Commenting on the verse which reports the devastation of Jerusalem by Nabuzaradan, that ‘he burnt the house of the Lord, and the king's house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great man's house,’ the Midrash makes the following remark:

— the verb used is teni, which means not only to recite but to study and to teach. To translate shebah by the neutral word ‘praise’, is to miss the real intent of the statement. Shebah in the present sentence, as in a great many others in talmudic-midrashic literature, is clearly δόξα; and one of the traditional commentators on our midrashic passage has already correctly explained it: in Johanan ben Zakkai's academy they were engaged in the Creation and Merkabah (Chariot) speculations. The parallel passage in the Palestinian Talmud bears him out.

One of the principal motivations for the Emperor Justinian's reconquest of Africa from the Vandal king Gelimer (Gelimer reigned from 15 June 530 to 15 September 533), was religious: the desire to liberate the African Catholic majority of the population from their Arian Vandal persecutors. No critical study exists, however, which assesses the extent to which the Byzantine expeditionary force of 533 actually treated its invasion of Africa as a Catholic war against Arianism. Such a study would also provide some information on the obscure problem of the relative significance of Arianism in North Africa after the Byzantine reconquest. Clarification of this question has become desirable, for in a recent article C. J. Speel argued that the disappearance of Christianity in the wake of the Islamic conquest is explained by the affinity of Islam and Arianism, which he claims was the religion of the majority of North Africans after the Byzantine reconquest. His thesis deserves to be tested by the Byzantine sources: according to the sources, how successfully did Arianism in Africa survive the collapse of the Vandal authority which had established it?

Since Beowulf was made available to scholars early in the last century it has been recognized as a poem deeply rooted in Germanic heroic tradition and dealing with ancient and pagan Scandinavian heroes. No pagan gods, however, are mentioned by name, and there are many references to the one true God who rules at all times over all. Further, there are unmistakable allusions to the story of Cain and Abel and to the giants who were destroyed by the flood. There are, however, no such allusions to any specifically Christian doctrines.

The vernacular homilies of pre-conquest England fall into two clear groups: homilies whose authorship is unknown and which are generally considered to have been written by the middle of the tenth century and the sermon collections of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York which were written, ca. 990–1020, under the influence of the Benedictine reform.

In what is perhaps one of the most provocative essays ever written on a single point of liturgical history, Josef Jungmann, S.J., has traced the roots of the outstanding abuses in medieval piety to an exaggerated, disproportionate emphasis on the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. This way of thinking and speaking of the Incarnation was the inevitable result of the Church's vigorous reaction to ‘the perfidious Arianism’ of the Frankish and Gothic peoples, who poured into Europe in the course of the late fifth and sixth centuries. For these new nations the Christ, the Logos of the Gospel, was subordinate to the Father from whom according to the Scriptures he had been born. Less than God, he was, therefore, only a creature, even though of the most noble proportions. This theological subordinationism was essential to the Arian faith which these nations professed.

A considerable amount of work has been done recently on Malory. This interest in the author of The Tale of King Arthur has been related in part to the advances in Arthurian scholarship which have formed a major portion of medieval studies in this century. In the whole Arthurian field perhaps no area has been so persistently studied as the legend of the holy grail.

The (‘The Meanings of the Philosophers’) of Abū al-Ghazālī († 1111) is the first part of a composite work in which the author — the theologian of Islam par excellence — takes a considered stand with regard to the teachings of the philosophers, especially al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā. In the first part his purpose is simply the presentation of their doctrines in logic, metaphysics and physics. The second part, the famous Tahāfut al-falāsifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), aims at exposing their self-contradictions on many points — the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of singulars, etc.

Es ist eine bekannte Tatsache, dass das Mittelalter zahlreiche, oft weitreichende und den Gang der Geschichte beeinflussende Fälschungen hervorgebracht hat. Die lange Reihe der Falsifikate reicht von den spätantiken Symmachianischen Fälschungen über die Konstantinische Schenkung, die Pseudo-Isidorischen Dekretalen, bis zu den zahllosen gefälschten Urkunden bekannter und unbekannter Verfasser des hohen Mittelalters und den gefälschten Viten zur Erhöhung des Ruhmes einer Kirche oder eines Klosters, Fälschungen, die aus betrügerischen Absichten, aus politischen Erwägungen, aus genealogischen Bestrebungen, aus Nachahmungssucht und dem Wunsche, echte oder falsche Reliquien zu deuten, aber auch aus edleren Motiven erwachsen sind. Das discrimen veri ac falsi ist deshalb zu einer der vornehmsten Aufgaben der kritischen Geschichtswissenschaft geworden und wurde vor allem in der Urkundenlehre zu höchster Feinheit entwickelt.

The oldest published inventory of the collegial church of St. Nicolas in Bari dates from A. D. 1313, and testifies to the interest taken by Charles II of Anjou in the basilica, his regia cappella. In 1296 Charles donated to St. Nicolas a number of liturgical ornaments and service-books; in 1304 he required that its thesaurarius (a canon of the basilica appointed by himself) make periodic inventories in quadruplicate of the objects under his care. As a result, detailed inventories of St. Ncolas' treasure begin in the early fourteenth century and continue, though with considerable lacunae, to the nineteenth. Most of these inventories have been published in whole or in part; they show that the basilica once had a large collection of liturgical objects and codices, particularly in the Angevin period. It is clear from the first inventory that the nucleus of this collection was Charles II's donation, which still forms the most impressive part of St. Nicolas' now depleted treasure; accordingly Charles has been considered the ‘founder’ of the treasury.

Ever since Giorgio Valla printed his edition and commentary of the Satires of Juvenal, for nearly five hundred years now, scholars have realized the importance of large portions of the commentary. Before putting together his notes and publishing them in 1486, Valla combined them with the material he had gleaned from a mutilated MS, which he for some reason believed the work of Probus. After Valla, nobody ever saw his ‘Probus,’ and it is to be assumed that, having taken what he wanted from the MS, Valla saw no objection to destroying it. A hundred years later, Pithou's discovery of his excellent MS, containing both a superior text of the Satires and a full set of scholia, confirmed the value of Valla's ‘Probus,’ but also revealed the fragmentary manner of its preservation, whether because of its condition when found or because of Valla's omissions. Still another witness on behalf of theses good scholia, also full, appeared at St. Gall and was published by Cramer (Hamburg 1823). During the next century, much work was done to establish an edition of the older and more reliable scholia, first of all by study of Pithou's MS (known as P and so referred to hereafter), the MS of St. Gall (S in most editions and so referred to hereafter), and of ’Probus’ (to which I shall hereafter refer without quotation marks) as elicited from the comments of Valla; then by research into the later, contaminated ‘secondary scholia.’ In the excellent edition by Paul Wessner, the labors of many scholars bore fruit.

Toutes les lettres de Jean Chrysostome qui nous sont parvenues datent de la fin de sa vie; elles s’échelonnent entre l'année 404 où il fut exilé et l'année 407 où il mourut. On en compte deux cent trente-six, parmi lesquelles dix-sept sont adressées à Olympias, diaconesse de Constantinople. C'est sur le texte de ces lettres, exclusivement, que portera notre étude.

A Venice manuscript of the eleventh century (Marcianus Z. L. 497), containing a handbook of the liberal arts, deserves the attention of students of medieval education, for it is connected with a man who was considered one of the most learned scholars of his day. The man is Lawrence of Amalfi. Information on the life of this scholar is meager, but we have glimpses of his literary activity as a monk of Monte Cassino, through writings of his which were preserved in the abbey; much later, after his elevation to the archbishopric of Amalfi and his subsequent exile, we find him taking refuge in Florence, where he wrote a life of a local saint; still later, we hear of him in Rome, teaching the boy Hildebrand, who was to become pope as Gregory VII; and we see him at the close of his life in affectionate friendship with Odilo of Cluny. Yet the renown of the archbishop suffered an eclipse within a century of his death. At Monte Cassino, almost all knowledge of Lawrence's subsequent history (after his leaving the monastery) was lost, and those elsewhere who recorded the few facts known about the archbishop of Amalfi did not connect him with the ancient monastery from which he came. In modern scholarship, Lawrence the monk and Lawrence the archbishop appeared as two distinct figures. Therefore, until Professor Walther Holtzmann brought together the scattered references and, through stylistic analysis, identified the monk of Monte Cassino with the archbishop of Amalfi, even the main outline of the scholarly churchman's career was obscure.

Most of the Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, who seized Rhodes between 1306 and 1310 and thereafter defended it against the infidels, came from knightly or petty noble families which gave them little formal education; probably many were illiterate. They were well fitted to garrison castles and serve on crusading expeditions in the Levant, and to administer the extensive European estates on which the Order relied for the men and money necessary to maintain its position at Rhodes. The more outstanding brethren were often employed as royal or papal councillors and captains, but they were not normally intellectuals. Faced with the complex legal problems arising from their relationships and disputes with popes, bishops and secular powers, the Hospitallers had to rely on hired professional lawyers. It appeared during the trial of the French Templars, whose background was similar to that of the Hospitallers, that the Master of the Temple was illiterate, that only a few Templars knew Latin, and that their lack of expert legal knowledge prevented them from defending themselves properly in the various inquests and trials which culminated in the dissolution of their Order in 1312. For their part, the Hospitallers' own disadvantages at law must have become especially clear to them during the protracted legal quarrels which ensued in the decades after 1312, when they tried to secure possession of the lands of the Templars which had been transferred to them by the pope. The Hospitallers must also have felt the burden of the heavy fees they had to pay their lawyers.

From an administrative point of view the Roman Empire in the West did not come to an end when Romulus Augustulus was deposed in A. D. 476 Generally speaking, the kingdoms of Odoacer and Theoderic were administered by the same agencies that had managed the empire since the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine. It is not surprising that there should have been much apparent continuity between late imperial and barbarian rule. The bureaucratic apparatus of empire, no matter how corrupt and cumbersome, was at least adapted to the needs of a civilized state, and it made sense to gratify the traditional ambitions of the senatorial establishment by maintaining ancient offices for its tenure. No wonder that an anonymous chronicler could remark that Theoderic ‘maintained the civil service for the Romans as it had been under the emperors.’

Until comparatively recently, inventories which confined themselves to a mere listing of titles of works, were the only source available to characterize library holdings. With the advance of scientific research, however, the need for detailed manuscript catalogues has become ever more widely recognized. A multitude of facts, such as date, provenance (if it is at all possible to establish it), copyist, possessors, and so forth, are required for each manuscript.

Les collections que nous présentons aujourd'hui ne sont conservées que dans deux MSS: Zwettl, Stiftsbibl. 162 (Zw) et Wien, Nationalbibl. 2163 (Wi). St. Kuttner, qui les a signalées il y a plus de vingt ans, estime qu'elles pourraient provenir de l'école de Vicence. Il a relevé l'attribution d'un grand nombre de solutions à Ber. qu'il estime être Bernard de Compostene l'Ancien. Nous n'avons aucun motif de discuter ces deux points, qui nous paraissent convenablement établis.

In his chronicle of Bloemhof Abbey (Floridus Hortus) in Wittewierum Magister Emo of Huizinge inserts a treatise on simony in which the following passage is to be found:

La Biblioteca de la Catedral de Toledo posee la más rica colección de códices jurídicos medievales entre todas las catedrales españolas. La cifra exacta de estos manuscritos ascienda a 258. La casi totalidad de estos códices contienen obras de derecho canónico, derecho romano y derecho español posteriores a las Decretales de Gregorio IX. Sin embargo hay unos cuantos con obras canónicas anteriores a 1234. Una descripción de los códices jurídicos medievales de esta Biblioteca aparecerá próximamente en un volumen, preparado por D. Ramón Gonzálvez y por el infrascrito, en la serie Cuadernos del Instituto Jurídico Español del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas de Madrid. Haciendo un despojo del mencionado catálogo, quisiera ofrecer aquí una breve nota de los códices que contienen obras canónicas anteriores a 1234.