As a monk at the famous Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede (673–735) produced a body of exegetical work that enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the Middle Ages. Something of that spirit seems to have reawakened in recent years, as Bede's commentaries are increasingly being studied and made available to wider audiences in English translation. One distinctive feature of this development is a growing awareness that Bede's reputation as an exegete is more multifaceted than has been previously realized, that it goes beyond what Beryl Smalley called “his faithful presentation of the tradition in its many aspects. Whereas earlier interpreters were content to regard Bede as a mere compiler reputed for his good sense and able Latinity, scholars are now paying homage to him as a penetrating and perceptive biblical commentator who did more than reproduce the thought of the fathers who preceded him. As I intend to show in what follows, Bede's treatment of prayer and contemplation in his exegesis attests well to this quality of his thought. The topic to date has received only minimal commentary, mainly on what Bede actually taught about prayer. My approach will be different. I begin with a discussion not of Bede's exegetical method but of his occupations and aims as a spiritual writer. Neither Bede's spirituality nor his role as spiritual writer have received the attention they deserve, and it is hoped that the reflections offered here will help rekindle interest in these neglected subjects. I then consider four prayer-related themes in his exegesis that bring his aims as a spiritual writer into view. Patristic tradition had commented widely on prayer, and Bede, we will see, did not set out to summarize this tradition in its entirety but rather to highlight and distill certain themes within it, those that best suited the needs of his Anglo-Saxon audience.

The Prague Sacramentary is the only complete example of this important early-medieval liturgical book to survive from eighth-century Bavaria. But, as the name implies, its present home is in the Czech Republic. The manuscript (Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituli, O. LXXXIII) was acquired in 1776 for the old metropolitan chapter library in Prague from a Czech private library, and nothing certain is known about its earlier location. That volume contains three works: the Sacramentary itself (fols. 1–120) together with an abridged lectionary (121–30), to which an incomplete penitential (131–45) in a different hand was added at an early date, almost certainly before autumn, 792. The page size is 247 × 165 mm (9.75 × 6.5 inches), and the gatherings of the volume vary between three and five sheets with four sheets predominating. The first 84 folios are written in a single column of 21 lines across the entire page, but folios 85–120 are written in two columns also of 21 lines each with marginal bounding lines drawn in an arrangement that is characteristic of Bavarian scriptoria in the Carolingian period. Four folios are now missing from the Sacramentary, three from the lectionary, and two from the penitential.

A spate of recent articles attests to a growing interest in Eve in criticism of Old English literature. However, these same articles demonstrate the narrowness of this interest, as they all focus on Eve in one poem — Genesis B — which is not even an entire poem, but rather a small (albeit significant) interpolation into another poem. Other Old English writings have been little studied: in particular, several prominent occurrences of Eve during the Harrowing of Hell survive in the Old English Martyrology; Blickling Homily 7; a homily De descensu Christi ad inferos in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 121; and the poem Christ and Satan, but have received little comment. In each of these texts Eve supplicates Christ when he descends into hell to free the souls of the biblical patriarchs and prophets after his crucifixion; furthermore, six Old English homilies record Eve's appearance during the Harrowing, although not her active involvement. The Evangelium Nicodemi most fully describes the Harrowing of Hell; Eve's appearance within these texts, however, does not derive from this apocryphon. Moreover, while these episodes incorporate ideas drawn from patristic exegesis, they do not derive directly from patristic writings either; nevertheless, Eve's role in these texts may be an Anglo-Saxon modification of the patristic contrast between Eve and Mary, whereby Eve is portrayed as a type of Mary instead of as her antithesis.

The composite volume now known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College [CCCC] 190, contains on pages 143 to 151 a mixture of liturgical exposition and prescription. The Latin passages constitute neither a polished work nor, like much else in the manuscript, an obvious antecedent to Old English texts, and so the group has never attracted much notice. I offer here the first discussion and edition of the passages in the belief that they shed new light on the sources and applications of liturgical commentary in late Anglo-Saxon England. Of equal or perhaps greater interest, the excerpts also include portions of the ordo for a pontifical mass on Christmas Day. The ordo, as we shall see, resists close dating or localization, but the very type of document has rarely survived in pre-Conquest English manuscripts and so merits attention. Both the expository and ordinal passages occasionally hint of access to unusual sources at some late Anglo-Saxon church, possibly Worcester cathedral during the pontificate of Wulfstan I (1002–16).

The so-called Barnwell chronicle contains “the best, the fullest and most sophisticated annals” written in England for the years 1202–25. Bishop Stubbs made its reputation, declaring it to be “one of the most valuable contributions in existence to the history of that eventful period,” and those who have used it since agree; J. C. Holt, for instance, thinks it is the “most perceptive” narrative source. Because the text has never been printed from the “Barnwell” manuscript, the chronicle is better known from the Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, which reproduces these annals almost verbatim. But their origin remains shrouded in mystery. Although many questions have been raised about them, the essential one is: Where were they written? To answer that question, one must first determine the interrelationship of the existing manuscripts that contain the text; then one can try to establish the provenance of the oldest manuscript and hence of the chronicle itself. Stubbs, of course, attempted to do just that, but with insufficient evidence and little concern for the canons of textual criticism. The present study will demonstrate that the “Barnwell” manuscript is in fact not the earliest; instead, it derives from British Library MS Add. 35,168, which was written at Crowland Abbey and which was probably copied from a lost original that was both composed and written at Peterborough.

The two poems edited here celebrate the English victories in 1346 over France (Crecy) and Scotland (Durham) in the early part of the Hundred Years War. Together with another on the siege of Calais in 1346–47 (Cantica leticie) they are by a writer I have labeled the “Anonymous of Calais.” They were first printed in 1859, but Wright's edition is flawed not only by errors of transcription and a clear failure to follow the sense (notably by accepting Valeys “Valois” at Crecy 272, where Kaleys “Calais” is essential), but also by his textual procedure, which implies that there was a single authorial original from which the manuscript witnesses deviated. I have tried to show here that there are two distinct versions, one an adaptation of the other.

Who schulde now knowe emperours, wonder of philosofres, other folwe the apostles, but hir noble dedes and hir wonder werkes were i-write in stories and so i-kept in mynde? … For storie is wytnesse of tyme, mynde of lyf messager of eldnesse — John Trevisa's translation of Polychronicon.

In a letter of 1404 to the Sienese professor Francesco Casini, the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati expressed appreciation for the addressee's commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, comparing it favorably with the Greek (XI/XII century) commentaries of Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus, and with the Latin ones of Albert the Great, Albert of Saxony, Gerard of Odo, Walter Burley, and Jean Buridan. He invited Casini not to neglect the works of Henry of Friemar, a minor fourteenth-century figure. Furthermore, Salutati remarked that Casini had even surpassed Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, whose commentaries were doubtless the most widespread in the Latin West of Salutati's time. As Luca Bianchi has pointed out, Salutati's letter highlights the degree to which Italian humanists depended on the scholastic tradition (whether Byzantine or Latin) when approaching Aristotle's Ethics; even Donato Acciaiuoli's famous commentary, published in 1478, draws heavily on Eustratius, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas. This was actually seen as one of its greatest merits by later commentators.3 However, Salutati's comments invite yet another observation: namely, that Salutati is unable to point to any specifically Italian tradition connected with this work. In fact, although Salutati does name two Italians (Thomas and Giles of Rome), they too, like all the other commentators mentioned, spent most of their lifetimes in northern Europe; for most of them, the center was not Italy but Paris. This is why Salutati heaped so much praise on Francesco Casini — finally an indigenous Italian tradition might develop; its beginnings were promising indeed.

In July or August 1474 in Senigallia, a town on the coast of the Adriatic sea, a translation into Hebrew was completed of the Ars brevis, a work by the medieval Christian philosopher, mystic, and missionary Ramon Llull. Within a couple of years, this translation had been copied a number of times, and from the colophon of one of these copies, it appears that this work was rated very highly by its Jewish readers as an aid for achieving mystical experience. Any interest shown by the adherents of one faith in the texts of another is important for shedding light on common intellectual interests and contacts. This translation is of especially great significance in that there appears to have been in Italy in the fifteenth century a circle of Jewish scholars willingly engaging with a Christian text in order to achieve divine illumination. Here, I will try to shed some light on this group of Jewish savants and to situate their interests within the wider context of the Renaissance.

There are two primary sources for the dramatic series of events that followed the death of Edward IV of England on 7 April 1483. One is the account, going only as far as the coronation of Richard III on 6 July, written in December by Dominic Mancini. The other concludes the anonymous memoir of the Yorkist period from 1459 to 22 August 1485, incorporated in the chronicles of Crowland Abbey. Both were written in retrospect and in Mancini's case from information chiefly provided by others, since he probably knew no English. Both accounts are hostile to Richard. Those who maintain that they malign the king tend to explain their animus as due, respectively, to foreign prejudice and to a deliberate campaign of denigration that began immediately upon the accession of Henry Tudor.

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.

These pages on the Aristotelica preserved in the Handschriften-Abteilung of the Staatsbibliothek-Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, supplement various publications concerned with the Latin tradition of Aristotle's works. The manuscripts of the medieval translations of Aristotle's works have been catalogued in Aristoteles latinus (Codices I–II–Suppl., Rome, 1939; Cambridge, 1955; Bruges-Paris, 1961); of the manuscripts included there only cross-references are supplied here. Several manuscripts containing Renaissance Latin translations of Aristotle's works — not included in the Aristoteles latinus — have been described completely.