Europe was christened in the waters of Roman Christianity. Creeds, liturgies, hierarchies, saints, and ascetic practices favored in later imperial Rome washed over the European peoples in successive centuries and marked their Christianity indelibly. The splendor of that imperial era, rescued from facile notions of a declining Rome, has come to historical life in a distinct epoch called “late antiquity” (300–650). Its monuments testify to an ethos at once classical and spiritual. Late antique Christians instinctively took from Roman surroundings all that suited their new religious ends, from the architectural form given churches to the rhetoric and philosophy that mediated sermons and theologies. This Roman imprint passed to European Christians as a sacred legacy: the basilica as a church rather than a civic hall, the metropolitan as a clerical rather than a civic official, Rome as the city of Saint Peter rather than the emperor, the Empire as destined for Christ's birth as much as Augustus's triumphs. Medieval believers, seeking to re-create the church of first-century Jerusalem, fixed repeatedly upon exemplars from late antique Rome: the teachings of Augustine, the Bible of Jerome, the philosophical theology of Boethius, the laws of Leo, the Rule of Benedict, the prayers ascribed to Gregory. Even the story of Rome's religious transformation entered into the self-understanding of medieval and modern Europeans, the conversion narrative joined to biblical history with its outcome treated as providential and decisive.

The Greek church of southern Italy and Sicily commemorated the temptation of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent. Homiliaries for the liturgical year presented one or both of two homilies attributed to John Chrysostom, ‘΄ Hλι ος μὲ ν(PG 61, 683–88) and ‘Eξλθεν ò κύριος (CPG 4906). The former is now known to be a composite homily drawn from three homilies of Nestorius edited by Nau. The latter, as will be maintained later, is by Severian of Gabala.

On 20 March, A.D. 698, eleven years after his death, the grave of Cuthbert, holy man and bishop of the Northumbrian diocese of Lindisfarne between 685 and 687, was opened and the body was found to be incorrupt. It has been argued in modern times that this was possibly due to the monks' technique of embalming, or to the salty condition of the island soil, which literally pickled the saint's body. However, the bishop at that time, Eadberht, proclaimed a miracle. Cuthbert's body was reinterred with rich gifts in a shrine above the church floor so that the saint could be easily accessible to the faithful. Thus began the cult of Saint Cuthbert which culminated in the building of the magnificent cathedral of Durham.

The first half of the twelfth century was, by any account, a remarkable time in the intellectual history of the medieval West. During this period the development and expansion of schools located in urban centers took place at an accelerating pace. Within these schools, masters forged new tools for organizing, analyzing, and presenting materials for their students. Not only was the rich harvest gleaned from the writings of authorities from past centuries subjected to a more organized sifting and evaluation; the results of contemporary intellectual debate were incorporated into texts that made their way into the curricula of the schools. One can see the effects of this sifting, organizing, discussing, and presenting in a wide variety of works from the half-century: the theological sententiae from the “school” of Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux, the accessus ad auctores literature in the arts curriculum, the Sic et non of Abelard, collections of canon law, and glossed Bibles and biblical commentaries. Although the contents of these works are quite diverse, in general they were produced within a common cultural situation: the medieval school.

If one takes standard overviews of the history of natural science or natural philosophy as his measure, the object appearing in the title of this study would literally appear not to exist. For, apart from a few scattered encyclopedia entries — which are always of necessity rather summary in character — one searches in vain for studies on the medieval interest in the natural sciences. For the contemporary cosmologist, be he first and foremost philosopher or physicist, the Middle Ages lie in a very deep darkness indeed.

In the Middle Ages, the destiny of the historical process was a subject of intense thought, fueled by an overarching notion of historical change and the impending final age. Of the many theologians who contributed to this discussion none stands out in more colorful form than the Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). Joachim made his mark by describing history as a process of patterns unfolding according to the relationships of the Trinity. For Joachim, history was an ongoing work of the living God, and he sought to elucidate the innermost mystery of the trinitarian relationships in the working-out of history. The whole process of history, he maintained, was progressing toward a higher spiritual level that would be characterized by the image of the mystical body of Christ in the final age, an age that he held would take place in this world. Although Bonaventure dismissed Joachim early in his academic career as ignorant and simplex, his rise to minister general in an order divided by radical Joachimism may have influenced his view of the abbot's theology. E. Randolph Daniel has shown that Bonaventure borrowed one of Joachim's patterns of history to define his eschatology more clearly in terms of Christocentricity. Like Joachim, Bonaventure held that the final age would take place in this world, and would be characterized by mystical peace. Potential Joachimist influence may also be detected in Bonaventure's Legenda maior.

In an essay entitled “Church History and the Bible,” Karlfried Froehlich once distinguished between the many biblical texts that have had a history and the few which have really made history. His point was that, in the history of their effects, the different books and even individual verses of the Bible have had a very uneven influence. Some have been relatively neutral or unproductive in their visible historical impact. Others can almost be said to have brought into being whole movements, institutions, ideas, and conflicts.

We give to our church of Exeter [this book], which we labored much in correcting in Paris, in the hand of John of Exeter.

And to this point I, John de Grandisson, have corrected, and not beyond, according to the book of Hugo of Saint Victor, as it was said to have been corrected by him, while I was studying in Paris, in the year of the Lord 1314, when the Templars were burned, in the next year after the Council of Vienne.

Kinship networks and social hierarchies provide an important key to the Byzantine Empire's tenacious survival over the course of more than a millennium. This study concentrates on one such social networking strategy, that of ritual brotherhood. No investigation of ritual brotherhood can overlook the Byzantine evidence, for Byzantium is unique among medieval societies in having formally incorporated into its ecclesiastical ritual the ceremony by which the priest's prayers and blessing make ‘brothers’ of two men. Further, the history of the empire provides ample evidence for the concrete implementation of this bond. Hagiographical and historical narratives as well as regulations of secular and ecclesiastical authorities attest to the importance of ritual brotherhood as it was practiced by holy men and patriarchs, aristocrats and emperors. The Byzantine evidence is, unsurprisingly, at the core of John Boswell's argument in his Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe,' Boswell drew attention to this interesting and multi-faceted relationship, but he did not explore the full range of sources for ritual brotherhood, nor did he attempt to show how this relationship related to others within Byzantine society.

A singular merit of John Boswell's provocative Same-Sex Unions has been to refocus the attention of a wide range of scholars from differing disciplines on the significance of manuscript sources for adelphopoiesis, a Christian ceremonial in the eastern Mediterranean for the ‘making of a brother'. It seems fair to say that the balance of scholarly opinion has rejected his claim that these rites were, in effect, marriage ceremonials for men. The ceremonials seem to have been used to create a ritual brotherhood in which one man ‘adopted’ another as his ‘brother’. This still leaves a large question to be considered: precisely what kinds of social institutions or arrangements did these rituals seek to confirm? I propose to investigate this problem in the context of evidence relating to the social structures of Roman and post-Roman societies, both to elucidate the social bonds reflected in the rites of adelphopoiesis and to suggest why this peculiar type of personal attachment is strikingly absent from the annals of western Roman imperial society.

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.