Among his biographers we find some of the greatest Italian humanists, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Filippo Villani, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Pietro Paolo Vergerio and Gianozzo Manetti. But, interestingly enough, for the period of the first century after Petrarch's death in 1374, there exists not a single biography which was composed by a non-Italian writer. This fact is the more notable when we remember the tremendous reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during his own era and afterwards, in France and Germany, and even in remote England, where Chaucer, in The Clerk's Prologue, sang the praise of ‘this clerk whose rethoryke so sweete enlumed al Itaille of poetrye.' The anonymous Bohemian scholar who, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, brought together an anthology of Petrarch's works, did not himself write a biography but simply used the one written by Vergerio. Interest in the personalities and achievements of the great poets and artists arose first in Italy, and it was there that the traditional literary form of ‘the lives of the illustrious men' was filled with a new spirit and content. From this point of view it appears characteristic that the first biography of Petrarch by a non-Italian was composed only after the passage of a hundred years following his death and that it was written by a man like Rudolph Agricola who was more than any of his northern fellow humanists influenced by Italian traditions and who, at the same time, was to become ‘the founder of the new intellectual life in Germany.’

In many medieval calendars the calendar proper for each month is preceded or followed by a verse (or several verses) treating of one (or one each) of the following subjects:

1. (a) the zodiacal sign

2. (b) the number of solar days

3. (c) the number of lunar days

4. (d) the position of the nones

5. (e) the Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian names

6. (f) the Roman traditions of the name and significance of the month

7. (g) the climatic conditions (aeris qualitates)

8. (h) the evil days (dies Aegyptiaci).

The study of medieval calendars has been so much preoccupied with their chronological and heortological aspects that, to my knowledge, these verses have never been the subject of a comprehensive investigation. In many editions they have been omitted as extraneous matter.

Paul Kehr, in 1909, published the volume of his Italia Pontificia that deals with Umbria. In it he wrote that there had been preserved in the episcopal archives in Città di Castello three volumes, books of the bishopric or ‘Atti della Curia vescovile' from the thirteenth and following centuries. He also said that there had been an earlier first book of acta but that it had been sought by him in vain. This sort of reference, in Kehr, suggests lost treasure, material sufficiently valuable to draw one up the Tiber to Città di Castello to see what is actually there.

The use of the figure ‘Christ the Physician' and of related medical analogies has quite frequently arrested the attention of scholars investigating patristic literature. There is no need of tracing the ultimate origin of this motif, or of documenting its appearance in numerous writings of the Fathers, both Eastern and Western, since recent study has treated both of these aspects in some detail. In spite of this rather specialized research, however, one seeks in vain to locate the name ‘Romanos' in lists of those authors who have pictured Christ as the Divine Physician of body and soul. This article, then, will have as its specific purpose an analysis of the use of the medical motif in the kontakia of Romanos the Melodist (d. 556). Such an addition to the literature on this topic is warranted by the importance of the Romanos corpus in the history of Christian Greek letters and the corresponding importance of the ὁ Χϱιστòς ὁἰατϱóς theme as an illustration of the Melodist's poetic technique.

The Poenitentiale or Liber Poenitentialis of Robert of Flamborough, canon penitentiary of the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris, is a practical manual which made available to the ordinary confessor of the early thirteenth century the fruit of the speculation of canonists and theologians as well as the jurisprudence of popes — all of which had been accumulating during the latter half of the twelfth century. It applied the canon law of the time to such matters as marriage, ordination, simony, usury and feudal contracts. Such a work is of obvious interest to the scholar, and two recent articles, one by Stephan Kuttner in Traditio in 1944 and the other by Pierre Michaud-Quantin in Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale in 1959, have dealt with it at some length. Some features have come to my attention which apparently had escaped the notice of others.

Among the medieval hagiographical writings derived from the British Isles none enjoyed greater popularity throughout the Middle Ages than the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (= NB). This celebrated prose work, a typical product of the Othonian period, has come down to us in more than a hundred MSS in various versions. It embodies the adventurous sea-story of the Irish Abbot St. Brendan, one of the great sixth-century founders of monasteries. In structure, the NB consists actually of three parts: a brief introduction comments on St. Brendan's descent, youth, ascetic life, and early monastic foundations; the main body reports some twenty-six adventures which he and his fourteen companions encountered in their search for the terra repromissionis or paradisum terrestre, the tír tairgirne of the ancient Celts; finally, a terse epilogue narrates his life after his return and subsequent happy death. While the main body of the NB, the sea-voyage proper, is uncompounded and has been modeled after Old Irish sea-tales, known in Celtic literature as immrama, both the introduction and epilogue, necessary to give the story the appropriate frame, represent incidents culled from the Vita Sancti Brendani (= VB), which has come down to us in various Irish and Latin recensions. These two narratives have over the centuries been combined by several medieval compilers into a single story in a more or less artistic way. Consequently, the student of the NB is ultimately confronted with that much feared and confusing type of Brendaniana, called conflated texts, which in view of the absence of clearly drawn lines between the contents of the VB and NB, have for centuries offered vexing problems to researchers. One of the minor, but nevertheless irritating, results of these fusions is the misleading caption ‘Vita’ Sancti Brendani, exhibited by a goodly number of NB-MSS, which has misled many cataloguers, medieval and modern, to list the Navigatio as a Vita. Thus, not less than half of all NB-MSS sail in the maelstrom of medieval literature under a false flag. A most peculiar Latin NB-MS, showing the same misleading caption Vita Sancti BrendaniAbbatis, is codex 256 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. This MS, hitherto unavailable to research, is of signal importance for the history of the Vita, the Navigatio, and above all, for the Old French translations of the Navigatio with their re-translations into Latin, so unique in medieval literature.

When, on election to the papacy in 1088, Odo of Ostia selected the name Urban II, he did so in acknowlegment of the clerical reforms then attributed to the obscure Urban I (†. 230). A careful investigation would clearly indicate the association — albeit on spurious grounds — of the memory of this ancient pope with clerical reform and the canons regular during the eleventh century. And the vigorous role of Odo-Urban as patron and reformer of the canons regular is readily documented. However, while they probably are apparent to certain specialists, no historian seems to have indicated the implications of Urban II's name in a detailed and explicit fashion.