It is no doubt a commonplace to state that Western Civilization is an heir, one among several, of an anterior unity: Christian Mediterranean Civilization. In that earlier unity all the local cultures that had sprung up round the great central sea — Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean, Syrian, Iranian, Hellenic, Italic — had coalesced in three successive and increasingly comprehensive phases within the corresponding imperial frameworks of the pax achaemenia, the pax macedonica, and the pax romana. With the advent of Christianity this political and cultural amalgam passed into still another phase, that of the pax christiana, which fell heir also to the hitherto seclusive cultural tradition of the Jews. But, before this last phase was reached, the rhythm of history had changed from gathering to scattering; Iran, which once itself had contributed to the cultural syncretism of the Mediterranean world, and which can be regarded as that world's easternmost bastion, withdrew from it under the impact of the ‘neo-Achaemenian’ and anti-Hellenic reaction which inaugurated the Sassanian age. Iran was to remain hostile to the pax romana and, although Christian enclaves were to be established in its territory, outside the new unity of Christendom. But, even though withdrawn back to the pre-Hellenistic phase of history — as if Alexander the Great had never lived — New Iran exercised, chiefly through Syria, a profound influence, especially in art, upon the rest of the Mediterranean world, both before and after the ushering in of the pax christiana. With time, the disintegration begun in Iran spread. Christian Mediterranean Civilization was broken up and succeeded by several others that derived from it: that of the West was one, that of Byzantium another, and so also that of Christian Caucasia.

The authenticity of the service book known to scholars as the Gregorian Sacramentary or simply the Gregorianum has long been a matter of discussion. From the mid-eighth century to the end of the ninth we find a strong external tradition assigning its authorship to St. Gregory the Great. Doubts on this point were first expressed by George Baron d'Eckhart in 1729, and the controversy flared up once more in 1890, when the traditional view was vigorously defended by Dom G. Morin.

The suggestion of a possible dependence of Aelfric's Catholic Homilies on a medieval collection of patristic sermons is neither new nor startling. John Earle, writing in 1884, remarked that Aelfric had most probably used ‘some standard collection of homilies now lost’. Max Förster, commenting on Earle's suggestion that Aelfric's source may have been similar to the homiliary of Eusebius of Emesa, pointed out that the Catholic Homilies have more in common with the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon as printed in Migne PL 95. Förster readily admitted that Aelfric may have used such a collection, but he contended that the Catholic Homilies represented a translation from a number of sources. His own study of Aelfric's sources is based on this assumption. It is the purpose of this paper to show that while Aelfric may not have used the medieval homiliary as his sole source, the two volumes of his Catholic Homilies give evidence of a very real dependence on the homiliary, and that almost all of his patristic sources can be traced to one or other version of a collection of homilies generally known as the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon.

Es ist gewiss ein aussergewöhnlicher Fall, dass ein theologischer Autor des elften Jahrhunderts der Aufmerksamkeit des gelehrten Organisators der Migneschen Patrologie entgangen ist, obwohl sein Werk in einer (wenn auch keineswegs guten) Druckausgabe vom Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts vorlag; es handelt sich um Gerhard von Csanád (24. Ix.1046 als Märtyrer in Ungarn gestorben), dessen Werk — einen Kommentar zum Canticum trium puerorum — Ignaz Graf Batthyány, der Bischof von Siebenbürgen, 1790 auf Grund der einzigen existierenden Handschrift (Cod. Monacensis lat. 6211) in Gyulafehérvár (Karlsburg, Alba Carolina, Alba Iulia) herausgegeben hat. Der Fall ist umso aussergewöhnlicher, als Manitius in seiner Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, die auf S. 74–81 des zweiten Bandes Gerhard ausführlich behandelt, nicht mit Unrecht von ihm sagt: ‘Jedenfalls gehört Gerhard zu den eigenartigsten Schriftstellern des 11. Jahrhunderts sowohl nach dem Inhalt, wie nach der Form seines Werkes.’

En présentant cette contribution à l'examen critique de l'œuvre de Hugues de Saint-Victor, nous avons d'abord à rendre hommage à B. Hauréau qui, au siècle dernier, entreprit une étude analogue, en 1859, sous le titre, Hugues de Saint-Victor: Nouvel examen de l'édition de ses oeuvres, puis, en 1886, sous le titre, Les oeuvres de Hugues de Saint-Victor. Compte tenu des travaux parus depuis lors et des résultats de nos propres recherches nous devons faire un certain nombre d'additions aux constatations faites par Hauréau, et un certain nombre de corrections aux jugements qu'il prononça. Il n'empêche que notre étude comme la sienne a un caractère provisoire et appelle à son tour additions, perfectionnements et corrections. Puissions-nous du moins être quelque peu utile aux chercheurs qui s'intéresseront à ce grand penseur du XIIe siècle.

Codex 485 (213) of the University Library of Erlangen contains an anonymous commentary, by questions, on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle commencing on fol. 47r and ending on fol. 80v. In 1930, M. Grabmann called attention to this commentary as one of the sources of the thesis that God cannot be the immediate source of human happiness — a thesis condemned in 1277 by Stephen Tempier along with 218 other ‘heretical’ doctrines. Professor Gaines Post of the University of Wisconsin had a photostatic copy made of the manuscript in question and Miss N. Koskenlinna, a former student of his, performed the painful task of its transliteration. The object of this article is the description and analysis of this unpublished, late thirteenthcentury exposition of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.

It has been said of Meister Eckhart, the most eloquent proclaimer of German mysticism, its deepest thinker and its only creatively gifted speculative mind, that his genius lay in his being imbued with but one single truth, a truth ‘monumental in its simplicity, profound in its implications, impressive in its sincerity.’ This one central idea, from which all others of the Master are derived and towards which all are orientated, is that of the generation or birth of the Divine Word, or Son, in the soul. Anyone who has not grasped that the generation of the Son through the Father in the Tittle spark of the soul’ (‘daz vünkelîn’) constitutes the sole motive, subject-matter and purpose of Eckhart's sermons and gives to them in various formulations, which are merely variants of the one great theme, a certain grand one-sidedness, has failed to understand the Master. To him there is lacking the knowledge of the unitive and orientating centre of Eckhart's intellectual heritage, whose meaning, inaccessible to him, becomes ever more and more entangled in an inextricable medley of contradictions and obscurities, until he is unable to see the wood for the trees. He does not comprehend that all the tracks of this mystic's speculative thought lead toward one predetermined goal: the mystic union of the intellect and will of man with the Godhead through the birth of the Divine Logos in the soul.

Historians generally agree that Jean Bodin is the most important French political theorist of the sixteenth century. But there seems to be no hope of reconciling the disagreements that arise when authorities try to determine the exact meaning of his work. J. W. Allen has remarked that ‘it is impossible to separate Bodin's political from his religious thought.' And because of this entanglement it is difficult to place Bodin in a definite intellectual tradition. At times Bodin's political analysis seems to be completely secular, without any moral considerations. In the Republic, for example, there are passages analyzing sovereignty that resemble the absolutism of Hobbes. And the Republic's theory of the origin of the state is further evidence of the secularism of his political thought. Of course Bodin follows the traditional conception of the family as the primary human group and a natural organization. But men form city-states or republics only after ambition has driven them to conflict. This transition from family to state occurs when the chief of a victorious company of warriors continues to rule his followers as subjects, and his captives as slaves:

In the preparation of a text-critical edition of the De anima of Cassiodorus, I have made and here offer to the public a list of the extant manuscripts known to me. These number approximately 160 and the oldest date from the ninth century. I hope shortly to publish the text and with it an adequate description and classification of the codices. Since it is too much to expect that my present list is without errors or omissions, I would be most grateful to any reader who might supply me with additional information.

The two texts presented here as a contribution to Hiberno-Latin literature are only a fragment of the still unedited Bible commentaries which came forth from the Irish Bible Schools of the Early Middle Ages. These two pieces are valuable sources for the development of biblical exegesis in the pre-Carolingian age, which, except for the accomplishment of the Venerable Bede (d. 735), is distinguished neither for the richness nor the depth of its theological writing. The years between the death of St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and Alcuin of York (d. 804) were dominated by the intellectual activity of the Irish monks, whose reputation for learning was mainly founded on their Bible scholarship. But the fruit of this scholarship is not well known. Though the two texts edited below do not represent all the intellectual factors involved in the biblical exegesis of the ancient schools of Ireland, they do reflect the spirit and method of these schools; and they do afford a clear insight into the cultural problem of the development of medieval exegesis at its earliest stage.

Scattered through provincial Italian archives are a large number of documents that, collectively, outline something of a pattern of procedure in peninsular courts of papal judges delegate during the thirteenth century. Through these documents some idea can be formed of what the recurring phrase secundum juris ordinem actually meant in cases complicated particularly by the ecclesiastical topography of the papal homeland. The general pattern can be formed only slowly and piecemeal, but occasionally individual documents that may help in its formation seem interesting enough to repay individual consideration. One of these, a notary-written confirmation of a delegate sentence, preserved in a book of original documents in the sacristy of the ex-Cathedral of Ravello, is transcribed below.

The figure of Louis IX of France is frequently surrounded by an aura of the unreal. Since he has been honored by the Church and succeeding generations as St. Louis, the tendency has often been to place him on a pedestal and to make of him a plaster statue rather than the vigorous king who ruled France for 44 eventful years in the midst of the thirteenth century. Above all, it is often imagined that a saint-king would surely be something of a pawn in the hands of the clerics, and especially the papacy.

In the Middle English Pearl, the maiden's explanation of heavenly equality through the Parable of the Vineyard (497–588) is followed by a fresh objection of the dreamer:

The fourteenth century was the great century of college-founding in western Europe. The previous century and a half had witnessed the origins and early growth of the great studia generalia in Italy, France, England and Spain. This previous age had also seen the creation and endowment of the first colleges within the universities, a development which was to make the college system the dominant organizational characteristic of the medieval universities. The College des Dix-Huit was set up at Paris in the last years of the twelfth century; the most celebrated of all colleges, the Sorbonne, was endowed in the thirteenth. Almost at the same time, Merton College came into being at Oxford. But what had been a slow growth in the thirteenth century became a phenomenal expansion and multiplication of colleges in the fourteenth century. These colleges, vastly increased in number, were almost invariably and naturally attached to the old centers. The college founded by Aubert de Guignicourt at Soissons is almost unique simply because it was a provincial college. Because provincial colleges were so rare, this particular foundation deserves examination.

In 1958 the American Council of Learned Societies devoted its thirty-ninth annual meeting to a consideration of ‘the present-day vitality of the classical tradition.’ The focal point in the two-day program was the persistent influence of certain aspects of Greek tragedy upon the arts in our time: two versions of the Antigone (Sophocles’ and Jean Anouilh's) were presented on the same evening; there were lectures on ‘the tragic sense’ in Picasso's Guernica and in contemporary painting and music; but the most striking affirmation of the theme was a lecture on ‘The Vitality of Sophocles’ by Professor H. D. F. Kitto of the University of Bristol. One of the most distinguished of modern classical scholars, Mr. Kitto is well known among American students for his book, Greek Tragedy, published in 1939. In addition to his work on tragic drama here considered there appeared in print last year a small volume by him on Sophocles as dramatist and philosopher. In 1957 Harvard University published a long-awaited, monumental study of Aristotle's Poetics by Professor Gerald F. Else of the University of Michigan, and in 1958 The Johns Hopkins Press published in book form six lectures delivered in Baltimore by Professor Richmond Lattimore on The Poetry of Greek Tragedy. That these classical scholars should have, during recent years, made such varied contributions to an understanding of Greek tragedy — a field to which each of them has devoted a major portion of his academic life — is noteworthy but scarcely surprising, since the Greek theatre and the Greek tragedians have been a perennial subject in the history of classical philology.

This paper concerns three small collections of decretals of Innocent III, two of which have been named and briefly described in print by Professor Stephan Kuttner, who has kindly brought the third to my notice.

The Summa Prima primi and the Summa Quamvis leges seculares were described by Kuttner and Rathbone in 1951 as two intimately related works of the Anglo-Norman school which were deserving of closer examination in future studies. These summae were significant, it was pointed out, as introducing a new stage in the literary output of the English schools, a stage marked by the reception of Bernard of Pavia's Breviarium and by a close dependence on Huguccio as the principal guide for the interpretation of the Decretum. The texts of the two summae have now been transcribed and collated in preparation for an eventual edition. This work makes it possible to explain their relationship to one another and to Huguccio. It also opens up a fresh set of problems concerning the connection between the Summa Prima primi and a little-known Summa Duacensis in MS Douai 649, fol. 96ra-140vb (D).

Malgré les plus importants travaux, les bibliothèques britanniques sont encore riches de nouveautés pour l'histoire des Droits savants à l'époque des glossateurs. On y trouve en abondance les commentaires de l'école de Bologne transmis par plusieurs générations d'étudiants, ou les œuvres des glossateurs anglais, qui formèrent à partir du milieu du XIIe siècle une école florissante dont l'originalité se laisse deviner à quelques signes extérieurs : attachement à des genres déterminés, prédilection pour certaines méthodes, révérence particulière de plusieurs maîtres italiens. Pour une période plus récente, les documents ne manquent pas non plus et l'histoire juridique françalse ferait parmi eux une ample moisson. Nous ne saurions donner ici les conclusions d'une enquète, encore loin de son achèvement, entreprise sur les conseils que nous donnait peu de temps avant sa mort F. De Zulueta. Délaissant mêrne son objet principal, nous réduirons cette note à la présentation de quelques Ceuvres et fragments canoniques. Cette modeste contribution à l'enrichissement du répertoire des sources se propose de donner une première liste de nouveaux manuscrits (I) ainsi que I'édition de textes caractéristiques (II).