Vor einiger Zeit machte Carlos Steel auf einige neue Proclus-Fragmente aufmerksam. 1m dritten Band der Ausgabe der Tria Opuscula von Daniel Isaac, erschienen 1982, stellte er drei griechische Fragmente aus De decem dubitationibus circa providentiam und eines aus De providentia vor. Diese Fragmente hatte er in einer Handschrift der Loci communes des Ps.-Maximus gefunden, dem Kodex aus der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek Hannover mit der Signatur IV 546, dessen Abschrift am 7. Mai 1311 von Eugenios Choumnos beendet wurde. Eine neuerliche Durchsicht der Handschrift ergab, daß, neben einem Fragment aus De providentia, sich nicht drei sondern acht Fragmente aus De decem dubitaiionibus circa providentiam hierin befinden.

Critics have amply considered how Christian authors in late antiquity adapted the forms, language, and themes of classical poetry to create an ecclesiastical poetic tradition. Studies related to this topic have largely focused upon biblical epic and the carmina of well-known poets like Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. In this paper, I wish to proceed into the less trodden area of Christian bucolic poetry, and specifically to one of the first examples of the form, Pornponius's Versus ad Gratiam Domini. This text, dating to the late fourth or early fifth century, is a 132-line Virgilian cento (with a concluding lacuna), or a work created out of unconnected verse units of varying length taken from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that an author pieces together to compose a new narrative. These units can be up to three lines long, but usually consist of a segment of a hexameter line. Sixteen centos ranging in date from ca. 200–ca. 530 survive from antiquity, with four handling Christian topics. Because the ecclesiastical centonists reuse Virgilian verses directly, their texts serve as extreme examples of how Christian authors created poems by reworking the classical past. It is this transformative gesture that will concern me in this paper. I will investigate how Pomponius redeploys Virgil's language to compose his Christian Versus ad Gratiam Domini and, in the process, endows his text with specific features manifesting the continuity with and change of classical bucolic that is so fundamental to the development of the Christian pastoral form.

Among the saints celebrated by the major vernacular Anglo-Saxon hagiographer Ælfric of Eynsham, one interesting group that has not received much scholarly attention is his warrior saints. In his lives of these saints Ælfric the monk, who has abjured violence, proclaims the spiritual achievements of men who have been military leaders and of ordinary soldiers serving in the ranks. The most famous of Ælfric's soldiers, St. Martin, was an unwilling one, but others commended by him were not unhappy to embrace the military life, even indeed when serving under pagans. Warrior saints were a distinctive and popular class of saints in the earlier Christian Mediterranean world. In the writings of Ælfric, as in Anglo-Saxon hagiography generally, they are a small group, but they are a group that illustrates strikingly Ælfric's approach to writing about saints, and study of them helps to throw light on the work he intended vernacular hagiography to perform. Part of that work, as argued below, was to provide ideologically suitable spiritual heroes for the faithful. But how should the potentially problematic group of warrior saints be presented, whose lives combine sanctity and violence and whose exploits might have disconcerting associations with the world of secular heroism?

The twelfth-century legal compilation known as the Usatges de Barcelona holds an important place in the history of Catalonia. Recognized as authoritative by kings and parliaments alike from at least the thirteenth century, the Usatges were integrated into the official collection of Catalan law commissioned by the Corts and the new king of Aragón, Fernando de Antequera, in 1412–13. The work of the jurists who carried out this task was eventually fixed in print (in Catalan) in 1495 as the Constitutions y altres drets de Cathalunya, which was reissued in 1588–89 and again in 1704. The Usatges thus formed part of the law of the region for over 500 years, until the suppression of Catalan local law in the Decreto de Nueva Planta of 1716; thereafter, they survived — and still survive — as a focus of Catalan nationalism and regional pride. For medieval historians, the Usatges usefully supplement Catalonia's abundant documentary evidence, evidence unaccompanied before the thirteenth century by significant narrative sources. Individual articles cover such diverse topics as composition payments for injuries, guidelines for judicial proceedings, inheritance rules, military obligation, the status of Jews and Muslims, marriage, rape, treason, and public highways. Drawn from and influenced by a wide variety of sources — including the Visigothic code, Roman law, comital charters, and royal decrees — they provide valuable information about legal traditions and reasoning in Catalonia.

In seinem ca. 1412 verfaßten Katalog verzeichnete Amplonius Rattinck von Beck eine Handschrift, die — seinen Angaben nach — wichtige Texte des 13. und insbesondere des 14. Jahrhunderts enthielt:

A work of natural science dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, Richard Lavenham's De causis naturalibus (henceforth DCN) is a theoretically simple, brief, and sometimes fanciful compendium of lore, Aristotelian science, and Christian authority on a variety of meteorological topics. A fair range of authorities and subjects is discussed in this relatively short work, from Augustine to Aristotle and from the cause of rainbows to the source of the tides. Neither an in-depth treatise nor a focused commentary, DCN is rather a summary of the mechanics of sun-caused exhalations in the sublunar region and of the various phenomena these exhalations produce.

If a diary of a prominent late-medieval religious figure were to be discovered that revealed his thoughts about the present and the future, such a discovery would seem to be too good to be true. But if labeled differently, such a document does exist: not a diary, but a prophetic commentary. The commentary by the fourteenth-century Augustinian friar Gentile of Foligno on the prophecy “Ve mundo in centum annis,” has never been the subject of sustained attention. Consequently the following presentation aims to examine it carefully within the context of the author's career and to show how it reveals some intriguing working habits as well as Gentile's firm hopes for the advent of angelic popes and ecclesiastical renewal.

“And the person who urged me to this point is the noble master, Pico della Mirandola, who is given to speculation of the highest sciences, is a very intelligent man, a worthy philosopher, a lover of truth, of whose like I have not seen in these times.” Thus wrote Elia del Medigo in the introduction to his commentary on Averroes' De substantia orbis written at the behest of the famous count of Mirandola as a result of their discussions in 1485. In late 1486, Pico, then in Rome, presented his Conclusiones in which he was able to couple the philosophy of Averroes with statements such as: “Averroes and Avicenna cannot disagree fundamentally on whether the physicist receives composite bodies from the metaphysician, even if they differ in their words,” or: “If there is any nature immediate to us that is either simply rational, or at least exists for the most part rationally, it has magic in its summit, and through its participation in men can be more perfect.” Conclusions like these could only have deeply frustrated someone like Elia del Medigo, who had devoted much time and effort to persuading the count of the superiority of peripatetic philosophy as interpreted by Averroes and may have caused him to revise somewhat his favorable statements about Pico. His last known contact with Pico was in December of the same year, in the form of a letter with two accompanying treatises, a last-ditch effort to make Pico aware of the superiority of Aristotelian-Averroistic cosmology.