In a preceding article, we have tried to show that important features of the relationship between St. Augustine and Plotinus still call for some investigation: that, in fact, one of the latter's most telling treatises (Ennead VI 4–5) had hitherto virtually escaped the notice of those interested in tracing his influence on Augustine's thought. To one possible implication of that study we alluded only briefly, but its importance for the history of Christian spirituality impels our returning to it now. Augustine, we suggested, from his earliest extant writings up to and including the Confessions, may well have been thinking in terms of a Plotinian fall of the soul into the body.

Paulinus of Nola (ca. 355–431)—the wealthy aristocrat from Aquitaine and once governor of Campania who converted to asceticism, sold his and his wife's property, went to Nola to live as a monk at St. Felix's shrine, and was eventually elected bishop of Nola—is remembered not so much for any single great achievement as for a number of smaller ones. His contemporaries admired his asceticism, and he is counted among the earliest Christian Latin poets. His descriptions of the buildings at Nola are important to Christian archaeology, and he was known to many Latin fathers, including Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. Of his works, about fifty letters and thirty poems are extant. Paulinus is also known through other writers, both contemporary and later; and what follows is an attempt to trace him in the literary tradition from his own day through to the Carolingian age.

Modern critics usually read the vision of Dryhthelm as an account of a man frightened into penitential asceticism even though Bede explains that Dryhthelm lived out his days in the desire for heaven, not fear of punishment. While fear is an important part of Dryhthelm's conversion, Bede depicts the process according to the doctrine of compunction as it is received from Gregory the Great, who presents compunction as a process by which fear of punishment yields to love and the desire for heaven. Reading the conversion of Dryhthelm as a process of Gregorian compunction reveals both Bede's fundamental optimism about the vision Dryhthelm has seen and a spirituality in the text that is more nuanced and positive than the fire and ice that figure so prominently in it. Proceeding from these observations, the paper argues that the celestial topography of Dryhthelm's vision is a spiritual topography — a map of personal and emotional progress through compunction, as understood by Gregory the Great and received by Bede, and only incidentally a map of celestial regions deemed logically necessary by later theologians. These conclusions complicate hellfire and brimstone readings of this and other Anglo-Saxon texts about judgment and penance, and they call for nuanced readings of compunction as a complex and productive experience.

In 634, the freshly consecrated bishop Birinus, having promised Pope Honorius that he would spread the faith in “the remotest. regions of England,” arrived in the territory of the West Saxons (or the Gewisse, as they were then still known). He found them so thoroughly pagan (“paganissimas”) that he opted to remain there to preach the gospel. The following year he baptized Cynegils, the first of the West Saxon kings to accept Christianity. The Brytenwalda, Oswald of Northumbria, stood sponsor. Together, the two kings endowed Birinus with the civitas of Dorchester-on-Thames as his see. Over the next few years, both Cynegils's son Cwichelm and his grandson Cuthred were baptized, the latter in 639 by Birinus in Dorchester. It would have been in or near this year that Aldhelm was born,” though his native area was said by William of Malmesbury to have been Sherborne, in the southwest of Wessex, on the border with the British kingdom of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall) and, thus, far from Birinus's episcopal seat in the upper Thames valley. Would this be an indication of the rapid spread of Christianity in the West Saxon kingdom? Notably, well within a generation a West Saxon became the first native-born archbishop of Canterbury when Deusdedit was consecrated in 655 (his Anglo-Saxon name was remembered as Friduwine).” But where Deusdedit received his ecclesiastical training is unknown; Bede can tell us only that he was a “West Saxon by race” (“de gente Occidentalium Saxonum”).” Or was Aldhelm's being Christian due to his royal status? It may be that another of Cynegils's sons, Centwine, who became king in Wessex in 676, was Aldhelm's father.” By this time, Aldhelm was a senior cleric in the West Saxon church.

The twentieth century witnessed an efflorescence of interest in medieval exegesis, sparked by scholars across a wide spectrum of intellectual, methodological, and confessional commitments. Thanks in large measure to the work of Beryl Smalley (1905–1984) and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), to name only two major exponents, the modern study of medieval exegesis achieved a depth and significance that fittingly complements the attention earlier generations had paid to scholastic theology.

The pages that follow continue the ‘Repertorium’ begun in Traditio 31 (1975) 99–126, and continued with the translations of the Liber Aphorismorum in Traditio 32 (1976) 257–292. Included in this issue are the commentaries on the Liber Aphorismorum, arranged in the case of those that are anonymous, by the first principal word of the incipit of the commentary; and where the commentator is named, alphabetically by the first name of the commentator. In each instance, the commentator will be identified briefly, where possible, and provided with bibliographical references for further information. Then follow the manuscripts, with incipit and desinit of the text, where applicable, and of the commentary.

The Gothic choir of Le Mans Cathedral was consecrated by Bishop Geoffroy de Loudun on April 24, 1254, while Saint Louis was still in the Holy Land and before the windows had been completely glazed. So much is established by the story related in the chronicle about the winegrowers who, arriving late and thus unable to carry a torch in the procession, decided to donate a window which would provide more permanent illumination instead. Their gift, now Bay c on the north side of the upper ambulatory, is datable ca. 1255 on the basis of this story (see fig. 1). Another window nearby (Bay a) was the gift of Guillaume Roland, then precentor of the cathedral, who is named in an inscription and depicted as a priest; since he became bishop before September 1255 another firm date is established for the glazing. The axial window (Bay g) depicts a knight who was present at the 1254 consecration: Rotrou de Montfort, shown with banner and heraldic surcoat de gueules à 2 léopards d'or passants (fig. 2). His arms are known to us from the Bigot Roll, which records the Angevin forces marshaled by the Capetian prince Charles d'Anjou for his campaigns in Flanders in the same year. Directly above Rotrou's window, the prestigious axial clerestory was the gift of Bishop Geoffroy de Loudun himself, builder of the new choir and dead by August 1255. His arms appear eight times in the borders: gueules à la bande d'or. And Bay C in the north clerestory depicts two knights and a canon of the family de Cormes with their arms. The canon is no doubt Geoffroy de Cormes, dead in 1263. The warriors who flank him are his father Guillaume ‘Major’ de Cormes and his uncle Jean, and they too are known to us from the Bigot Roll which gives their arms: ‘l'escru blanc a III jumelles noires.’

Some time ago, while I was working on the life of William Lily, the Grammarian, my attention was directed to the state of letters and learning in the Rhodes of early Renaissance times. George Lily, William's son, tells us that his father, when a young man, stayed at Rhodes a certain length of time for the sake of letters, and that he learned there the elements of Greek and Latin. Objection may be made to the second part of this statement: since the senior Lily already had his B.A. from Oxford when he began his foreign travels, presumably he had learned there a fair amount of Latin, and quite possibly some Greek; the choice of the word “elements” was surely not a happy one. However, on the face of things, there would seem to be no good reason for doubting the main assertion: that William Lily went to Rhodes “for the sake of letters.” Later biographers of Lily incorporate George's statement in their own accounts, some of them adding a detail or two of their own. But we must wait until the eighteenth century before we are given a reason for believing in any noteworthy culture in Renaissance Rhodes. Philip Morant, in the article which he wrote on Lily for the Biographica Britannica, says: “At his [Lily's] return from thence [Jerusalem], he studied some time at Rhodes; where, after the taking of Constantinople, several learned men had taken refuge.” Bliss's edition of Anthony à Wood carries this statement about the learned men, quoting the Biographica Britannica as source. Morant, although he did take occasion to drive home the point in correcting an earlier biographer, Thomas Fuller, had offered no support for his assertion.

The Earthly Paradise was a favorite topic of medieval theologians, philosophers, poets, and artists. Drawn as much from the biblical paradisus voluptatis (Gen. 2:8–14) and hortus conclusus (Song of Sol. 4:12) as from Greek and Roman accounts of a locus amoenus, the general outlines of paradise were well established by the patristic period: it is a garden or garden-like natural place, on Earth but set aside by God, perfect in every attribute, wholly uncorrupted, temperate in its climate, gently watered by rivers and fountains, ever fertile in its soil, rich in fruits and beasts of every kind; its inhabitants do not experience exertion, passion, illness, pain, or shame; in short, it is a place free of the consequences of sin. These attributes were frequently applied to both the Garden of Eden enjoyed by the first parents and the Heaven enjoyed by the blessed after death, so “paradise” could be understood in both terrestrial and celestial forms, overlapping spiritually and materially.

The manuscript sources of the Mozarabic or Old Hispanic liturgy have been thoroughly described and analyzed, with the exception of an early-eleventh-century book of saints' offices that has been considered missing since the late nineteenth century from the Cathedral Archive of Toledo. In October 2001, I identified this lost book as manuscript B2916 in the library of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, where it has been since its acquisition by the Society's founder, Archer Huntington. HSA MS B2916 is the only codex of the Old Hispanic liturgy preserved outside Europe. This manuscript is a curious book, comprising the offices for the feasts of Saint Martin (November 11), Saint Emilianus or Millán (November 12), and the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15). The matins lessons of the first two offices consist of the entirety of, respectively, the Vitae of Martin by Sulpicius Severus and of San Millán by Braulio of Saragossa. Because the manuscript was in a private collection and has remained uncatalogued, it has gone unnoticed for the last century, a period that saw the maturation of modern study of the Mozarabic rite. The contents of the book were not unknown during this time, however, because some specialists have consulted the copy (today in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid) made in 1752 by the polymath Jesuit Andrés Marcos Burriel. Indeed, it was Clyde Brockett's remarkably accurate handmade copy of the Burriel copy that made the identification of the manuscript possible, even at two removes. While the Burriel copy is useful, many important aspects of the original manuscript deserve notice.

Die neue Liste der von Simon von Bisignano in seiner Summa zitierten Extravaganten, welche T. P. McLaughlin in den Medieval Studies 20 (1958) 167–176 veröffentlicht hat, gibt die Möglichkeit, die Dekretalensammlung, welche Simon benutzt hat, mit ziemlicher Sicherheit zu bestimmen. Wenn sich dabei die Vermutung auf eine Sammlung der ‘italienischen Gruppe' der Primitiven vor 1Comp. richtete, so lag das nach dem, was J. Juncker in seiner grundlegenden Abhandlung über die coll. Berolinensis ausgeführt hatte, von vornherein rein nahe. Aber als Juncker die Ber. als älteste und primitivste Sammlung in die Literaturgeschichte der kanonistischen Quellen einführte, hatte er von der Existenz weiterer, teils noch altertümlicher, teils umfangreicherer Sammlungen, die sich mit der Ber. zu einer Familie oder Gruppe zusammenfassen lassen, noch keine Kenntnis. Weitgehende Übereinstimmung im mitgeteilten Material, Gleichlauf in der Reihenfolge der einzelnen Stücke auf kürzere oder längere Strecken, textkritische Einzelheiten berechtigen methodisch zu dieser Gruppierung; ihr Wachstum von Sammlung zu Sammlung ist kein Gegenargument angesichts der rechtsschöpferischen Tätigkeit der Kurie, welche in Schule und Kirchenverwaltung gleichermassen das Bedürfnis wacherhielt, die jeweils neueste und vollständigste Sammlung zur Hand zu haben. Diese Entwicklung innerhalb der Gruppe kann erst durch die ausführliche Analyse jeder einzelnen Sammlung sichtbar gemacht werden; für den Nachweis, dass zu fast allen zu der von McLaughlin nachgewiesenen Dekretalen die Texte in den Sammlungen der italienischen Gruppe zu finden sind, wird die Zusammenstellung im Anhang genügen. Da aber vier von fünf in Frage kommenden Sammlungen kaum mehr als dem Namen nach, bekannt sind, müssen über sie einige Bemerkungen vorausgeschickt werden.

This article offers a new perspective on the anonymous Liber beati et laudabilis viri Gregorii. The oldest extant life of Pope Gregory the Great, the Liber was composed at the double monastery of Strænæshalch, conventionally known as Whitby, under Abbess Ælfflæd probably between ca. 704 and 714. A principal concern of my article is the function, within the Liber, of its report of Gregory's encounter with a group of Deiran Angles in Rome, and that story's relation to the emphasis throughout the Liber on orality: the transmission of knowledge miraculously from heaven and through earthly channels by means of speech and other sounds. The Liber survives in an early ninth-century redaction, part of St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 567 (pp. 75–110). After discussing some issues that pertain to the modern edition and translation made by Bertram Colgrave from this manuscript, I compare the legend of Gregory and the Deirans in the Liber with the version in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. I then review the larger hagiographical narrative in which the Whitby author frames this episode, and I examine the story and other distinctive thematic as well as stylistic aspects of the Liber in the light of the following circumstances: seventh- to eighth-century regional developments that affected Whitby; conditions of teaching at this monastery, a major early English educational center; the documented interest at Whitby under Ælfflæd, as under her predecessor Hild, in heaven-inspired or miraculous forms of oratory; and liturgy and commemoration of the dead. Of interest for analyzing all these topics, but especially the last two mentioned, is Whitby's status as a female-led institution.

The miracle of the Apostle of Ireland leading to the expulsion of noxious reptiles from the Emerald Isle is, if not one of the best attested, at least one of the most widely known. In a brief study published some time ago, the writer pointed out that similar miracles are credited to quite a number of other holy men, the scene of their actions being, significantly enough, the Channel Islands and some islands on the French Riviera. The list might be considerably extended.

The early expansion of Islam led in time to widespread conversions of Christians in conquered territories. In the later eleventh century, however, western Christendom was in turn launching offensives against Islam on several fronts. Territorial gains were made in various Mediterranean regions and, although by the end of the thirteenth century the Holy Land had been lost again, Sicily remained in Christian hands, and in the second half of the thirteenth century in the Iberian peninsula only Granada remained under Muslim control: the whole peninsula was under Christian rule before the end of the fifteenth century. This expansion was accompanied, especially in the thirteenth century, by attempts to convert Muslims and other non-Christians. Yet in the period from the late eleventh until the later fifteenth century some western Christians converted to Islam. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the situations that prompted the adoption of Islam, and the reasons for such conversions, although the evidence is usually insufficient to indicate exactly why a particular Christian became a Muslim: the preconceived ideas voiced in western sources about forced conversions can be misleading and, although a crude distinction might be made between conversions from conviction and those based on worldly considerations, motives did not necessarily always fit neatly into just one of these two categories. But obviously not all converts would have had an equal understanding of the nature of Islamic beliefs and practices. The response of western ecclesiastical and secular authorities to renegades will also be considered. Further conversions of Christian peoples who had already for centuries been living under Muslim rule will not be examined, but only the adoption of Islam by those whose origins lay in western Christian countries or who were normally resident in these, and by westerners whose lands were newly conquered by Muslim powers after the eleventh century; and the focus will be mainly, though not exclusively, on the crusader states and the Iberian peninsula.

This article investigates how and why medieval ecclesiastical writers thought and wrote about experiences of grief in human history. It examines the works of three late twelfth-century Latin writers from England: a foundation history of Waltham Abbey and its holy cross, a series of annals kept by Hugh Candidus at Peterborough, and Gerald of Wales's autobiographical and travel writing alongside his De principis instructione. Drawing on biblical, literary, theological, and iconographic models for grief and suffering in the western Christian tradition, the article situates these works in the exegetical and philosophical ideas they shared, and explains what is original and significant about their approaches to each instance of grief. It argues that the central problem these writers pondered in their narratives was the relationship between the universal and particular nature of grief. Grieving, they thought, had three key qualities: it impelled a desire to act; it could not be meaningfully measured; and it persisted in time. In prioritizing the experience of grief over its function, meaning, or morality, these writers considered the emotion rational, natural, and honest. The value these writers placed on human family or family-like relationships provides the context for understanding their priorities in thinking about responses to loss. Interest in grief's endurance, rather than its resolution in consolation, has been understood as more typical of secular, not sacred, thought. By showing how these writers’ ideas about grief's nature lived alongside and within other ideas of Christian thought, this article illuminates a greater range of medieval ecclesiastical ideas about the dignity of human history and emotion.

The origin of the actual Roman Canon missae, despite the labors of prominent scholars in the field of Liturgy, remains a secret. We agree with Dom Bernard Botte who declares in regard to questions concerning the Roman Canon: