The romanesque façade of the abbey church of St.-Gilles in the diocese of Nlmes has been a subject of debate among art historians for many years. This controversy has been centered on the design of the church's façade [Fig. 1]. In addition to a series of colonnettes supporting archivolts that surround the tympana over its three western doorways, the St.-Gilles façade also possesses two free-standing columns flanking the central doorway that support nothing, a peculiarity which has led scholars to conclude that the plan of the façade was changed during the remodeling of the church in the twelfth century. The debate has focused on the dating of this change. A number of dates have been suggested, based on the façade's sculptural style, on dated inscriptions in the crypt, and on documents dealing with the church fabric. The art historians of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries dated the redesigning of the façade between 1116 and the middle of the thirteenth century, though the tendency of more recent scholarship has been to narrow the range of dates to between 1116 and the 1140s.

A strong attachment to education and scholarship very early distinguished the orders of friars established in the thirteenth century. Although Francis of Assisi had made no provision for such activities in the new religious movement which he founded, nevertheless, not long after his death in 1226 the Franciscans had already begun to show a pronounced intellectualist bent. In a sermon delivered in 1229, Odo of Châteauroux noted the influx of scholars into the Order and the prominence of the Franciscans in the Paris schools. Subsequently, some of the finest minds in Europe were converted to the Franciscan style of Christian life; and the enthusiasm and aptitude of the friars minor for teaching became very apparent — transforming them into almost a separate universitas.

During the twentieth century scholarly attention has turned increasingly to Severian of Gabala with new attributions, editions, and commentaries. Many researchers have contributed to this dramatic growth, but three in particular have been in the forefront: J. Zellinger with his Genesishomilien and Studien, H. D. Altendorf with his Untersuchungen, and S. J. Voicu with his many contributions culminating in his magisterial article on Severian in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, We have reached the point where an index to Severian's scriptural references may be of considerable help to researchers in identifying homilies referred to in other homilies, in determining the authorship of homilies that might be attributed to Severian, and in gaining a better general understanding of Severian's thought and the tradition in which he worked.

L'Epitome in philosophiam fut publié pour la première fois par B. Hauréau, en 1859, conjointement au De contemplatione et eius speciebus en appendice à son ouvrage Hugues de Saint-Victor. Nouvel examen de l'édition de ses oeuvres. Mais la présentation n'était qu'une simple indication et ignorait apparat critique et historique aussi bien qu'étude du texte. Au demeurant, quatre manuscrits seulement — de Paris — étaient signalés, deux autres — de Douai et d'Oxford — devant être découverts ensuite. Ce sont ces six manuscrits que nous aurons à étudier: les quatre de Paris, trois de la Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS lat. 15.315, 14.506, 14.659, un de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS lat. 717; le manuscrit de Douai, MS lat. 366; le manuscrit d'Oxford, Balliol College, MS lat. 296, et nous nous demanderons comment se présente la question de l'authenticité hugonienne de l'Epitome et quelles sont les caractéristiques des manuscrits qui nous en présentent le texte.

Michael Scot was a central figure both for the transmission of Arabic philosophy to the Latin West and for the development of medieval science and astrology, yet much still remains unknown about his life and career. In part of a longer article dedicated to teasing out some of the strands of Michael Scot's influences and impact, Charles Burnett poses intriguing questions about the importance of his early sojourn in Toledo. He shows that Michael, along with Salio of Padua and Mark of Toledo, continued the translating activity begun in the twelfth century in Toledo, and he wonders whether Michael — like the twelfth-century translators Dominicus Gundissalinus, Gerard of Cremona, and John Hispanus — was closely associated with the cathedral of Toledo. Burnett hypothesizes that Toledo could have been the place where Michael first came across the works of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes that he is credited with translating from the Arabic, and he notes that many of Michael's sources for his astrological treatise, the Liber introductorius (hereafter LI), were available in Toledo. Burnett suggests that by Michael's final departure from Spain to Italy, around 1220, he may have already made considerable headway in both his translating and astrological activities.

Vor einiger Zeit machte Carlos Steel auf einige neue Proclus-Fragmente aufmerksam. 1m dritten Band der Ausgabe der Tria Opuscula von Daniel Isaac, erschienen 1982, stellte er drei griechische Fragmente aus De decem dubitationibus circa providentiam und eines aus De providentia vor. Diese Fragmente hatte er in einer Handschrift der Loci communes des Ps.-Maximus gefunden, dem Kodex aus der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover mit der Signatur IV 546, dessen Abschrift am 7. Mai 1311 von Eugenios Choumnos beendet wurde. Eine neuerliche Durchsicht der Handschrift ergab, daß, neben einem Fragment aus De providentia, sich nicht drei sondern acht Fragmente aus De decem dubitaiionibus circa providentiam hierin befinden.

A Byzantinist today would not attempt to investigate any area of the Byzantine landscape without a thorough consideration of the hagiographic evidence. And yet, hagiography, which admittedly does not always make for entertainment, is not as well plowed a field as one might hope. We may point, by way of example, to the manuscript of the Vita Euthymii Sardensis, Bodleianus Laudianus Graecus 69, fol. 306v-324v, written by the monk Metrophanes. The text has been entirely ignored and neglected, although Krumbacher had noted some seventy years ago that it was easily accessible in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Of course, the neglect may be due to the unwarranted assumption that the text's value is meagre if not wholly negligible. And yet, Euthymius' personality should certainly have aroused the interest of historians.

Sidonius Apollinaris needs no introduction as by far our best informant for the history of Roman Gaul in the late fifth century and as one of the most accomplished practitioners of the complicated literary style so admired in his age and so often contemned in ours. Because his poems and letters provide abundant evidence for political and social history, most historians have until recently tended to see him as a predominantly secular figure. That impression is heightened by the literary genres he chose for his writings and whose accepted rules and forms he meticulously followed. However, a handful of studies since mid-century, and recently a political biography, have drawn attention to one or another neglected religious dimension of his life. Gradually a hidden Sidonius has been emerging from between the lines of reluctant sources that are not autobiographical by nature or by his intent.

The Somnium of John of Legnano, the great Bolognese lawyer of the fourteenth century, was first properly brought to the attention of scholars by G. W. Coopland in 1926. Professor Coopland's chief concern was with the relationship between this work and the much more famous Somnium Viridarii, composed about 1375 at the court of King Charles V of France, whose author made some substantial borrowings from John's slightly earlier work. Though he supplied a synopsis of its content, Coopland gave it as his opinion that John's work was not in itself of any great interest, apart from the section in it which is devoted to a defence of papal monarchy, a section which, as the author makes clear, incorporates into the Somnium a tract on this matter which he had composed previously. This probably is the most interesting part of John's much larger and more ambitious work, which seems to have been written in 1372, but our opinion is that the other sections have rather more in them to reward the reader than Coopland suggested. This is the justification for an attempt to describe the work in more detail than he did and to discuss briefly some parts of its content and arguments.

The later Middle Ages was the high moment of the popular, vernacular sermon, yet relatively few examples of extraliturgical sermons can be recovered from the written evidence. Latin collections of sermon cycles—those preached in the context of the mass liturgy and saints' days—were produced in large quantities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, functioning more or less directly as exemplars for the actual sermons that would then be preached in the local vernaculars of western Europe. In England, such Latin sermon collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often include some vernacular materials, especially lyrics, and many treatises are extant that provide priests with the materials to make sermons on a wide range of topics and for an indefinite number of occasions. Of the relatively few English sermons and sermon collections extant from the period, however, by far the greatest number are, like the Latin cycles, those keyed to the cycle of Sunday texts and to saints' days, whose very formality militates against a sense of them as representative of the most common forms and themes of vernacular sermons, particularly those earnestly preached on the occasions like that which Chaucer satirically describes in the Summoner's Tale, when “ther wente a lymytour aboute / To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doubte” (3.1711–1712). With so few examples of non-liturgical sermons extant, our sense both of the reality and of the satire is incomplete.

In an essay entitled “Church History and the Bible,” Karlfried Froehlich once distinguished between the many biblical texts that have had a history and the few which have really made history. His point was that, in the history of their effects, the different books and even individual verses of the Bible have had a very uneven influence. Some have been relatively neutral or unproductive in their visible historical impact. Others can almost be said to have brought into being whole movements, institutions, ideas, and conflicts.

The end of the fifteenth century witnessed the dissolution of the medieval kingdom of Georgia. The three kingdoms — of Georgia proper (Iberia= K'art'li), of Imeretia (Abasgia), and of Kakhetia — and the five sovereign principalities, into which that ancient and once powerful realm had found itself divided, were ill prepared now to face the onslaught of the Islamic imperialism of the Osmans and the Safawis or, finally, to prevent the nearest Christian empire, to which they had turned for aid, from absorbing them.

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

Boccaccio's first work, the Caccia di Diana, is generally considered a playful allegory of ‘courtly’ love. Although the poem's literal content cannot be reconciled with its allegedly amorous message, critics have cited the discrepancy as a characteristic example of the youthful author's failure to appreciate the importance of narrative unity. There is, however, reason to believe that we have been mistaken both in our understanding of the Caccia's meaning and in our evaluation of its artistic merit. Like Dante's Commedia, Vita nuova, and lost sirventese, Boccaccio's primary models for this early narrative, it is, in fact, a carefully planned numerical composition. The symbolic implications of the numbers hidden in the text suggest, moreover, that Diana's hunt and the miraculous triumph of her rival, Venus, form a fictional veil designed to conceal an emblematic victory of virtue over vice and an allegory of conversion from bestial lust to Christian love.

In one of the very few essays in English on Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, Eleanor Shipley Duckett calls him a prince of the Church, a statesman, an administrator, a scholar who rises far above the other figures she surveys and who stands out in the company of Charles the Great and Pope Nicholas I in the historical records of the ninth century. His long life, from his birth in northern France in 806, his entry into the monastery of St. Denis in 814, his consecration as archbishop in 845, to his death in 882 at Epernay while fleeing from the Danish invasion, was one long series of combats calling for a variety of talents. He revealed a deep knowledge of canon law in his various ecclesiastical disputes with recalcitrant clergy and laity, an astute diplomatic talent in his attempts to knit together the rapidly unraveling unity of the empire, a broad but unoriginal scholarship in his theological controversies over predestination and the Trinity which brought him to grips with the leading thinkers of the Carolingian renaissance, especially the redoubtable Saxon Gottschalk, monk of Orbais. It is with this last controversy that this paper will be concerned.

A fresh attempt on the two most formidable puzzles in the Divina Commedia, by one who cannot even profess to be a Dantist, may seem peculiarly open to what a contemporary scholar has called ‘the mild raillery that attends those who persist in offering solutions of problems apparently worked to death.' Yet a survey of the massive bibliography surrounding Dante's DXV and Veltro produces the strong impression that no explanation proposed for either of them so far has won for itself any real core of acceptance. If this one-sentence summary of six hundred years' scholarship is accurate, it suggests that a fruitful approach is less likely to emerge from comparative re-assessments of the existing theories, than from an exploration of some of the all-but-forgotten corners of medieval Christian tradition, in search of an interpretation that will fit the two prophecies and their contexts more precisely. In the present study, Part I will offer an interpretation of the DXV which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been proposed; Part II will demonstrate the compatibility of this interpretation with other crucial parts of the Commedia; Part III will offer a somewhat less original interpretation of the Veltro; and Part IV will examine the relationship between the two prophecies as I have interpreted them.