It is of course generally recognized that the carvings on medieval misericords, in England as elsewhere, are preponderantly secular in subject, including only a slight sprinkling of biblical and other religious motifs; according to a recent study, ‘only about 4.5 per cent of Britain's almost 8,600 surviving centrepieces and supporters have primarily religious significance, and 1.5 per cent are Scriptural, as compared with over twice that in France.’ To this basic situation we must add that of all medieval art forms, misericords are among those most completely lacking in context, and so are likely to be among the most mute about their own intended meanings. As M. D. Anderson remarks on another of their enigmatic aspects, ‘Between the clearly identifiable subjects and those as clearly not intended to convey any particular meaning lies a mass of work presenting a wide variety of iconographical puzzles’; and while she is referring to the difference between the purely decorative and the iconographically significant in any way, a similar no-man's land must surely be allowed to exist between the clearly non-biblical and the biblical or possibly biblical. An instructive example can be found in a fifteenth-century French misericord now in the church of St.-Cernin, which shows a ‘handsome dancing man with … oriental turban and earrings’ and is identified by its editors — attractively though by no means conclusively — as David dancing before the Lord in 2 Kings (Vulgate) 6.14–16.

Ephraem the Syrian is undoubtedly the best-known holy man of the Syriac-speaking world in the patristic period. Within fifty years of Ephraem's death, Palladius included a notice of him among the ascetic saints whose memory he celebrated in the Lausiac History. Sozomen the historian celebrated Ephraem's memory as a popular ecclesiastical writer, some of whose works had been translated into Greek even during his lifetime. Jerome claimed to recognize Ephraem's theological genius in a Greek translation he read of a book by Ephraem on the Holy Spirit. And toward the end of the fifth century, Gennadius of Marseilles called attention to Ephraem as a composer of metrical psalms. Well within the patristic era itself, therefore, Ephraem's reputation as holy man, theologian, and poet was secure.

A review of the scholarship on the sources of the Old English Christ III makes it increasingly clear that the poem is related to the homiletic tradition, a term used here to refer to both sermons and homilies. This relationship is apparent in three main ways: first, several long passages directly translate known homilies; second, a number of other passages are homiletic in their hortatory tone and their direct apostrophes to their audiences; and third, the constant rearrangement of biblical material to make specific thematic points suggests that the poet was working from homilies rather than directly from the Bible. One example of this third kind of evidence may be instructive since it has not been specifically noted. In describing how man's former deeds are revealed after the general resurrection, the poet writes:

Three Epiphany homilies survive in Old English, two by Ælfric and one numbered sixteenth among the anonymous homilies in the late tenth-century Vercelli Book. True to early medieval convention for this feast, the homilies by Ælfric are devoted principally to the adoration of the magi and to Christ's Baptism, the two earliest manifestations of Christ's divinity. The Vercelli homily stands apart from these in several respects, perhaps most obviously in that it opens with a Gospel lection from Mt 3.13–17 (on the Baptism) rather than Mt 2.1–16 (on Herod's meeting with the wise men), and is the only medieval vernacular Epiphany homily to do so. As other scholars have noted, this pericope associates the homily with Gallican or Neapolitan rather than Roman use and links it liturgically to a small group of early Insular texts that include the Lindisfarne Gospels, St. Cuthbert's Gospels, and St. Burchard's Gospels — all of which contain lists of Gospel lections derived from a Neapolitan lectionary system. In addition, though a portion of the text has been lost, the Vercelli homily covers a range of themes seemingly out of place with Ælfric's more sober reflections on the feast, and the central portion of the homily in particular recounts a series of marvels associated with Christ's Baptism that has no parallel in medieval vernacular homiletic literature. The focus of that passage is a dialogue between Christ and John the Baptist, beginning just after the lost folio. Christ and John discuss the wonders of the Baptism, and the homilist interrupts them to explain this miraculous event as the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy:

Among the range of moral concepts that the Middle Ages derived from Aristotle, few exercised greater influence than the doctrine of habitus (a term ordinarily translated as ‘habit,’ but more properly meaning ‘state’ or ‘condition’). In the thirteenth century, such prominent thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Godfrey of Fontaines, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham placed habitus (derived from the Greek term ἅξις) near the heart of their studies of ethics. It is largely possible to explain thirteenth-century interest in the concept of habitus on the basis of the appearance of Robert Grosseteste's full translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Grosseteste's Latin version, taken in conjunction with a growing interest in the field of ethics among arts masters, rendered the technical vocabulary of Aristotelian moral thought into a commonplace of scholastic philosophy.

In the early 1130s Peter Abelard received three letters from Heloise, once his mistress and wife, now his sister and daughter in religion. The first two were so traumatic that he must have thought twice before scanning the third, in which Heloise resolutely turned from the subject of tragic love to the minutiae of monastic observance. For modern readers the correspondence may lapse from titillation into tedium with this epistle. But Abelard was no doubt immensely relieved. Laying aside her griefs, Heloise now wrote to him as abbess to abbot, asking only two things: a treatise explaining ‘how the order of nuns began,’ and a monastic rule suitable for her nuns at the Paraclete. Although they were already observing the Benedictine Rule, she complained that as this rule ‘was clearly written for men alone, it can only be fully obeyed by men,’ because it is not fair to lay ‘the same yoke of monastic ordinance on the weaker sex as on the stronger.’ Heloise went on to specify several concrete areas of concern, such as the use of meat and wine, the dangers of hospitality, the practice of manual labor, and the liturgical role assigned to the abbot. To underline her point, she even observed that the regulation underwear prescribed in the Benedictine Rule was not suitable for women, because ‘the monthly purging of their superfluous humours must avoid such things.’

The disease of love (amor hereos) proved a topic of longstanding interest at the medical school of Montpellier between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. From Arnald of Villanova and Bernard of Gordon in the late thirteenth century to Valescus of Taranta and Jacques Angeli in the fifteenth, generations of Montpellier masters and students studied, expounded, and debated the lover's malady. Gerard of Solo, who received his master's degree in medicine from Montpellier in 1335, and who remained at the university to become a leading figure of medical scholasticism, compiled a university exercise on lovesickness, the Determinatio de amore hereos. Though best known to students of lovesickness as the author of a commentary on the ninth book of al-Rāzī's Liber ad almansorem, Gerard's Determinatio, which is probably his magisterial version of a disputation on love, treats the subject more systematically than does the commentary on al-Rāzī. The Determinatio, which represents how the topic of lovesickness was taught outside the framework of textual commentary, provides a useful summary of fourteenth-century scholastic medical doctrine on love.

When, in the first canto of Purgatorio, Vergil requests permission to ascend through the Mountain's seven kingdoms, Cato issues instructions for the requisite purification. Vergil complies, descending with Dante to the base of the island, where he applies the morning dew to remove dirt and tears from Dante's eyes and cheeks, and girds Dante with a smooth rush. This brief drama, said to restore the color to Dante's face and to prepare for a meeting with the primo ministro (98–99) of paradise, is both the most densely ritualized moment of transition between the first two canticas and the thematic centerpiece of Purgatorio 1.

We all ‘know’ that medieval Aristotelians did not believe that a vacuum was possible, and we are complacent in our ‘knowledge’ that they were wrong. Even if we have an inkling of the sophistication of much medieval thinking on this topic, we are unlikely to suppose that anything medievals had to say on the subject is worth the trouble to study. What we may not realize is that not all medievals thought a vacuum or motion in a vacuum was impossible; following Avempace, in fact, many medieval philosophers argued that motion in a vacuum was possible, at least in theory.

In 1961 Robert Kaske called attention to an eschatological prophecy of a certain ‘frater Columbinus’ which had attracted scant notice before. Until now there has been no close study of the prophecy, perhaps because of the apparent lack of early evidence relating to the ‘frater’ and his work. Some recent discoveries, however, cast light on the origins and significance of what we consider one of the most original and interesting prophetic texts of the later Middle Ages.

Among the persistent problems of Piers Plowman criticism, that of defining the meaning of the poem's title figure still holds a prominent place. The problem is largely one of finding or forging a unity out of the bewildering multiplicity of Piers's roles in the poem. Skeat, the poem's first modern editor, proposed three discrete meanings for Piers in three parts of the poem: in his first appearance (B 5–7) he is ‘the type of the ideal honest man’; in the second (B 15–18), Christ; in the third (B 19–20), Peter and his worthy successors in the papal office. Later critics, searching for a means of unifying these three, have fallen roughly into three traditions, each with its own approach to the ‘problem of Piers.’

Gildersleeve gave ὄλβος, ϰόϱος, ὓβϱις, and ἂτη as the genealogy of evil characteristic of archaic Greek thought. Greene observed a fifth item at the end of the sequences in Solon 13. Commenting on Aeschylus, Agam. 757–62 Denniston and Page note that ‘ϰόϱος—ὓβϱις—ἂτη are often linked together as successive elements in the downfall of man.’ More recently Doyle has challenged the very existence of a ‘canonical tetralogy.’ He concludes that there were three triads (ὄλβος—ὓβϱις—ἂτη; ὄλβος—ϰόϱος—ἂτη; ϰόϱος—ὓβϱις—ἂτη); and that they occur too infrequently to be seen as ‘a central doctrine of Greek thought’ (Doyle 302/45).

When Heloise took up the veil, she broke out through her tears into the lament of Cornelia from Lucan's Bellum civile (8.94–98). The story illustrates the extent to which the Bellum civile appealed to the imagination of its medieval readers. Indeed, evidence for the popularity of Lucan in the Middle Ages is abundant. Manuscripts of the work are listed in medieval library catalogues. Lucan was a standard author in the school curriculum from the tenth century. Quotations from Lucan are found not only in the works of Abelard and other writers, but in compilations of history, geography, and even natural science: the poet was regarded as a source for a wide range of knowledge.

A manuscript which was once thought to have belonged to Petrarch and which is now owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia, currently catalogued as MS Lewis European 53, contains several items of interest to historians of philosophy and science. Included among the twelve mostly anonymous treatises in the codex (see below) are three hitherto unnoticed witnesses to the Aristotle commentaries of the Oxford master of arts, Adam of Buckfield. The sixth item in the collection is one of six surviving copies of Adam's commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, four already having been listed in Charles Lohr's inventory published in this journal and the fifth, in a Munich manuscript, having recently been brought to my attention by the same scholar. The ninth item is a copy of the first recension of Adam's commentary on the De sensu et sensato and the tenth item a copy of the first recension of the same master's commentary on the De generatione et corruptione. None of these works has been edited.

The fundamental interpretative difficulty in cantos 26 and 27 of the Inferno, especially in recent years, has been to reconcile the diverse crimes of two characters as unlike each other as Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro, by identifying one sin that would account for their common collocation in the eighth degree of the circle of fraud. Guido da Montefeltro, a relatively pedestrian brand of con artist and a near contemporary of Dante's, is dwarfed by his juxtaposition with the great hero of antiquity, Ulysses, whose epic adventure beyond the known world tends to trivialize any of his particular fraudulent acts enumerated by Dante's guide Virgil (Inf. 26.58–63). Classification is no idle issue, especially for a figure who, apart from his ancient notoriety, has enormous appeal for our own age, an attractiveness he acquired by the grace of the same literary creator who condemned him to hell. Dante's Ulysses, epitome of the most ambitious of secular aspirations — a believer, we might say, in the promise of science and technology, pioneer of research and exploration, and figurehead of enlightened humanism — burns in a tongue of flame as does Guido, a wily military strategist, little more than a common crook. Even if we can organize the various crimes of Ulysses and Guido under one heading of sin, the inescapable focus of both cantos is not on each character's lifetime of trickery but on the moment of his death, where the magnanimity of Ulysses and the pusillanimity of Guido appear most opposed. One of the harshest ironies of the Inferno is that such a gaping discrepancy in chronology, grandeur, historical importance, and apparent moral fiber can be cancelled out completely by a single form of torment. Such a stratification means, in other words, that from the divine perspective Ulysses and Guido are without differentiation.

In this note∗ I want to investigate the relationship between two manuscripts of Peter of Eboli's De balneis puteolanis, a medical work in verse form dating from around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The poem is balneological in nature. It describes the medical properties ascribed in classical and later antiquity to the therapeutic waters in the area of Pozzuoli known as the Campi phlegraei (between Naples and Baia in southern Italy). The poem contains descriptions of up to thirty-seven baths. Some of these are not authentic and the order in which they are treated often varies among the manuscripts. I hope to publish an edition of the poem in which these often very complex details will be treated.

In 1969 Ian Thomson published the texts of two humanist poems with a selective commentary. One of them, Item 144 of the Toledo Cathedral Library MS 100.42, fol. 233r (henceforth T, following Thomson's designation), which also appears as Item 68 in Cod. Vaticanus Barberinianus latinus 42, fol. 328r–v (henceforth simply B, again following Thomson), is a 20-line work attributed to the lawyer Jacobus Cremonensis salaciously describing an erotic contest between Priapus and the nymph Dione. Although Thomson's article appeared two decades ago, I have only recently come upon it, and wish here, if somewhat belatedly, to reply to several of Thomson's textual and other notes on this Priapic poem.

These pages complete the catalogue of early medieval Hiberno-Latin commentaries on the Bible begun in Traditio 44 (1988) 537–71.