In the late third century of the Common Era, the Platonic tradition was changed profoundly under the direction of Iamblichus of Chalcis, head of the Platonic school in Syria. Through the introduction of Egyptian and Chaldaean religious rites as part of the intellectual disciplines of his school, Iamblichus was given the honorific title ‘divine’ (θεĩος) by his Neoplatonic successors. Modern scholars, however, have generally not seen the head of the Platonic school's turning to magic rites as the high point of intellectual progress, and Iamblichus' contribution to Platonism has either been dismissed as a corruption of the tradition or has been left as an irresoluble enigma.

In several texts Augustine speaks of the Word of God as becoming man in order to make men eternal or to free men from time. Though this theme may well be a relatively minor one in Augustine's treatment of the purpose of the Incarnation, it is one that is interesting both in itself and also, I believe, in terms of what it reveals about Augustine's Plotinian understanding of the Christian faith. In this paper I shall first set forth the texts that I have found in which Augustine deals with this liberation of men from time by the Word. Then, after pointing out some problems with this theme, I shall try to show how it is intimately tied to several other themes in Augustine's thought that bear a decidedly Plotinian stamp, especially those of the fall of the soul, the ‘heaven of heavens,’ and the definition of time. Finally I shall argue that though Augustine's claim that the Word came as man to free man from time can be understood in a quite orthodox sense, some of the oddities surrounding this idea are quite likely due to the Plotinian conceptual framework within which the theme is articulated.

There is something immediately appealing about a wandering bard such as the sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, who left his native Italy to seek the hospitality and patronage of the kings and bishops of Merovingian Gaul. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fortunatus attracted the attention of a succession of scholars such as Thierry, Caron, Dostal, Meyer, and Koebner, but it is now over fifty years since the last full-scale treatment of the poet was written: that of the Abbé Tardi in 1927. As a consequence of this, a number of rather questionable biographical details, as they are given in these standard accounts of the poet, have come to be somewhat uncritically accepted. Some re-examination of the evidence for Fortunatus' travels and career is long overdue. My aim here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the poet's career, nor indeed a full biographical sketch, but rather to discuss critically some key issues within these accounts of Fortunatus' career, in the light of the elements of autobiography found in Venantius' poems. As we shall see, an outline of the various stages of his career, both before his arrival in Gaul and during the many years of his residence in his adopted homeland, may be pieced together with the aid of the scattered evidence contained in his poems, yet this evidence is often obviously incomplete and is at times frustratingly ambiguous. Still, we can best proceed in the reconstruction of Venantius' career and travels by investigating what may be established, or brought into question, by the evidence of the poems themselves.

In his Studien zum Psalterium Romanum in England und zu seinen Glossierungen, Karl Wildhagen writes of the Blickling Psalter (MS Pierpont Morgan Library m.776): ‘Dass es gegen Schluss des 10. oder Anfang des 11. Jahrhunderts im Süden und zwar in der bischöflichen (über Canterbury?) oder königliehen Kanzlei zu Winchester gewesen sein muss, beweisen die zahlreichen in ihm befindlichen jüngeren ae. Glossierungen aus dieser Zeit, die durchaus mit der damals in Winchester befindlichen Regius-Glosse übereinstimmen und z. T. sicher aus ihr kopiert sind.’ Helmut Gneuss reiterates Wildhagen's claim for the direct dependence of Blickling (M) upon Regius (D) in his description of the psalter in Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen: ‘Die spätws. Glossen sind vorwiegend und wohl direkt von Ms. D. abhängig.’ Kenneth and Celia Sisam, in their edition of the Salisbury Psalter, significantly qualify the suppositions of Wildhagen and Gneuss on the relationship between the Old English glosses of M and D: ‘Nearly all these later glosses are of type D; those that are not are either commonplace or, like 118.139 tyrging = “zelus” and 129.3 hwa acymϷ = “quis sustinebit,” they are found earlier in the psalms in D. There seems to be no means of defining the exact relation of this derivative to the extant D.’ All three of these statements are unsupported by a systematic and detailed examination of the Old English glosses in M and D to determine whether the later glosses in M derive directly from D or from an indeterminate D-type gloss.

For many years, scholars felt that the unusual elements in Genesis B exonerated Adam and Eve by portraying them as innocent victims of a diabolical deception. In particular, the tempter's apparent disguise as an angel, Eve's vision of heaven, and the consistent emphasis throughout the temptation scene on Adam's and Eve's wholehearted loyalty to God made it difficult to confirm their guilt or to identify their sin. For some time, therefore, Genesis B's sympathetic portrayal of the first parents was accepted as one of the poem's strange unorthodoxies, yet another puzzle in a maze of puzzles. However, the more recent studies of the poem have shown its treatment of guilt to be both less unorthodox and, at the same time, more complex than was earlier suspected. Rosemary Woolf, for example, suggests that Eve was motivated, not by innocent loyalty, but by pride ‘directed towards emulation and envy of Adam’; that she succumbed to the tempter's persuasions because she ‘listened with a willful credulity springing from nascent vanity’; and that the poet's insistence upon Eve's ‘wacra hyge’ and good intentions was an apology necessary to mitigate the impression of Eve as a nagging wife. For her, Genesis B thus portrays a variation on Genesis 3.5, which in familiar commentary was sometimes interpreted to stress Eve's desire to be like Adam.

Robert I of Dreux, third surviving son of Louis VI of France, is a little-known figure. The causes of this obscurity lie in part in the fragmentary and dispersed nature of the sources on Robert but also in the lack of interest which historians have shown regarding both him and the baronial dynasty which he founded. Indeed, no significant work on the counts of Dreux and Braine has appeared since the publication, in 1631, of André Duchesne's antiquarian history of that family. Numerous broader studies of the Capetian monarchy mention Robert in passing, because of the cession of Dreux to him by Louis VII and because of his aborted conspiracy, in 1149, to seize the throne; but it is symptomatic of the state of the scholarship on him that the first event has consistently been misunderstood, while the second is so poorly documented that judgments have ranged from calling it a major crisis for the monarchy to dismissing it as a trivial episode, with inadequate evidence for either view.

The development of sophisticated and complex techniques of literary interpretation was among the greatest achievements of those twelfth-century thinkers who have come loosely to be called ‘Chartrian.’ Chartrian literary allegoresis grew from a reawakened interest in the natural sciences, and a spiritual optimism about man's rational capacity to understand the Creator through his creation. These literary commentators made a habit of encyclopedic digression, using single words or brief passages from their texts to introduce whole chunks of allegorically or literally relevant information from the trivium, the quadrivium, mythology, and natural philosophy. They thus sought to find in their books the whole world of knowledge and the course of spiritual development, even as they had learned to see their world itself as a book. Intimately connected to this was the idea of the arts as a discipline for regaining lost knowledge of divine truths, and education as part of a symbolic spiritual pilgrimage.

In the early spring of 1129, the priory of Notre-Dame at Argenteuil, a house for women some thirteen kilometers northwest of Paris on the Seine, was ‘restored’ to the abbey of Saint-Denis. This restitution took place at a council held by the papal legate in France, Matthew, cardinal bishop of Albano, at the Parisian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The nuns of Argenteuil, accused of scandalous living, were replaced by monks of Saint-Denis. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1122–51) considered the recovery of Argenteuil one of his foremost achievements.

If Peter John Olivi was given less than his due by previous generations of scholars, the present generation seems bent on making it up to him. Recent writers have identified him as a father of fourteenth-century nominalism, as a major architect of the dogma of papal infallibility, as a trail-blazer in economic thought, and as an astute reformer whose advice, if heeded, would have saved the church a good deal of subsequent trouble. In the process, Olivi's image has been substantially refurbished.

In the north of England, as the thirteenth century was drawing to a close, an enterprising and pastorally zealous cleric was engaged in the composition of the most extensive preaching codex in the English language since Aelfric's Catholic Homilies. The text now known as the Northern Homily Cycle (hereafter NHC) was left untitled by an anonymous author who wrote in his native dialect and was well versed in the lore of the north country. He used a rhymed octosyllabic line throughout. His plan encompassed a free rendering of the Gospel pericope for the particular Sunday (the homilies are chiefly dominical), a complementary exegesis drawn from the Fathers, and an exemplum, reflecting a shrewd sense of his audience and the fashion of the time. In these exempla he revealed a catholic taste by selecting stories of saints and monks, stories from antiquity and the east, pieces of local Northumbrian folklore, legends of the Virgin, accounts of miraculous beasts, risqu6 fables, and child-like pious tales.

The medieval wall paintings of Longthorpe Tower (near Peterborough, England), discovered by fortunate accident over thirty years ago, have been the object of several critical investigations; because of their delicate and fragmentary condition, however, it has been impossible to arrive at an exact interpretation of the entire program. Two of these fourteenth-century paintings appear to treat the Seven Ages of Man and the Labors of the Months. Of particular interest is a third large painting (see plate), which depicts the wheel of the five senses. Much attention has been given to elucidating the significance of the five animals positioned on the rim of the wheel and to interpreting the meaning and function of the male figure who stands behind the wheel and appears to govern its motion. The problem of interpretation is not new. Indeed, the unknown artist provided a written guide to these wall paintings, but unfortunately the remnants of these inscriptions, found by the circumference and spokes of the wheel, are now indecipherable. Critics are in general agreement that the painting represents the five senses, and most cite the passage in Thomas of Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum, which pairs specific animals with individual senses.

Michael Scot was a translator of Arabic treatises in the early thirteenth century who was credited by Roger Bacon with introducing parts of the Aristotelian corpus to the Latin West. He was associated with Emperor Frederick II and left a reputation as a wizard and necromancer that endured until the nineteenth century. In spite of this prominence, we know very few facts about his life. This lack of evidence did not deter nineteenth-century antiquarians from writing whole books about him, using conjecture to fill in what is otherwise lacking.