Modern analyses of the course of Roman politics in the years 62–60 b.c. reveal a high level of agreement in comparison with the welter of conflicting theories that have emerged from studies of the political activity of the fifties.

The dismissal of his army at Brundisium and certain seemingly conciliatory gestures toward the conservative elements of the Roman aristocracy have led most scholars to conclude that in 62 b.c. Pompey, at heart a conservative, was eager for closer ties with Rome's oligarchs, and willing to accept the notion of government by the senate if his immediate but modest needs were met.

Hrabanus Maurus's De institutione clericorum is a masterpiece of clerical formation, emblematic of the Carolingian Renewal and esteemed by thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. In the third book, Hrabanus juxtaposes Augustine's teachings in De doctrina christiana with Gregory the Great's instruction in the Regula pastoralis to craft an original case for a close connection between wisdom and moral life in priestly training. Hrabanus's effort concretizes long-standing concerns of Carolingian reformers reiterated in landmark reform documents from the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Moreover, throughout his life, Hrabanus periodically returns to his work on priestly formation for words and ideas to undergird subsequent efforts at integrating education with pastoral practice in a variety of genres, including his model sermons, his encyclopedic commentary, and his handbook for missionary conversion. In addition to highlighting Hrabanus's individual genius as one who adroitly applies traditional authorities in novel ways to contemporary problems, this study illumines the crucial role played by monasteries like Fulda as engines for the Carolingian reform.

The fact that the question of war guilt has frequently followed in the wake of major wars has contributed little, if anything, to a clarification of the concept. The perplexing difficulties raised by it are amply illustrated by the unsuccessful attempts, made periodically at various ages and on various levels of civilization, to arrive at criteria permitting a differentiation between the bellum justum and the bellum injustum. States, unlike individuals, are not confronted with simple choices between obeying or violating the law. Determination of the initial violation of existing covenants sheds little, if any, light on the responsibility for commencing war. Nor is such responsibility necessarily incurred by launching the first attack. Nothing could be more futile than to equate this act with aggressive and unjust war. The initial attack may be a legitimate response to an existing situation, and a war of aggression, as St. Augustine already pointed out, a just war; nor is there any reason to assume that the party forced into the defensive is invariably innocent. If war guilt is to be more than a specious pretense for inflicting punishment upon the vanquished, it can be measured only in terms of the alternatives available to a state, and the choice has to be viewed in the light of historical, ethical, and political factors. The assessment of such guilt is a problem of extraordinary complexity. To confine it to formal legal considerations would result not only in gross injustice, but would tend to perpetuate international tensions.

In 343 A. D. the Synod of Sardica, speaking of priests to be sent by the pope e latere suo or, in the equally authoritative Greek version, used a figure of speech which, in its Latin form as a latere or de latere—both variants are already attested in the early transmission of the Sardican canons — became in time an important canonical concept. Although the bishops assembled at Sardica might at first seem to have coined a striking neologism, the phrase employed by them actually echoes certain passages of the Greek and Latin Bibles and the use made of those passages in some of the homilies of the Fathers. As we listen to the biblico-patristical overtones with which the term a latere resounds, the theological source of early canonical language becomes, for this one instance, perceptible again.

The development of the pre-Carolingian seigneurie has received little attention, although this neglect is due in large part to a scarcity in source material. This lack may be supplemented by relying on other material, such as that supplied in the Lex Baiuvariorum. The latter, the Bavarian code, was promulgated within the first half of the eighth century and slightly before the appearance of the Carolingian estate organization. The development of manorial obligations in eighth-century Bavaria is illustrated by one major law in the Lex Baiuvariorum, and this law is I, 13. However, the study of the seigneurie in Bavaria is complicated by differing interpretations of the evidence. What follows is an attempt to re-evaluate the evidence as supplied in L. Baiu. I, 13 and to show its relationship with the Carolingian estate organization.

For more than sixty years now Heinrich Hagenmeyer's ‘Chronologie de la première croisade’ has been a standard reference. As a compilation and critique of dates recorded by the crusading historians and their contemporaries, the great German scholar's account is as satisfactory today as when it first appeared. It is in the area, however, of the hypothetical dates which Hagenmeyer assigned to the various occurrences on the expeditions of Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon to the Orient that the ‘Chronologie’ stands in error and needs revision.

L'histoire byzantine est peut-être parmi toutes les branches de la science historique celle qui est effleurée occasionnellement par le nombre le plus grand d'historiens, et en même temps celle dont le nombre des adeptes cent pour cent est peut-être le plus petit; d'autre part, ces travailleurs, si peu nombreux qu'ils soient dans notre champ d'études, diffèrent entre eux, plus qu'il n'arrive dans les autres branches historiques, par la conception de leur tâche commune, par les buts derniers qu'ils se proposent et par les méthodes qu'ils emploient pour y parvenir. Cette situation triplement paradoxale s'explique par le peu de précision qu'a comporté longtemps et que comporte toujours, sous certains rapports, la notion qu'on se fait, jusque dans les rangs des spécialistes, du terme de byzantin, et, d'autre part, précisément par ce qui constitue à mon avis la particularité la plus saillante de l'histoire byzantine et qui lui confère son véritable intérêt. J'ai toujours professé la maxime térentienne adaptée aux recherches de l'historien, du nihil historici a me alienum puto, mais à une époque oò l'ensemble des connaissances historiques est devenu depuis longtemps beaucoup trop vaste pour pouvoir être embrassé par un seul, j'ai cru trouver dans le domaine de l'histoire byzantine celui oò l'on peut mieux que dans tout autre s'adonner au goût de l'histoire universelle tout en servant modestement une branche spéciale, comme tout autre historien de nos jours.

In 1964 Professor Sesto Prete published a description of the contents of two fifteenth-century manuscripts, MS 100.42 in the Cathedral Library at Toledo and Cod. Vaticanus Barberinianus latinus 42. He called these T and B respectively, and they will be so referred to here. T contains 169 humanistic items as opposed to 76 in B. The manuscripts have 32 items in common.

Bei den Vorarbeiten für eine Dissertation über die bedingte Eheschliessung im kanonischen Recht, die vor allem die Entwicklung dieses Rechtsinstituts in der Zeit von 1140-1234 aufzeigen wird, hat der Verfasser unter anderem einzelne bisher unbekannte Handschriften verschiedener kanonistischer Werke aufgefunden oder bereits bekannte Handschriften näher identifiziert. Da die Drucklegung der Dissertation wohl noch einige Zeit in Anspruch nehmen wird, möchte der Verfasser die wichtigsten Ergebnisse vorläufig kurz anzeigen. Der Einzelnachweis wird in der genannten Dissertation folgen.

As in previous Bulletins, bibliographical references are limited (1) to the first notice given of a manuscript not recorded in the Repertorium, and (2) to significant corrections or amplifications concerning previously known and new manuscripts (such references being preceded by ‘cf.’). Details of descriptions given in the Repertorium are not repeated, and new manuscripts are marked by the symbol *.

It is difficult to deduce the Aristotelian scientific procedure — to take his abstract statement of the nature of science and to show that his actual method in a particular work is adequately explained by the initial definition. Yet Aristotle's actual method is worth getting at. It provides insight into Aristotle and into Greek thought, and it sheds light on the course of ideas during the centuries which have been scientifically Aristotelian. In the following pages, I have tried to discover and to describe the method at work in a particular scientific treatise. The unit chosen for study is the first book and a half of the De caelo. Here it is that Aristotle develops his highly influential science of the celestial bodies.

Near the end of the twelfth century, the scholar and statesman Peter of Blois felt compelled to bring together the wisdom of ancients and moderns on the subject of love and friendship. He was reluctant to publish his synthesis, for he was afraid that his reliance on other authors would bring charges of fraud. Sure enough, it has. Unfortunately, he relied too heavily on one modern in particular, St. Ailred of Rievaulx; and, like many undergraduate papers, his treatise is a better example of plagiarism than of synthesis.

The peculiar piece of late Byzantine legal literature which is known by the strange name of Tipoukeitos, is concerned with the so-called Basilica. It indicates, in a very succinct form, the topics dealt with in the sixty books of Emperor Leo the Philosopher's voluminous codification. It seems that the author of T. used a copy of B. which differed somewhat, particularly in its enumeration of the single texts, from those MSS on which the brothers Heimbach based their edition of B. but, in general, the order of books and titles in T. is the same as in the Heimbachs' edition.

The ingenuity of early Christian artisans in turning a host of pagan symbols and images to the service of a new ideology is one of the most conspicuous features of Christian art during the second and third centuries after Christ. It is responsible for the art of the catacombs in which Orpheus the charmer of wild beasts represents Christ the Good Shepherd, and the eagle, peacock, Dionysiac grapes, sun, stars, and other pagan funerary symbols of long standing express the state of the Christian soul after death. Yet as Christianity grew stronger in the Roman empire, as councils were held and creeds formulated, and as a distinctively Christian view of history evolved in which Old Testament figures replaced pagan heroes, we find a curious lag in the visual arts. The old pagan imagery continues to appear in Christian funerary monuments, often in conjunction with newer, wholly Christian, motifs, but significantly not replaced by them. This phenomenon is not due simply to the conservatism of the artisans, but owes much to the vigor of the old motifs and the persistence of the ideas they represented. It also points up the fundamental difference between a verbal statement, made up of words which may be freely rearranged and whose connotations shift mercurially from year to year, and a visual statement, which is less flexible and able to retain its symbolic appeal for a very long time. The difference, practically a commonplace in the study of the history of ideas, is nonetheless often overlooked in the study of the ideas and motifs of late antiquity, when words and pictures ostensibly representing the same ideas were often straining in opposite directions. Thus, while the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon sought to settle for all time the relation between the human and divine in the person of Jesus, Christian artisans were still depicting Christ the Good Shepherd in the aspect of Orpheus.

The unedited Canticum amoris of Richard Rolle is a Latin poem of one hundred fifty-two lines addressed to the Virgin Mary. Written after he had become a hermit and while, it seems, he was still a youth, the work is of considerable interest for itself, for the light it sheds on the author as man and artist, and for a study of the confluence of the currents in the stream of English literature at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The signature, woven into the poem, leaves no doubt about its being a genuine work of one who in England was probably the most influential English writer of the late middle ages. It was listed among the Latin works of Rolle which Horstmann intended to edit, discussed by Miss Hope Emily Allen in her indispensable canon of the hermit's work, and singled out by Mr. Raby as a work that should be published.

It is not without reason that Harnack calls St. Gregory the Great ‘Doctor angelorum et diaboli.’ The misery of Gregory's times, occasioned by the incessant attacks of the Lombards, made him convinced that the end of the world was at hand. Thus it is that his thought has a definitely eschatological stamp. The terrors of death and the fierce onslaughts of the devil were popular themes with St. Gregory the Great.

What was Dante's interpretation of the third Aristotelian disposition of Nicomachean Ethics 7, which he calls ‘la matta bestialitade’ and how does it function in the structure of the Inferno? Correlatively, what range of meaning did Dante assign the second disposition, ‘malizia’? The problem is difficult at best and, from a modern point of view, apparently literarily unrewarding. What is more, after a long tradition of scholarly discussion and dispute a kind of consensus has emerged. With the solution which it proposes most are willing to rest content and indeed many simply take its correctness for granted. It is the thesis of this study that the consensus is based on an improvisation and that the high probability of an alternative solution can be effectively demonstrated. Underlying this is the conviction that this is not a scholarly quibble, of interest only to the ‘experts’ or merely a matter of interest for the history of ideas. Rather it is a problem with profound significance for the total structure of the Inferno both intellectual and literary.

While searching for traces of Virgilian echoes in medieval Latin poetry, I came upon the following unusual Christmas song from Bohemia, recorded between ca. 1410 and 1420 in a manuscript of the Abbey of Hohenfurth:

1. En aetas iam aurea incipit vigere Regnaque saturnea revolvuntur vere,

2. Parvulus dum nascitur ex intemerata Virgine, quae pariens mansit illibata.

3. Sibyllinis versibus hic fuit praedictus, Quod Maro commemorat, nec est sermo fictus.

4. Utrique ergo psallite, Matri, nato canite pie resonantes.

5. Tibi Deus pater grates, Qui in figura per vates filium spopondisti;

6. Atque tibi sacrum flamen, Qui nobis consolamen obumbrando contulisti.

7. R° Narrando poetice, Intelligendo mystice, is est Saloninus, Vera sapientia, filius divinus.