The practice of magic was much in vogue in the Renaissance and even the word had gained a limited respectability. Thus in 1558 when Giambattista della Porta published his collection of curiosities of art and nature he did so under the title Magia naturalis, and even in the next century the far more sober Bishop John Wilkins was to publish a book entitled Mathematicall Magick. Such works indicate essential similarities between magic and science in that each has as part of its aim the application of not readily apparent knowledge to practice. But we should not think that the widespread acceptance of natural magic in the Renaissance meant that the term had become a synonym for what we should now call science, for we still have to bear in mind such pictures as those of Marsilio Ficino chanting his Orphic hymns, of John Dee conversing with spirits through his medium Edward Kelly, and of Tommaso Campaneüa and Pope Urban VIII closeted together and performing secret rites to ward off the plague.

Among the seven deadly sins, none is more interesting to study for its historical development and the complexity of its meaning than the sin of acedia. For while its companions — with the possible exception of avarice — remained fairly static through the centuries of medieval thought, and indeed have remained so to the present, acedia presented a variety of faces and changed in its very nature, from the moment when it entered Christian teaching in the West to the fifteenth century. In Christian thinking, pride has always been pride; its psychological roots may have been explained in agreement with different philosophical and psychological systems, and its manifestations may vary according to changing attitudes and experiences, but its nature has remained essentially unchanged. The same is true of envy, wrath, lust, and the others. But not so with acedia. A reflection of the complexity which this concept acquired during its medieval lifetime can still be seen in the totally different connotations which its names have for the cognoscenti of today. The ancient term acedia fascinates because it suggests such phenomena as spiritual dryness, ennui or WeItschmerz, while its vernacular equivalent sloth, as everyone readily agrees, stands for something so common and ordinary that it hardly deserves a second thought.

The Christian teaching on usury did not develop in a vacuum. Christianity was born in a semitic milieu and spread rapidly through the Graeco-Roman world. Naturally, its ancestry and its environment influenced its moral thinking. The Fathers of the Church were well acquainted with the thought of others about usury. Besides many references to the clear Old Testament usury prohibition, the writings of the Fathers reflect and interact with attitudes toward interest-taking in Greece and Rome and in early rabbinical literature. It will thus be helpful to examine those strains of thought that existed side by side with the early patristic teaching and influenced it.

It is commonly known that in the canonical sources of ancient and early medieval times many bishops, priests and deacons throughout the Latin Church were called cardinales, long before that term came to be used exclusively, or even primarily, for a specific group of dignitaries in the Church of Rome. Historians do not agree, however, as to the original meaning of the word in the language of the ancient Church. Nor do they, as a rule, explain with sufficient clearness in what sense it was first applied to those members of the Roman clergy—the priests of the ancient tituli or quasi-parishes; the deacons both of the papal palace and the city's diaconiae; and seven bishops of the metropolitan province—who eventually rose to the unique position of becoming the ‘senators’ and sole electors of the Pope.

Sporadic attempts have been made in the past to demonstrate direct connexions between the various Celtic literatures and Beowulf; I think it fair to say that the proposed links have always seemed tenuous or imaginary and have not been taken seriously by most students of the Old English poem. A century of desultory comparisons, leading to a negative result, by persons qualified in either Old English or Celtic or neither, does not, however, exhaust the subject or indicate its irrelevance. It seems to me that a determined attack on the subject may indicate desirable approaches and cautions which students of Beowulf could consider as they contemplate further work on the poem. I shall organise my remarks under five headings: the possibility of Irish (or other Celtic) influence on Beowulf in particular and on Old English literature in general; archaism in the language and metrics of ‘traditional’ verse; problems of archaism and anachronism in ‘traditional’ literature; the search for a text-history of Beowulf with its consequent issues of transmission and problems of dating; and general historical questions.

In recent years renewed interest has been shown in the history of the military orders in the Iberian peninsula, and a considerable number of studies have been published both in Spain and elsewhere. Yet most of the works that are concerned with the medieval period treat of a single order, and little attempt has been made to provide general surveys. Obviously much detailed research still needs to be undertaken before definitive conclusions can be formulated, and the nature of the evidence makes the discussion of some topics more difficult than that of others. The surviving sources supply more direct information about rights and privileges than about the orders' role in the struggle against Islam. But, as the function of the military orders was to fight against the infidel, their contribution to the reconquista is a subject that merits investigation, despite the limitations of the evidence.

The Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum of John of Salisbury has come down to us in three manuscripts: a twelfth-century codex in the British Museum (Royal 13. D. IV); a fourteenth-century manuscript in the University Library at Cambridge (Ii. II. 31); a seventeenth-century codex now located in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (Hamburg Cod. Phil. 350). The editio princeps was published by Christian Petersen (Hamburg 1843), and it has remained the standard edition. However, important deficiencies in that work have made a complete re-examination of the text necessary.

‘The origin of the notions transubstantiatio and transubstantiare has frequently been sought.’ With this classic understatement Ludwig Hödl began a section of his magisterial study ‘Der Transubstantiationsbegriff in der scholastischen Theologie des 12. Jahrhunderts.’ Interest in the origins and the originator of this influential idea, however, has cooled in recent decades. In part, this is due to changing fashions in scholarship. The philosophical and confessional interests that fueled much of the earlier research into Eucharistic doctrines hold less attraction in an ecumenical age.

The history of the early Germans is controversial terrain. This is known, though not invariably admitted. A few years ago, Klaus von See summed up the underlying predicament:

With these succinct lines, the Chanson de Roland conveys the aggressive intolerance which characterized the crusading spirit. From the apostolic period, Christianity had usually been propagated by missionaries who tried to persuade the pagan people to accept the faith voluntarily.

A Crusader, both etymologically and historically, was a person who had ‘taken the Cross.’ The symbolic act of taking the Cross was practiced routinely from 1095 onward by all those who had made a vow to participate in the expeditions to the Holy Land and elsewhere which were proclaimed, sanctioned, and indulgenced by the papacy. In the eyes of the canonists, when they came to analyse the institutions of the Crusade, the formal taking of the Cross was viewed as a ceremony which solemnized the vow by which the Crusader bound himself, both morally and legally, to serve in the ranks of the Crusade.

Le 5 décembre 1360, le roi Jean le Bon, qui a quitté l'Angleterre oò il était tenu prisonnier depuis la bataille de Poitiers, perdue quatre ans plus tôt, et qui revient de Calais à Paris par petites étapes, sans hâte particulière, s'arrête à Compiègne oò il va passer quelques jours et promulguer un texte important, édictant deux mesures inséparables l'une de l'autre: la suppression de tous impôts autres que ceux qu'il établit pour le paiement de sa rançon et la fabrication d'une bonne monnaie. Quelques jours plus tard, le roi est à Paris, se rend dans l'hôtel de Guillaume de Melun, archevêque de Sens, et déclare qu'il est désormais ‘franc’ des Anglais, terme qui ne peut manquer d'être rapproché du nom donné aux pièces d'or qui sont frappées dès le mois de décembre 1360 sous le nom de ‘francs.’ La monnaie forte est établie sur une évaluation du marc d'or fin à 60 livres tournois et du marc d'argent à 4 livres 18 sous tournois. En même temps est instaurée l‘équivalence de la monnaie réelle et de la monnaie de compte, le franc valant une livre tournois et le denier d'argent quinze sous tournois. La frappe du franc marque solennellement la stabilité de la monnaie et l'ajustement exact de la livre, monnaie de compte, aux pièces d'or ou d'argent. Jean II répudie formellement les mutations ‘par quoy nostre royaume et peuple d'icelui a esté moult diminué et gasté.’

In the early 1130s Peter Abelard received three letters from Heloise, once his mistress and wife, now his sister and daughter in religion. The first two were so traumatic that he must have thought twice before scanning the third, in which Heloise resolutely turned from the subject of tragic love to the minutiae of monastic observance. For modern readers the correspondence may lapse from titillation into tedium with this epistle. But Abelard was no doubt immensely relieved. Laying aside her griefs, Heloise now wrote to him as abbess to abbot, asking only two things: a treatise explaining ‘how the order of nuns began,’ and a monastic rule suitable for her nuns at the Paraclete. Although they were already observing the Benedictine Rule, she complained that as this rule ‘was clearly written for men alone, it can only be fully obeyed by men,’ because it is not fair to lay ‘the same yoke of monastic ordinance on the weaker sex as on the stronger.’ Heloise went on to specify several concrete areas of concern, such as the use of meat and wine, the dangers of hospitality, the practice of manual labor, and the liturgical role assigned to the abbot. To underline her point, she even observed that the regulation underwear prescribed in the Benedictine Rule was not suitable for women, because ‘the monthly purging of their superfluous humours must avoid such things.’

The clergy of medieval England constituted a small but important section of the population. As an order of society it included persons of a wide variety of dignities from the archbishop of Canterbury who sat on the right side of the king to the poor clerk or lonely anchorite. The problem of estimating their numbers varies also from group to group of the clergy, for a careful census of medieval population was almost never made. Such estimates as are made must be secured from data usually prepared for purposes of taxation or other matters of record. They are very uneven because there was little uniformity of practices. Some groups, such as the clerks in minor orders, might be expected to be slighted in the sources, but others of greater importance in their day share the same obscurity with respect to numbers, and for no group is there a continuous and well attested record. This study discusses briefly the sources and methods used and then considers the numbers of the secular clergy and (in much more detail) the orders of nuns, monks, canons, and friars.

The three decades preceding the publication of the new Latin translation of the Psalter by the Biblical Institute in Rome in 1945 have seen a number of studies and articles which throw revealing light on the interpretation of Psalm 90.6. Discussing the laws of purification and diet in the Old Testament, J. Döller thought it possible to discover in the Bible a few faint vestiges of a popular belief in demons among the Israelites and saw a plague demon especially in ‘the destruction that lays waste at noonday’ (Ps. 90.6b). Referring to Döller's study, S. Landersdorfer pointed to a parallel Assyrian belief which regarded midnight and noonday as periods especially dangerous and haunted by demonic agencies, and was inclined to assume even for the Masoretic text the idea of a demon of night (6a) and a demon of noonday (6b). Both demons were thought to exercise their power especially at the hours of the chilling midnight cold and the scorching noonday heat, and to be responsible for certain bodily disorders, such as sunstroke and malaria fever, and for other diseases caused by the rapid changes of temperature in the southern deserts. In this case the psalmist would already have alluded to a popular belief, though such an allusion would not necessarily imply that he himself shared the view, Landersdorfer's article had been written ten years prior to its publication, that is, in a period when, owing to the disturbances during and shortly after the First World War, access to foreign publications was difficult and often impossible. Thus he was apparently unaware that, only about a year before the completion of his article, W. H. Worrell had pointed out some similar parallels from oriental countries.

Students of medieval scholasticism are accustomed to apply the name ‘conceptualism’ to Ockham's doctrine concerning the nature and scope of universals. This seems to be an apt designation, provided that its meaning is not burdened with idealistic connotations. Unfortunately, quite a number of neo-scholastics qualify conceptualism as a doctrine which severs the bond between thought and reality, and is therefore essentially idealistic. Small wonder, then, that such a conceptualism imputed to William Ockham falls an easy prey to their violent, and to a large extent justified, attack against idealism in general. However, as far as Ockham's conceptualism is concerned, their victory in this regard is an illusion, for the simple reason that his alleged idealistic conceptualism does not exist. Hence it appears to us that Ockham's genuine conceptualism enjoys, for the time being, a relative security from neo-scholastic criticism.

As Charles Henry Coster wittily observed, the fall of Boethius has been almost as much discussed as that of Adam, and as in Adam's case there is hardly a statement about it that is not open to doubt, that has not been exhaustively, even acrimoniously, argued. Even the year in which he was arrested and that in which he died have been hotly disputed, though these are questions far simpler then the problem of why he fell.

The Consolation of Philosophy may have owed its popularity to its theme of the search for the summum bonum, the eternal verity beyond the vicissitudes of everyday life, a theme particularly appealing in a period of upheaval and danger such as the tenth and eleventh centuries. But it was much more than a work of conventional piety or Christian philosophy. It was essentially a classical work and its collection of verses in different metres, its mythological allusions and Neoplatonic cosmology, as well as its more Christian discussions of fate and free will, made it a key work in the intellectual ferment of the time. But it was a difficult work, requiring a critical apparatus of elucidation and explanation before its riches could be fully appreciated. This apparatus, in the form of glosses and scholia, necessarily had to draw upon a variety of sources.