We know the events of only five or six years in the life of Severian of Gabala, from A.D. 398 or 399 to 404. We are told that Severian was Syrian by birth and spoke Greek with a Syriac accent. His brother bishop and friend Antiochus of Ptolemais went to Constantinople, probably very soon after Chrysostom's episcopal consecration on 15 December 397 or 26 February 398, and earned a great deal of money preaching. Severian decided to follow his friend's example and went to the imperial capital in 398 or 399 to make his fortune. He was well received by Chrysostom; his preaching was evidently a great success, and he became known to many in high office as well as to the emperor Arcadius and the empress Eudoxia.

Sidonius Apollinaris needs no introduction as by far our best informant for the history of Roman Gaul in the late fifth century and as one of the most accomplished practitioners of the complicated literary style so admired in his age and so often contemned in ours. Because his poems and letters provide abundant evidence for political and social history, most historians have until recently tended to see him as a predominantly secular figure. That impression is heightened by the literary genres he chose for his writings and whose accepted rules and forms he meticulously followed. However, a handful of studies since mid-century, and recently a political biography, have drawn attention to one or another neglected religious dimension of his life. Gradually a hidden Sidonius has been emerging from between the lines of reluctant sources that are not autobiographical by nature or by his intent.

The more spectacular a prediction is, the more frustrating it becomes when the prescribed date passes and nothing happens. This essay will discuss not so much the predictions of yesterday but rather the awakening of the morning after. False predictions left a gap and created the need for explicit or implicit responses to the failed prediction, a need that could be filled by modifying the calculations or condemning fresh speculation. This essay shows how people managed to reconceptualize the order of the world after a.d. 800 = a.m. [annus mundi] 6000, the beginning of the supposed seventh, ultimate millennium. As we consider the intellectual progress of the ninth century, we also need to look at the link between the Carolingian reform and the release of apocalyptic tension or post-apocalyptic exhaustion. This investigation builds on recent contributions to the field of medieval eschatology, especially those of Wolfram Brandes, Richard K. Emmerson, Johannes Fried, Richard Landes, Bernard McGinn, and others. It focuses on selected sources, and particularly on exegetical texts, to show that overcoming the eschatological crisis caused more than a shift in the system of counting years, from annus mundi to ab incarnatione Domini. Questions about dates led to general reflections about time, the past and the future. The significant shift, therefore, was from counting time to a philosophy of time.

In a description of a trip through the Midi of France in 1835, Prosper Merimée devotes a lengthy paragraph to the analysis of the Christ in Vézelay's Pentecost tympanum (fig. 1). He marvels at the carving of the figure's feet and “blessing” hands, as well as the placement of the thighs in relation to the torso. Later in his treatment of the abbey church and its sculpture, the author notes that figures on the nave capitals convey a “savage zeal” (zèle farouche) by means of posture and facial expressions. Gestures, in the widely construed, medieval sense of the word, clearly struck the celebrated French author as a salient feature of Vézelay's sculpture. Merimée sympathized with Romantic visions of the Middle Ages as a period less tainted by the stifling effects of civilization, and perhaps his fascination with the dramatic body movement carved throughout the abbey church reflects the belief that these were unfettered by the artistic or social constraints of the early nineteenth century. Yet throughout his description of Vézelay's sculpture, he never attempts to explore the meanings that the carved body might have held for a medieval audience; their meaning is not considered to be historical, but rather to be self-evident. The operative assumption that gestures in medieval art are transparent in meaning anticipates much subsequent scholarship.

In the early thirteenth century Christian thinkers in the Latin West encountered for the first time the Aristotelian philosophy that was pouring into Europe through translations from Arabic into Latin. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, was one of the principal figures in the first reception of the Aristotelian writings in the West. William, in fact, displayed a remarkable openness to Aristotelian thought, embracing much of it as his own, while firmly rejecting other teachings as opposed to the faith. Despite the various ecclesiastical prohibitions against the teaching of Aristotelian philosophy during the first half of the century, William said, “Although in many matters we have to speak against Aristotle, as is truly right and proper — and this holds for all the statements by which he contradicts the truth — he should still be accepted, that is, upheld, in all those statements in which he is found to have held the correct position.”

As part of giving an account of the incarnation, Thomas Aquinas states that Christ is a composite person:

One of the earliest works of the Majorcan Ramon Lull (1230/35–1315/16) was a Compendium logicae Algazelis (1271/72), a work based on the first section of the Maqâsid al-falâsifa (that is, “Opinions of the Philosophers”) of the great Muslim theologian, Abû Ḥâmid al-Ghazâlî (d. 1111). Algazel was Persian and his Maqâṣid an Arabic form of a Persian work by the celebrated philosopher Ibn Sînâ (d. 1037), known to the Latins as Avicenna. Algazel summarized the philosophy of Avicenna with the intention of refuting it in his Tahâfut al-falâsifa (that is, “Destruction of the Philosophers”). As is generally known, the Cordovan philosopher and jurist, Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198), sought to refute this latter work in his Tahâfut al-tahâfut or “Destructio destructionis.”

Der Karolinus des Aegidius von Paris (12./13. Jahrhundert), der das Leben Karls des Großen darstellt in einer füstenspiegelähnlichen Form zur Unterweisung des künftigen französischen Königs Ludwigs VIII., wurde 1973 erstmals vollständig ediert von M. L. Colker (Traditio 29 [1973], 199–325). Die Ausgabe enthält einen breiten Testimonienapparat, der neben den historischen Quellen des Autors besonders klassische lateinische Dichter, Vulgatastellen und die Alexandreis des Walter von Châtillon berücksichtigt. Allerdings illustrieren die hier angeführten Dichterstellen oftmals nur gängige Hexameterjunkturen und gemeinplätzige dichterische Motive. Andererseits gehen manche dem Dichter in seinen Formulierungen eindeutig vorschwebende Vorbilder gelegentlich verloren, besonders wenn ihre Auffindung erschwert wird durch variierende Textüberlieferung der Vorlage, syntaktisch unrichtige Auffassung durch den imitierenden Dichter oder in einen völlig verschiedenen Zusammenhang versetzende sprachliche Abwandlung.

Although recent studies have shown that women played a larger part in European and American armies in early modern times than standard military histories have been prepared to acknowledge, it has never been suggested that they were regarded as combatants. Individual women who wanted to fight in the ranks had to cross-dress and “pass” as men. Cross-dressing was apparently not unknown even in medieval Christian armies, for, according to a Muslim chronicler, some of the crusaders killed in action in the twelfth century were discovered to have been women, but only after their corpses had been stripped on the field of battle. There were certainly no female fighting units, either then or later, in European armies. Therefore, the statement in a Castilian chronicle, written in the thirteenth century, that precisely such a unit served in the ranks of a Muslim army outside Valencia, has been dismissed as legend. The purpose of this article is to show that it must be taken seriously.

The importance of the commentaries on Aristotle's works in late medieval philosophy cannot be overestimated; they are in many cases the only witnesses to contemporary debates on philosophical topics. They are nonetheless very difficult to use: not only have different versions of the same commentary sometimes been preserved but also different commentaries on the same works, such as the different lecturae of some of Buridan's commentaries. There is also the highly standardized form of the commentaries themselves, where the same questions on a given Aristotelian work are often discussed in the same order. This uniformity is not limited to the titles of the questiones but affects the arguments too, which gives rise to doubts about the originality of the authors. It is easy to think of them as slavishly following an established tradition and so to fail to appreciate the real importance of their commentaries.