Olympiodorus of Thebes is an important figure for the history of late antiquity. The few details of his life preserved as anecdotes in his History give glimpses of a career which embraced the skills of poet, philosopher, and diplomat. A native of Egypt, he had influence at the imperial court of Constantinople, among the sophists of Athens, and even outside the borders of the empire. His History (more correctly, his “materials for history”) is lost, surviving only as fragments in the narratives of Zosimus, Sozomen, and Philostorgius, and in the rich summary given by the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius. These remains comprise the most substantial narrative sources for events in the western Roman Empire in the early fifth century. Besides its value as a source, the History is important as a monument to the vitality of the belief in the unity of the Roman Empire under the Theodosian dynasty. Olympiodorus wrote in Greek, and knowledge of his work is attested only in Constantinople, yet his political narrative, from 407 to 425, concerns only events in the western half of the empire. To understand the significance of these facts, it is necessary to set the composition of Olympiodorus's work in its proper context. Clarifying the date of publication is the first step toward this goal. Internal and external evidence suggests that the work was written in 440 or soon after, more than a decade later than the date of composition usually accepted. Taken with thematic emphases evident in the structure of the History, this revised dating explains why an eastern writer should have written a detailed account of western events in the early part of the century. Olympiodorus's account is a characteristic product of the highly literate class of eastern imperial civil servants, and of their genuine preoccupation with the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire at a time when both were threatened by the rise of the new Carthaginian power of the Vandals.

The heroes of God scorn apostasy. Bound and thrust into an insanely fired furnace, its flames jetting nine and forty cubits above the oven itself, they stand unconcerned in the midst of it, their bonds wondrously burned away. And the flames do not touch them; rather, the fire bursts out the sides to incinerate the torturers who stoke it. Then an angel of the Lord enters the furnace and thrusts the fire from the saints, who feel the pleasant refreshment of a dewy breeze. In the middle of the fire they stand and praise God. Astonished, their persecutor beholds the trio with the fourth who has joined them, who is like unto the Son of God, and calls the three forth from the midst of the fire. He, too, acknowledges and praises God when he and his court see, no longer through the confusing shimmer of heat, but with indisputable clarity, right before their eyes, the converting proof: no power had the fire over the saints' bodies, and not a hair of their heads had been singed, and neither had their garments been affected.

William of Auvergne became a master of theology in the University of Paris in 1223 and was appointed bishop of Paris by Gregory IX in 1228. William governed the church of Paris until his death in 1249, while continuing to write the works which constitute his immense Magisterium divinale et sapientiale. Despite the fact that he was the first of the thirteenth-century theologians to appreciate the value of the Aristotelian philosophy that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, his writings have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Étienne Gilson has sketched well the impact of the influx of Greek and Arabian philosophical works into the Christian West:

In a recent Traditio article, Cary J. Nederman has added another valuable study to the series of papers he has been publishing over the past few years. This body of work has the laudable goal of showing that, across the twelfth century, thinkers were taking an increasingly Aristotelian line in the fields of ethics and political theory, on the basis of ideas transmitted indirectly via works available in Latin well before the appearance of the integral Latin translations of the texts of the Stagirite deemed to have launched the “Aristotelian revolution” of the thirteenth century in these fields. Throughout this burgeoning oeuvre, Nederman has been quite successful in supporting his case for a more gradual and less cataclysmic reception of Aristotle in the Latin West than the standard accounts acknowledge. It is not the purpose of this paper to challenge that larger argument. Nonetheless, with respect to the Aristotelian doctrine of habitus on which Nederman focuses in his Traditio article, we would like to suggest that his analysis needs to be reconsidered. We offer the following pages as an amplificatio of his thesis, with the aim of adding nuance to it by bringing forward material that he omits. Our intention here is not so much to criticize Nederman's reading of the texts on habitus in the twelfth century that he does adduce, and certainly not to object to his larger project, but rather to indicate that there is more to the story, and so to refine his analysis in the hope of strengthening it.

At a certain moment in his life Ramon Llull became convinced that if his great projects were ever to be realized, he would have to gain the support of the leading rulers of Christendom. The Crown of Aragon was not enough. God had revealed to him a universal Art for the conversion of infidels, a paradigm of all knowledge, a general method for contemplation, and Llull naturally deemed it vital that this revelation should become known throughout the world. Some thirteen years after his illumination, Llull decided to go to Paris, to address the most powerful monarch in Europe and defend his ideas before the most prestigious university in the western world.

L'importanza del volgarizzamento e dell'allegorizzazione delle Metamorfosi ovidiane per opera di Giovanni di Bonsignori, meglio conosciuti con il titolo Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare, che venne lora assegnato nelle edizioni a stampa, è dovuta alla larga diffusione che ebbero nel XV secolo e nei primi decenni del XVI. Terminato nel 1377, il testa ebbe una discreta divulgazione manoscritta e conobbe una prima stampa a Venezia nel 1497 “per Zoanne Rosso Vercellese ad instantia del nobile homo miser Lucantonio Zonta fiorentino” (ovvero Lucantonio Giunti), Sempre a Venezia “ad instantia del […] Lucantonio Zonta” seguirono una seconda edizione nel 1501 “per Christofolo de Pensa” e una terza nel 1508 “per Alexandro di Bandoni.” Nel 1517 e nel 1523 si ebbero ancora a Venezia altre due edizioni, ambedue “per Georgio de' Rusconi.” Nel 1519 fu pubblicato a Milano “in Minutiana officina,” per i fratelli da Legnano; nel 1520, ancora a Milano, “per Rocho et Fratello da Valle ad instantia de Miser Nicolò Da Gorgonzola.”

N. R. Ker, in his Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, provides a note to his analysis of Bristol University Library DM 14, a version of the Medulla Grammatice: “A fragment of three leaves, now Bristol University DM 1, appears to be also from Medulla Grammaticae. It contains part of C and the end of D and is described and printed by P. Haworth in Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, xlv (1923), 253–75, with two facsimiles. Written space c.232 150 mm. 2 cols. 45 lines. Used apparently in the binding of a volume of Buckinghamshire wills, s. xvi. The title ‘Liber test' bucks (?) sacerdotis magistri Ric' Edmunds anno 1569 xxix decembris' is on f. 3 and the names of some testators, Thomas Gayts of Coleshill, Ralph Wright of Olney and John Haward of Chesham Wooburn, are on f.1.”

Karl Jost first noted the use of a passage from Atto of Vercelli, De pressuris ecclesiasticis, in Archbishop Wulfstan's Latin composition De Christianitate. Dorothy Bethurum, however, in her essay on the group of manuscripts associated as representatives of Wulfstan's “Commonplace Book,” suggested that an extract in one of these, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190, pp. 96–97, was an intermediary between the original work of Atto and Wulfstan's De Christianitate. Jost and Bethurum used the edition of Atto by d'Achery, reprinted in Migne. Now Joachim Bauer has re-edited Atto's tract and, finding early manuscripts rare, has read CCC 190 and identified more quotations from Atto in this English manuscript.

In a recent issue of Traditio, Sister M. Teresa Brady demonstrates clearly that the late fourteenth-century devotional work The Pore Caitif, which she is confident is wholly orthodox, has made extensive use of some of the material produced in the well-organized and well-financed centers of Lollardy which Anne Hudson has shown to have been active at the time. Her demonstration starts with, and is clearest for, the Glossed Gospels, a series of commentaries on the four Gospels consisting entirely of translations from the works of standard authorities, mostly patristic, and based on the Catena Aurea, but including also quotations from authors more nearly contemporary, such as Grosseteste, John of Abbeville, FitzRalph, and William Peraldus. In establishing so clearly the use of the Glossed Gospels (hereafter GG) Sister Teresa claims justly to have found the first stone in the metaphorical arch which I once suggested should link Bible translation and tract production, though her tracts are orthodox, not the Lollard ones the metaphor envisaged.

With the final volumes of his Iter, Paul Oskar Kristeller covers such important countries as Italy, Switzerland, the United States, and (what was at the time of publication) the U.S.S.R. A significant portion of the manuscripts listed or described concerns scientific correspondence between, for example, Italian physicians and Swiss naturalists, such as that between Ulisse Aldrovandi and Konrad Gessner and the Zwinger and Platter families. The Aldrovandi correspondence has been known for some time, but the Zwinger and Platter letters have not yet been sufficiently exploited. In all, eighty-seven letter writers are represented.