The ingenuity of early Christian artisans in turning a host of pagan symbols and images to the service of a new ideology is one of the most conspicuous features of Christian art during the second and third centuries after Christ. It is responsible for the art of the catacombs in which Orpheus the charmer of wild beasts represents Christ the Good Shepherd, and the eagle, peacock, Dionysiac grapes, sun, stars, and other pagan funerary symbols of long standing express the state of the Christian soul after death. Yet as Christianity grew stronger in the Roman empire, as councils were held and creeds formulated, and as a distinctively Christian view of history evolved in which Old Testament figures replaced pagan heroes, we find a curious lag in the visual arts. The old pagan imagery continues to appear in Christian funerary monuments, often in conjunction with newer, wholly Christian, motifs, but significantly not replaced by them. This phenomenon is not due simply to the conservatism of the artisans, but owes much to the vigor of the old motifs and the persistence of the ideas they represented. It also points up the fundamental difference between a verbal statement, made up of words which may be freely rearranged and whose connotations shift mercurially from year to year, and a visual statement, which is less flexible and able to retain its symbolic appeal for a very long time. The difference, practically a commonplace in the study of the history of ideas, is nonetheless often overlooked in the study of the ideas and motifs of late antiquity, when words and pictures ostensibly representing the same ideas were often straining in opposite directions. Thus, while the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon sought to settle for all time the relation between the human and divine in the person of Jesus, Christian artisans were still depicting Christ the Good Shepherd in the aspect of Orpheus.

The sources for the reign of Leo VI the Wise (886–912) are numerous, but historians have been handicapped by the existence of two virtual Lives of Leo, the Logothete chronicle and the Vita Euthymii† (=VE), for the very natural result of the existence of these two apparent histories of his reign has been to form too exclusively the judgment of posterity on him and it. Both are, for different reasons, excessively restrictive: the Logothete is hostile and eliminates systematically any favorable information. The VE is favorable but, written as it is to justify the ascent of the patriarchal throne by the monk Euthymius, its almost exclusive concern is with Leo's matrimonial misfortunes and the picture it gives of him shows him always grovelling at the feet of Euthymius. The emperor as humble suppliant to the saint is a great theme of the Vita and coincides with the mosaic in St. Sophia usually considered to be his portrait. Actually, emperors were quite prone to demonstrations of humility before monks.

To propose a unified religious allegory in what hitherto has been accepted rather generally as two distinct Old English poems, and universally as secular poetry carrying no meaning beyond the literal, is to risk being categorized as a ‘pan-allegorist’ in literary theory and an evangelist in temperament. Let me begin, therefore, by protesting that if the corpus of Old English poetry should ever be unmasked as a series of impeccably Christian allegories, no one will be more astounded or dismayed than I. It would be difficult to deny, however, that the great scholars who laid the foundations for our study of this poetry were, in most instances, more interested in Germanic antiquity than in Latin Christianity; and that as a result, a disproportionate number of our own major discoveries are likely to come out of the once-neglected Patrologia Latina. If this observation is accurate, we may do well to suspend temporarily our belief in certain universal negative conclusions—like, for example, the familiar pronouncement that Old English poets characteristically do not employ allegory—and to inquire whether some of the ‘secular’ poems that have puzzled us for so long may not become less puzzling in the light of early Christian thought. Much as we may revere the spirit of Germanic antiquity, we shall do it small service by attributing to it attitudes or works that it might not have cared to claim.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux is an unwilling enigma. No zealot in the Church's history has spoken more eloquently about right rule in the Church; none has been more fierce in his condemnation of the ecclesiastical truant. And yet, when this has been said, there remain the persistent questions of what Bernard actually conceived to be right rule in the Church, which truancy he would wholly exorcise and which merely prune. Oddly enough, in regard to his policies for reform, Bernard has become almost as well known among modern scholars for his ambiguities as for his doctrines. There now exists a rather bewildering garden of Bernardine studies from which a student can pluck an interpretation of his papal theory as Gregorian, anti-Gregorian, hierarchical, egalitarian, proto-Protestant, or any one of a variety of other hues. It will be the purpose of this paper to present the major interpretations of the De consideratione now extant and to attempt, where possible, to eliminate theories which are clearly specious, in the hope that future studies can proceed amicably and constructively.

No one reading Suger's life of Louis VI would be apt to think that the abbot of Saint Denis had an extremely broad or, as one used to say, ‘liberal’ conception of the territorial limits of Francia. On the contrary, it is evident that for him Francia was a compact unit of lands roughly equivalent to the more modern Ǐle de France, lands which in no way approximate what France was later to become. One finds, for example, that Louis after his various provincial expeditions is described as returning ‘in Franciam,’ be it from Flanders, Auvergne, or Berry. Similarly, frontiers and marches are to be found facing not only the empire, which is natural enough, but also Normandy, Berry, Auvergne, and Burgundy. In short, for Suger Francia was hemmed in by a host of other and often hostile lands, and while the king's duty might be to control them as best he might, it is nevertheless apparent that they do not, in Suger's normal use of the term, constitute part of Francia.

As Professor D. W. Robertson, Jr., has pointed out, the Man of Law's reiterated concern for the ‘fruyt’ of his story as opposed to its ‘chaf is a clear invitation to the audience both to seek the ‘sentence’ of the story and to judge whether or not the Man of Law is successful in his interpretation of his own material. Indeed, the Man of Law stands high among the Canterbury pilgrims in the degree of his involvement with his story, and he is presented to us as one who cannot simply tell a tale, but who feels obliged to react to it sympathetically, to comment on it, and even to interpret it for us. Thus, when it comes time for the Man of Law to tell a tale, he selects the story of Custance, whose humble faith in God's Providence is rewarded by numerous deliverances from death and from fates-worse-than-death, and, lest we miss the terror of impending doom or the moral of Custance's deliverances, the Man of Law intrudes repeatedly in order to emphasize and interpret. These interpretations and emphases are scarcely the serene summations of ‘sentence’ we might expect this providential tale to elicit from an educated man, but are rather a commentary on the narrator's and not the heroine's emotional reactions to the vicissitudes of the story. The Man of Law's specific and general interpretations of the story, as a consequence, become interesting both for their relevance, or lack of it, to the tale, and for their ability to disclose by their degree of pertinence much about the Man of Law's understanding of things providential.

La Question inédite de Jean de Ripa dont Mgr. André Combes et son collaborateur au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Francis Ruello, apportent l'édition critique vient compléter de remarquable façon le dossier jadis établi par le regretté Alexandre Koyré sur le vide et l'espace infini au XIVe siècle. La dernière partie de ce dossier révèle chez le grand oxonien Thomas Bradwardine ‘l'affirmation d'un espace infini’ et pose le problème: Dieu et l'espace dont le měme historien, à la fois de la pensée scientifique et de la pensée religieuse, devait montrer l'importance en analysant, du xve au xviie siècle, le passage du monde clos à l'univers infini. La discussion et la solution de ce problème font l'un des principaux intérěts du texte de 1354 ou 1355 ci-dessous publié. On le retrouverait chez Nicole Oresme traitant en français ‘du Ciel et du Monde,’ parlant — au témoignage de Pierre Duhem — d’ ‘une espace vuide, incorporèle … qui est hors le ciel,’ disant de ce ‘lieu ymaginé vuit et infini: c'est l'immensité de Dieu meisme …’; immensité cependant ‘indivisible et sans extension,’ une ‘position’ de Dieu comparable à la ‘duration’ qui ‘est éternité indivisible et sans succession.’ Pareilles expressions évoquent la problématique ultérieure analysée par Koyré; il cite les Méditations chrétiennes de Malebranche. Citons les Entretiens sur la Métaphysique; au huitième, Théodore dit à Ariste: ‘je prétends vous donner quelque connaissance de l'immensité de Dieu en la comparant avec son éternité,’ et ajoute: ‘… vous n'entrez point dans ma pensée, si vous croyez que … les espaces imaginaires soient, pour ainsi dire, le lieu qu'occupe la substance infinie de la Divinité’; les formules de Jean de Ripa évoquent aussi des ‘espaces que l'on conçoit au-delà du monde’ et un Dieu ‘infini en tout sens’ n'existant ‘qu'en lui-měme’ dans ‘son immensité.’

One of the many charges leveled against Richard III after his downfall was that of attempted or intended incest with his niece Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of his brother Edward IV. Richard's opponents had proposed a match between Elizabeth and Henry Tudor (who as Henry VII eventually married her); and, in order to circumvent this plot, so the rumor went, Richard desired to marry her himself, once his own wife (Anne Neville) was out of the way. Queen Anne did in fact die in March of 1485, and whatever his intentions had been, Richard soon felt constrained to put an end to the speculation by denouncing it as a slander.

The history of Latin Aristotelianism reaches roughly from Boethius to Galileo — from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Whereas the early Middle Ages knew only a part of Aristotle's logic, the whole Aristotelian corpus became known in the period around 1200. From the middle of the thirteenth century to the end of the Middle Ages, and in some circles even beyond, the influence of these works was decisive both for the system of education and for the development of philosophy and natural science.

John of Legnano (ca. 1320–1383) was the foremost professor of law at Bologna in the last half of the fourteenth century. Although he has received recognition for his early study on the ethics of warfare, his importance today might better be ascribed to the breadth of his writings, to his close connections with the papal and civic affairs of his day, and to his role as the chief apologist for Urban VI at the outbreak of the Great Western Schism.

Le Parisinus gr. 657 est un beau manuscrit de 310 × 240 mm. Il contient 257 ff. écrits sur deux colonnes de trente lignes. Il est daté du xiie siècle. Il se présente actuellement sous une reliure de cuir rouge aux armes de Henri IV et contient uniquement des œuvres de Jean Chrysostome: ff. 1–182 le commentaire sur les psaumes 119 à 150; ff. 183–257 la collection complète des dixsept lettres à Olympias.

In his article ‘Juvenal's Bookcase,’ Gilbert Highet demonstrates that Juvenal's poetry was stylistically influenced chiefly by Martial, Ovid, Vergil, and Horace. Highet also points out that Juvenal was familiar with Propertius’ elegies, and cites four instances of imitation. In this study we shall examine these passages and other passages where the satirist may have been influenced by the Augustan elegist.

The barbarian invasions of the fifth century have been studied in great detail, and the major participants in these invasions — the Franks, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns — have rightly received the bulk of scholarly attention. Smaller groups of invaders such as the Alans, several bands of which settled in Gaul, have not received notice commensurate with their importance. While most of the better histories of the late empire mention the Alans, no adequate study has been made of their settlement in Gaul. In this paper an attempt will be made to ascertain the role played by the Alans in Gaul during the fifth century.

When, on election to the papacy in 1088, Odo of Ostia selected the name Urban II, he did so in acknowlegment of the clerical reforms then attributed to the obscure Urban I (†. 230). A careful investigation would clearly indicate the association — albeit on spurious grounds — of the memory of this ancient pope with clerical reform and the canons regular during the eleventh century. And the vigorous role of Odo-Urban as patron and reformer of the canons regular is readily documented. However, while they probably are apparent to certain specialists, no historian seems to have indicated the implications of Urban II's name in a detailed and explicit fashion.

Despite the renewal of interest in the Catholic vernacular drama of medieval England, critics generally have failed to understand the framework upon which the unity of the Wakefield Mactacio Abel (The Killing of Abel) rests. If, as I believe, the central issue in the play is the response of mankind to God's grace against the background of the whole of history, then those who would admire the play solely for its realism or for its farce are not properly responding to the drama. There are many who perhaps do find the theology implicit in medieval drama to be rather dull fare, but in no way can the religious doctrine be split away from other aspects of this play.

General Activities. — From January to late August 1967, the undersigned was on leave from the Institute; consequently, activities in the Institute's New Haven office were sharply reduced. Current matters were taken care of on visits made in New Haven at regular intervals by J. F. Kenney and by R. L. Benson, with the assistance of a student.

En las dos últimas entregas de esta revista di cuenta de algunos códices jurídico-canónicos encontrados recientemente en bibliotecas españolas. Trátase de textos y comentarios de derecho canónico que se conservan en códices que hasta ahora habían permanecido ignorados y cuyo contenido pertenece cronológicamente a la época clásica comprendida entre el Decreto de Graciano y las Decretales de Gregorio IX. En un reciente iter hispanicum localicé todavía algunos nuevos manuscritos de los que doy cuenta a continuación.

When in 1951 Walther Holtzmann brought to an end his survey of the English libraries which he had scoured for papal documents, he included the Phillipps collection at Cheltenham. His account was compiled on the basis of an eightday visit to the library nearly twenty years earlier. In printing it he observed that since 1932 many of the manuscripts had found their way into the British Museum, the Bodleian, and elsewhere. He therefore confined himself to describing thirty-five manuscripts which he had failed to trace to other libraries: he did not know whether they were still in the Phillipps collection or whether they had been sold. The fate of many of these manuscripts is now discoverable. Indeed, almost all which could possibly be of service in the search for papalia in England can be traced. It may be of help to users of Holtzmann's work to know their whereabouts.

Nous voudrions, dans ces quelques pages, terminer le dépouillement commencé jadis (il y a dix ans déjà) des qq. contenues dans le MS Bamberg, Staatsbibl. Can. 17 [P.I. 11]. Nous avions laissé de côté les collections III1 (fol. 127–133r) et III4 (fol. 171–177). Ces deux séries reprennent un certain nombre de qq. publiées jadis par F. Thaner d'après le MS Stuttgart, Landesbibl. HB VI 62 (H 72) fol. 58v-71r (q. 1–30) et 120v-123v (q. 31–36) et dont quelques-unes se retrouvent dans le MS Cambridge, Univ. Libr. Addit. 3321 vol. 2 fol. 26v-31v. Nous y joindrons, en complément, l'énoncé (la seule partie qui nous ait été conservée) d'une q. du MS Vatican, Pal. lat. 678 fol. 98rv. On pourra le comparer avec celui que nous avons déjà publié. C'est bien le měme thème, mais la tournure en est autre. Nous trouverons d'ailleurs le měme procédé dans la série dont nous allons proposer l'analyse.