The terse and politically oriented narrative of the seventh-century chronicle attributed to Fredegar often has been compared unfavorably to one of its principal sources, Gregory of Tours's Decem Libri Historiarum, a complex and layered composition in which historical and theological programs converge. Although a superficial comparison with Gregory's Historiae would seem to indicate Fredegar's own relative disengagement from ecclesiastical and spiritual concerns, a closer examination of the Chronica reveals a programmatic effort to endorse royal-episcopal collaboration so that the pax ecclesiae might be preserved and earthly governance perfected. Writing, as he believed, in the end times, Fredegar shared Gregory of Tours's eschatological conviction that such collaboration would help to prepare the regnum Francorum for final judgment. A close examination of those twenty-one cases in which Fredegar refers explicitly to the involvement of bishops in court affairs suggests the chronicler's conviction that the professional, political, and spiritual obligations of Frankish bishops were not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the Chronica's ecclesiastical topography, while limited geographically and personalized according to Fredegar's attachment to specific cults and institutions, provides the setting for the author's collaborative ideal, with holy places providing both a context and an impetus for the integration of royal and clerical agendas. While Fredegar recognized signs of divine judgment everywhere, the chronicler's perspective ultimately was optimistic, envisioning a regnum Francorum cleansed of oppression by the judgment of God, preparing the way for the perfection of the world in the age to come.

The superior learning of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–704) was acknowledged in both Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic contemporary sources by such renowned scholars as Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, Adomnán of Iona, Stephen of Ripon, and Alcuin of York. Both Aldhelm and Adomnán knew him personally, and texts composed by these two scholars and presented to Aldfrith help delineate the breadth of his educational background. He was educated among the Gaels, and their records described him as sapiens. By examining texts of other seventh-century Gaelic sapientes, and the comments of Aldhelm and Bede about Gaelic intellectual life and educational opportunities, we can expand our purview of the scope of his education. The nature of seventh-century schooling was peripatetic, and Aldfrith's dual heritage requires a broad search for locations. Many scholars accept Iona as the likely source of his learned background, but this essay will argue that, among other likely locations in Britain and Ireland, Bangor in Northern Ireland is best supported by surviving evidence. His benign reign is placed at the end of the first century of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, but his education benefited the kingdom of Northumbria through generations of Gaelic scholarship, as exemplified by peregrini such as Columba and Columbanus, and sapientes like Laidcenn mac Baíth, Cummíne of Clonfert, Ailerán of Clonard, Cenn Fáelad mac Ailello, and Banbán of Kildare. Aldfrith's rule ushered in a period of cultural florescence in Northumbria that saw the first hagiography and earliest illuminated manuscripts produced in Anglo-Saxon England and that culminated in the extensive library authored by Bede (d. 735).

In early medieval Ireland, the cosmos was conceived as tripartite, composed of the heavens, earth's surface, and underearth and undersea. Harmonious relations with cosmic forces were assured by just royal rule. Crossing this vertical coordinate, which also had implications for the human hierarchies of rank and function, were the manifold phenomena as known to human life. This external reality was mentally organized as a vast set of homologies, the recognition and maintenance of which contributed to the prosperity and fertility of the kingdom. The literate record displays multiple taxonomies and categories, often expressed in numerical values. Among these are the pentad and, in spatial terms, the quincunx. This fivefoldness and the order it represented were recognized and replicated on a variety of scales: the five provinces of Ireland, the family farm and its neighbors, the house and its outbuildings. Also implicated as mesocosms were the interior arrangements of royal banquet halls, hostels for kings on circuit and other travelers, and law courts. The quincuncial organization of interior space reflects and promotes macrocosmic order but in the great corpus of literate works is the setting for disruptive human dynamics — the stuff of story — often associated with themes of the heroic life and royal rule. This conception of interior space was elaborated in the pagan period and, in formal terms, was readily accommodated in subsequent Christian centuries, with new hierarchies and the perdurable conception of the kingship as stabilizing factors.

In this article, I seek to define the difficult legal phrase utroque iure caruerunt (“and they have been deprived of both laws”), which appears in capitulum XII of the Legatine Capitulary of 786 (a collection of canons promulgated ostensibly by a papal legation sent to England in order to address unspecified abuses), describing a punitive sanction for malefactors who have committed or conspired to commit the crime of regicide. I have been able to identify no parallel occurrence of this phrase in any culturally similar or temporally proximate documents, leaving me with little beyond the text itself to seek evidence for its precise meaning. Since it has been demonstrated recently that Alcuin — a native-born Anglo-Saxon and a Northumbrian — was intimately involved in drafting the Legatine Capitulary (if, indeed, he was not the sole author), and moreover, since this phrase appears in a text composed in the first instance for a Northumbrian audience, I argue that this phrase is deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon legal precedents. I conclude that the phrase signifies that those guilty of regicide should be deprived of both secular and ecclesiastical law, that is, that they should be both outlawed and excommunicated. As such, this phrase represents the first reference to the legal sanction of outlawry in Anglo-Saxon law by more than a century. Additionally, this phrase would appear to take for granted the close cooperation between ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence specifically to punish crime, a feature of Anglo-Saxon law likewise not formally described (according to current thought) until more than a century later. I finish by considering the implications of my argument for the history of Anglo-Saxon law, suggesting in particular that we must revise currently held opinions about the pace of its development, particularly in the Anglian North, where — due most likely to the loss of evidence resulting from the Viking invasions — very little primary-text evidence has survived.

This paper examines some hitherto unconsidered marginal notes in the calendar of the Liber Floridus (year 1121) and establishes their link with the popular medieval text on the twelve fasting Fridays. The calendrical form of representation makes this information appear side by side with a list of events supposed to have happened on 25 March — a possible starting point for the development of a longer textual version contaminating the list of the twelve Fridays and the list of Friday events.

This article comprises a study and edition of the Cronica de Anglia, a significant but neglected history of England from AD 162 to 1125 whose importance lies chiefly in its connections to other accounts of the period. Though it is uniquely preserved in a late twelfth-century manuscript from Rievaulx Abbey, close reading confirms that it was composed between 1125 and 1137, not in the north of England but in the West Midlands, almost certainly at Worcester Cathedral Priory. If it is not the work of the priory's foremost historian, John of Worcester (d. after 1143), then it was almost certainly produced under his direction. Not only are its contents closely related to his Chronica chronicarum and Chronicula, they also shed new light on John's interests and the ways in which he and his helpers compiled and edited their histories. Turning to another purpose materials used in John's other works, Cronica de Anglia arranges them in order to speak to questions about the relative antiquity and status of the kingdom's bishoprics, churches, and monasteries — a concern not otherwise prominent in this corpus. This chronicle also sheds precious light on the immediate reception of William of Malmesbury's histories of the English, especially the first edition of Gesta pontificum Anglorum. Carefully suppressing dangerous nuances in William's reportage, Cronica de Anglia betrays John's anxiety to avoid becoming entangled in Malmesbury's campaign against the king's chief minister, Bishop Roger of Salisbury (1102–39). The article concludes with the first complete edition of the text.

In the early thirteenth century, numerous Cistercian monasteries were founded in the former Byzantine territories conquered in the context of the Fourth Crusade. According to the standard narrative, put forth in the 1970s, Pope Innocent III sent the Cistercians on a “mission to the Orthodox,” but the mission was a failure, because the White Monks soon abandoned almost all of their houses in Frankish Greece and Constantinople without having “converted” the Greeks. In the light of recent research on the aftermath of 1204 and on the Cistercian Order, this paper argues that the Frankish rulers took the initiative to found Cistercian monasteries in the Greek East for the same reason that they did so in the Latin West: to cater to the Latin rite aristocracy. This Cistercian mission was a success, since the Cistercian establishments in Greece generally existed as long as the Western nobility survived to patronize and protect them. There is no evidence that Innocent intended the Cistercians to be missionaries in Romania since, contrary to a once common assumption, the papacy did not view the Greeks as requiring the same kind of missionary activity that was deemed necessary in lands inhabited by pagans or heretics.

The aim of this article is to study the meaning and significance of the word christinus (diminutive of Christus; “little Christ”) in the spiritual work of Arnau de Vilanova (ca. 1240–1311). This Catalan doctor and thinker created the neologism and used it twice in the titles of two of his works (Allocutio christini de hiis que conveniunt homini secundum propriam dignitatem creaturae rationalis ad inclitum dominum tertium Fredericum, Trinacriae regem illustrem and Tractatus epistolarum christini). On both occasions Arnau de Vilanova used the term in the genitive, referring to himself. This concept expresses an elaborate theology of the conformity of the Christian with Christ and also suggests Arnau de Vilanova's wish to underline his own similarity with Christ as a move to urge the highest civil and ecclesiastical authorities to put plans for reform into place. Christinus, together with other expressions such as “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Christianity,” points to a fully Christocentric conception of Christianity and its historical context, and it is also proof of Arnau's inventiveness in creating new words. The word christinus bears some resemblance to another typical Arnaldian concept: thomatista (Thomist).

Canonical bigamy posed a barrier for late medieval men who were or had been married to a widow or unfaithful wife and wanted to retain or be appointed to clerical rank. Western church norms from the twelfth century onward permitted only the papacy to dispense from the obstacle for promotion or readmission to the sacred orders of sub-deacon, deacon, and priest. And yet, papal administrative records from the period indicate that actual dispensations were hardly ever granted to “bigamous” recipients. What accounts for this discrepancy between theoretical freedom and practical restraint? The article discusses the historical evidence and suggests that besides theological reservations the risk of political conflict with lay jurisdictions may have persuaded most of the popes not to make use of their dispensatory power in cases of bigamia.

In characteristic fashion, the Iter Italicum of Paul Oskar Kristeller reveals the richness of Renaissance thought on seafaring. The literature on seafaring conserved in manuscripts cataloged in the Iter Italicum ranges from commentary on ancient seafaring to eulogies of contemporary heroes to works on mechanics and engineering with unusual proposals for naval weaponry. Those manuscripts likewise highlight the Renaissance conceptualization of seafaring as an art and a creative tension in Renaissance scholarship between looking back to the past and looking forward to the future.

This article is focused on Angelo Poliziano's general attitude to philosophy as a discipline and on his specific accounts of scholastic philosophy, found mainly in his four opening lectures to his courses on Aristotle's logic and ethics that were held in the Florentine Studium between 1490 and 1494, in the light of his overall exclusive classical approach. It shows, among other things, that philosophy was more important to Poliziano than common expressions such as “the humanist interest in philosophy” may suggest. Poliziano's important definition of history presented in his Panepistemon, together with other pieces of evidence, can reveal the moment in which disciplines associated with the “humanities” (in the modern sense of this term) began to be separated from the natural sciences — at a point just preceding the massive critique of Aristotelian science during the sixteenth century — through Poliziano's notion of a philosophical literature to which also the Aristotelian texts belong.