Two years ago we briefly announced the discovery of a new document of great interest for the history of the Fourth Lateran Council. Written in Spring 1216 as a letter from Rome, presumably by a German, it was copied by a thirteenth-century scribe into a manuscript now at the Universitäts-bibliothek of Giessen, where it follows directly after the constitutiones of the council. With its detailed and vivid description of the three plenary sessions and of many events that took place in between, the anonymous report adds considerably to the information we possess from other sources. But although other portions of the Giessen codex have been known and used by many scholars ever since the eighteenth century, this text has been overlooked to the present day. It is a happy coincidence that we are able to present this eyewitness account of the greatest of the ecumenical councils of the Middle Ages while the Second Vatican Council is in session.

The term or spiritus has a long history in Western natural philosophy. Its extensive use and elaboration in the Graeco-Roman world formed the background for medieval and Renaissance treatments. Although the Stoic and Neoplatonic traditions, as well as such authors as Vergil, Macrobius, Nemesius, and Augustine, are important, the present article will attempt only to survey some medieval understandings of the Aristotelian and Galenic spiritus, which provided the basis for medicine and biological speculation.

The earliest moments of medieval Latin theoretical medicine are marked by the assimilation of Greek medicine and natural philosophy from the living tradition of Arabic medicine and philosophy. With respect to spiritus, Arabic modifications which mediated the assimilation of Aristotle's and Galen's views led to a multiplicity of meanings being attached to the term spiritus, especially where the ancient resources were applied to problems generated by the mingling of diverse cultural and religious systems. A second result was the attempt to fix, through critical interpretation, the specific medical meaning attributable to the term spiritus, to define the domain of animate beings to which spiritus belonged, and to justify philosophically and theologically the quite restricted nature of the term spiritus. If the former tendency was the legacy of the broader and more fluid concerns of the twelfth century, the latter, we shall see, was the standpoint bequeathed to later medieval and Renaissance medicine by authors like Albertus Magnus.

The suggestion of a possible dependence of Aelfric's Catholic Homilies on a medieval collection of patristic sermons is neither new nor startling. John Earle, writing in 1884, remarked that Aelfric had most probably used ‘some standard collection of homilies now lost’. Max Förster, commenting on Earle's suggestion that Aelfric's source may have been similar to the homiliary of Eusebius of Emesa, pointed out that the Catholic Homilies have more in common with the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon as printed in Migne PL 95. Förster readily admitted that Aelfric may have used such a collection, but he contended that the Catholic Homilies represented a translation from a number of sources. His own study of Aelfric's sources is based on this assumption. It is the purpose of this paper to show that while Aelfric may not have used the medieval homiliary as his sole source, the two volumes of his Catholic Homilies give evidence of a very real dependence on the homiliary, and that almost all of his patristic sources can be traced to one or other version of a collection of homilies generally known as the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon.

When Dante ascended to the Sphere of the Sun, he was directed by St. Thomas Aquinas to consider a circle of shining lights. One of the lights, St. Thomas tells him, is Gratian, “who served the one and the other court so well that it gives pleasure in Paradise” (che l'uno e l'altro foro / aiutò sì che piace in paradiso [Paradiso 10:104–5]). The allusion to two “courts” (fora) would have puzzled Gratian, but to both Thomas and Dante it would have had a clear reference to the two broad arenas in which the Church's canon law was operative: the external forum of ecclesiastical courts (sometimes known as the “contentious forum”) and the internal forum of conscience and of penance. This new way of describing the Church's legal competence had been invented in the decades immediately following the publication of Gratian's magisterial textbook (ca. 1140), and it would have important consequences for the history of medieval canon law in the years to come.

Ecclesiastical problems naturally loom large in any investigation of relations between Greeks and Latins after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. The story of the negotiations between the Popes and the Patriarchs at Nicaea-the diplomacy and debate with regard to a union of the Churches-has been well told by Walter Norden; except for materials discovered by Schillmann and Heisenberg, little important information has become available since he wrote. I have therefore not re-examined this range of problems here. The purpose of this study is two-fold: first, to investigate within the Empire itself certain of the local ecclesiastical relationships between Greeks and Latins; and, second, to discover the modifications in ecclesiastical organization brought about by the Roman Church in the newly-conquered Byzantine territories which, from 1204 on, formed part of the Latin patriarchate. It is, then, the social and administrative rather than the theological and diplomatic aspects of the subject which engage our attention here.

The importance of Fulgentius, the exiled bishop of Ruspe (A.D. 503–523), as the spokesman of the orthodox African church against the Arian Vandals has long been recognized, and so Fulgentius is primarily known for his polemical tracts addressed to the Vandal king Thrasamund (496–523) and other Arians. His theology is not much admired, being largely derivative from Augustine; his style, likewise, compares poorly with that of the great bishop of Hippo. Nevertheless, the real significance of Fulgentius as aristocrat, monk, bishop, and litterateur is revealed in his Epistulae.

When one considers the absence of reliable information about events in general within the city of Constantinople itself between the death of the second Latin Emperor Henry in 1216 and the recapture of the city by the Greeks from Nicaea in 1261, it is surprising that the references to the Franciscans there, comparatively abundant in the sources, have not previously been used to shed some light on the religious and social history of the capital during this dark period.

The discourse of Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532) on the Golden Age is here published for the first time. It is edited from what seems to be the only extant version, found in manuscript in the Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distrital of Évora, Portugal. The discourse was delivered by Giles in a somewhat different form in Saint Peter's basilica in Rome on Dec. 21, 1507, at the request of Pope Julius II and in his presence. The king of Portugal, Manuel I (1495–1521), had written to Julius from Abrantes under date of Sept. 25, 1507, to announce to him some great news. The king, recently informed of three important events regarding his interests in the Far East, now wanted to communicate his information to the pope: the Portuguese, under the leadership of Lourenço de Almeida (?-1508) had landed in Ceylon and obtained from the most powerful ruler there an agreement to pay an annual tribute to the Portuguese crown; on March 18, 1506, de Almeida won an important naval victory over the Zamorin of Calicut; and in the same year another Portuguese fleet discovered the island of Madagascar.

In the late third century of the Common Era, the Platonic tradition was changed profoundly under the direction of Iamblichus of Chalcis, head of the Platonic school in Syria. Through the introduction of Egyptian and Chaldaean religious rites as part of the intellectual disciplines of his school, Iamblichus was given the honorific title ‘divine’ (θεĩος) by his Neoplatonic successors. Modern scholars, however, have generally not seen the head of the Platonic school's turning to magic rites as the high point of intellectual progress, and Iamblichus' contribution to Platonism has either been dismissed as a corruption of the tradition or has been left as an irresoluble enigma.

We all ‘know’ that medieval Aristotelians did not believe that a vacuum was possible, and we are complacent in our ‘knowledge’ that they were wrong. Even if we have an inkling of the sophistication of much medieval thinking on this topic, we are unlikely to suppose that anything medievals had to say on the subject is worth the trouble to study. What we may not realize is that not all medievals thought a vacuum or motion in a vacuum was impossible; following Avempace, in fact, many medieval philosophers argued that motion in a vacuum was possible, at least in theory.

Ephraem the Syrian is undoubtedly the best-known holy man of the Syriac-speaking world in the patristic period. Within fifty years of Ephraem's death, Palladius included a notice of him among the ascetic saints whose memory he celebrated in the Lausiac History. Sozomen the historian celebrated Ephraem's memory as a popular ecclesiastical writer, some of whose works had been translated into Greek even during his lifetime. Jerome claimed to recognize Ephraem's theological genius in a Greek translation he read of a book by Ephraem on the Holy Spirit. And toward the end of the fifth century, Gennadius of Marseilles called attention to Ephraem as a composer of metrical psalms. Well within the patristic era itself, therefore, Ephraem's reputation as holy man, theologian, and poet was secure.

Some people say the Western world is in a mess, and what it needs is to rediscover its religion. Of the two chief kinds of objection made to this idea, scientific and social, the second is probably nearer the centre of debate now. Its main form, put broadly, is the theory that religion is a device promoted by the rich to stop the poor rebelling. A social theory like this has an historical dimension. To tell if it is true, data are needed about what people have actually done, rich or poor. Since history so far has mostly been about the great, the need for data is all the keener in respect of the poor. The aim of this article is to add, in the context of this general debate, to known data about poor men's religion, from an especially crucial and obscure period: the central Middle Ages.

One of the most significant and influential figures of the ‘renaissance of the twelfth century,’ though not mentioned by Charles Haskins in his monumental work of that title (Cambridge 1927), was the Calabrian Joachim of Flora, a man who contributed nothing directly to the revival of science, to a knowledge of Greek or Latin antiquity, or to the rise of a secular attitude. Long before the date of the appearance of Haskins' work, however, since Michelet in fact, Joachim's name was associated with the Renaissance, and in the early years of this century this link was emphasized by Burdach and his followers. He is supposed to have done more to orient men's minds towards, and to have aroused expectations of, a coming new age in the later Middle Ages than anyone else. Whether one wishes to go as far as Burdach went (and I myself certainly do not wish to do so), it is at least true that his works and the works associated with his name helped to create the ferment that was eventually, in a few centuries, to make men feel that they were in a new era of rebirth and that a period of darkness lay behind them.

Throughout much of the Middle Ages the Iberian Peninsula had been responsible for the transmision to Europe of many of Aristotle's works and those of his Arab commentators. Without the ‘school’ of translators, which flourished at Toledo for nearly a century after its foundation in the 1120s by archbishop Raimundo, the twelfth-century revival of Aristotelianism at Paris would scarcely have been possible. But the motley Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula benefited less from the tradition of Arab scholarship than did their northern neighbours. Intellectual concerns were rather narrowly limited to the requirements of the schools and interest in the moral writings of Aristotle was therefore less pronounced than it was in the sphere of natural philosophy. The evidence for Spanish scholarly initiatives in respect of Aristotle's moral philosophy before the beginning of the fifteenth century is, indeed, slender; there are some commentaries and compendia used in teaching but certainly nothing to compare with the activities of Grosseteste, Moerbeke, Burley, and Oresme.

When should an historian analyze the assumptions which underlie his work, and when, if ever, is it incumbent on him to include in his work a discussion of the beliefs and procedures which have influenced his treatment of a subject? Recently historians, and in particular English medievalists, have been criticized for their anarchic empiricism; yet willingness to utilize any approach which promises concrete results, regardless of an integrated theoretical justification, is an attitude by no means limited to history but characteristic of many fields of detailed investigation in the natural and social sciences. By their fruits, as appraised by experts in the same field, shall their works be judged. There are times, however, when a broad historical subject is so narrowly treated that the result is tantamount to a philosophical statement, a statement, however implicit, that there is but one way of gaining valid knowledge of of men's past actions. We may then feel that the historian ought to have justified his procedure more explicitly, and we may be provoked to analyze and criticize the work, not for what has been said in it, but for what has not. This is especially true when the contrast between the dimensions of the subject and the limitations of a particular historian's vision throw his approach into high relief and incite the reader to examine the historian's conception of history. The English Jewry under Angevin Kings by H. G. Richardson is such a book because of its tone of certainty as to the proper path of history and because its subject cannot be domesticated to the calm conventions of professional habit.

Interest in the problem of Roman law in Henry de Bracton's De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae has recently started up with renewed vigor and with increasing emphasis upon the European rather than insular character of his treatise and upon the necessity of studying it ‘within the framework of the European legal (especially legistic and canonistic) literature of his time.’ But among the important elements of Roman law in Bracton the familiar maxim, ‘quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur’ (the words of Justinian, C. 5, 59, 5 §2), has been overlooked. In this study I wish to show how Bracton was influenced by the maxim (henceforth referred to simply as q. o. t. — quod omnes tangit), and how his acceptance of it may have some significance for its appearance in royal writs by which communities were summoned to send representatives to Parliament. For towards the end of the thirteenth century and later, the kings of England and France, when they needed extraordinary taxes or national support in quarrels with Pope Boniface VIII and consequently had to obtain the consent of great nobles, prelates and communities of lesser free men, sometimes stated in the preamble to summonses to an assembly that the cause of the convocation was a serious or difficult business (ardua negotia) touching (contingentia or tangentia) both king and kingdom. The presence of tangere or contingere in a context of the kind resulted, although students of representation have not observed it, from the influence of q.o.t. as an equitable principle in legal procedure—this will become apparent after the legal meaning and the terminology current in the thirteenth century are examined.

Increasingly we become aware of the medieval background of the Italian Renaissance. The secular, worldly spirit, associated with the Renaissance and always existing in the practical life of men, was already finding abundant intellectual, rationalizing expression in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ‘L'esprit laïque’ flourished among the legists at Bologna and the legal advisers of kings, leading through theories of public law and the state to the extreme ‘statism’ of Machiavelli and recent times. Following the revival of Roman law and the rise of national states, the new study of Aristotle and the extreme Aristotelianism of the later thirteenth century contributed to the political secularism of the fourteenth century (William Ockham and Marsiglio of Padua), as it did to a secular emphasis on morality. Not to mention many manifestations of a worldly appreciation of nature in the literature and art of the twelfth and the following century, the naturalistic treatment of love condemned at Paris in 1277 is strikingly similar in spirit to ideas in Lorenzo Valla's De voluptate. And classical humanism of the kind associated with Petrarch and his followers, rather than with the humanism of the twelfth century (John of Salisbury), although there is much common to both kinds, was beginning to appear in the thirteenth century among the ‘civil servants’ (notaries and secretaries) of the Italian communes.

These pages continue the inventory of Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries published in Traditio 23 (1967) 313-413, 24 (1968) 149-245, and 26 (1970) 135-216. 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.

No one reading Suger's life of Louis VI would be apt to think that the abbot of Saint Denis had an extremely broad or, as one used to say, ‘liberal’ conception of the territorial limits of Francia. On the contrary, it is evident that for him Francia was a compact unit of lands roughly equivalent to the more modern Ǐle de France, lands which in no way approximate what France was later to become. One finds, for example, that Louis after his various provincial expeditions is described as returning ‘in Franciam,’ be it from Flanders, Auvergne, or Berry. Similarly, frontiers and marches are to be found facing not only the empire, which is natural enough, but also Normandy, Berry, Auvergne, and Burgundy. In short, for Suger Francia was hemmed in by a host of other and often hostile lands, and while the king's duty might be to control them as best he might, it is nevertheless apparent that they do not, in Suger's normal use of the term, constitute part of Francia.

Although they were primarily interested in the theoretical issues at stake, the late-medieval papal publicists who dealt with the relationship between church and state were aware of and influenced by important current developments. Augustinus Triumphus makes surprisingly few references to current events. However, he treats at some length the question of whether or not the pope must reside in Rome — because of some of the criticisms that had been directed against his residence in Avignon. He discusses the question of whether or not the pope can resign his office — because this had been an issue of some concern ever since the resignation of Celestine V. Furthermore, he treats in some detail of the issue of Christian perfection — how it was realized by Christ and the early church, and how it can be realized in the contemporary church — because of the storm that had surrounded the protests of the Spiritual Franciscans. In view of all this it is undoubtedly the case that he and like-minded political theorists devoted the time they did to the church-state issue, not merely because there were interesting theoretical issues at stake, but because it was a vexing problem for the society in which they lived. This society had witnessed two major confrontations between the spiritual and temporal authorities: the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France in the early part of the fourteenth century, and the conflict between John XXII and the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in the third decade of the century, and all of this had not been without its influence on the papal theorists.