Early Latin Christian documents translated from Greek (e.g., Latin translations of the Greek New Testament) contain a large number of Greek loan-words. This article attempts to collect and catalogue the Greek loan-words found in the Vulgate New Testament and the early Latin versions of the Apostolic Fathers. In this literature I have identified some 420 loan-words. The purpose of this article is to systematically categorize, analyze, and comment on these loan-words. In the main section of the article the loan-words are divided into discrete content groups based on their origin and/or meaning. These groups include: (1.) words that originated in Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlagen and that were then transliterated into Greek and then Latin; (2.) words with biblical or ecclesiological orientation that are found exclusively or predominantly in early Christian Latin writings; (3.) words that fall into distinct categories of items, persons or places (e.g., “animals,” “items of clothing,” “gems and minerals,” “human occupations”); and (4.) words of a general character that do not fit in any of the above categories. In this section of the article are listed, for each loan-word: first, the Latin word; second, the Greek Vorlage; third, the meaning(s) of the Latin word; and fourth, one example of a passage in the Vulgate New Testament or the Latin Apostolic Fathers in which the Latin word may be found. Loan-words with special characteristics (e.g., Latin hapax legomena) are commented on individually.

Within the collected works of Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century Latin poet who wrote verse for kings, royal officials, bishops, and nuns in Frankish Gaul, there are found three acrostic poems. One, on the themes of captivity and release (5.6) is accompanied by a prose letter (5.6a) in which the poet discusses his methods in composing this work, which he intended for decorative display on a wall. The other two acrostics are written on the theme of the Holy Cross (2.4; 2.5). This paper, which offers a new interpretation of the figurative acrostics on the Holy Cross, begins first by examining the compositional strategies discussed by Fortunatus in 5.6a and his use there of the extended metaphor of weaving for the composition of acrostic poetry. The paper then moves to a wider discussion of weaving as a metaphor in Fortunatus's poetry before exploring how the poet played with metaphors and materiality, particularly in those instances when he was writing verse intended to be actually placed on material objects or sent with them. It finally goes on to argue, on the basis of indications within the acrostic poems on the Holy Cross themselves and much circumstantial evidence external to them, that these poems (2.4; 2.5) were written for public display in the chapel of the Holy Cross convent at Poitiers. It argues that these acrostics were most probably intended as textile designs for church vela or “hangings.”

This article investigates the ideologies which underpinned unconsecrated burial in late Anglo-Saxon legal and religious texts. The exclusion of sinners and criminals from Christian cemeteries has typically been interpreted by scholars as a form of excommunication or an attempt to facilitate damnation. However, a reassessment of legislative, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical sources reveals that this was not so. In tenth-century laws and charters, unconsecrated burial was imposed exclusively by secular authorities; it was only prescribed by ecclesiastical authorities from ca. 1000. This suggests that it originated as a temporal punishment but later came to be used as an ecclesiastical sentence. The following analysis of the textual evidence yields two interrelated arguments. First, this article demonstrates that through the mid-eleventh century, unconsecrated burial was a penalty distinct from ecclesiastical excommunication. Where excommunication was imposed upon living sinners, to coerce them to penance, unconsecrated burial was prescribed for the unrepentant or criminal dead, whose actions placed them beyond earthly help. Second, this article contends that written prescriptions for unconsecrated burial differentiated secular from ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Although laymen and clergy collaborated in the dispensation of law and justice throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, the written evidence for unconsecrated burial shows that this penalty fell either under the authority of secular or of ecclesiastical agents, demonstrating a clearer separation between these spheres than is usually recognized in pre-Conquest England.

It is somewhat rare to be able to analyze the membership of an early medieval women's religious community in any detail. Sant Joan de Ripoll, which operated from the late ninth century until 1017 at modern-day Sant Joan de les Abadesses in Catalonia, provides not just this opportunity but the even rarer chance to evaluate the nuns’ command of writing, by means of a single original charter of 949 that several of them signed autograph. This article argues that the signatures of these nuns indicate that they had in fact been taught to write before joining the nunnery. They are thus a source for female lay, rather than religious, literacy in this time and area. Consolidating this, the article provides a prosopography of the known nuns derived from the other charters of the nunnery's part-surviving archive, including tracing some of their careers beyond the 1017 dissolution of the house. This shows that the members of the comital family who had founded the house and provided several of its abbesses were not otherwise frequent among the nuns; rather, the nunnery recruited from the local notables in its neighborhoods, to whose interest in female literacy these signatures therefore testify. Such support could not prevent the closure of the house, however, and the article closes with a reflection on the agency available to the nuns in a political sphere dominated by male, secular interests.

A scenario well known to Beowulf scholars alleges that after Beowulf has slain the monsters and gone home, Hrothulf, nephew of the Danish king Hrothgar, will murder prince Hrethric to gain the throne when the old king dies. This story, that many Anglo-Saxonists assume is integral to the ancient legend of these kings, is a modern misreading of the poet's allusions to events associated with the Scylding dynasty — a legendary history that the poet arguably takes care to follow. The present essay, in two parts, first shows how the idea of Hrothulf's treachery arose and became canonical under the influence of prestigious English and American scholars, then finds fault with this idea, refuting its “proof” from Saxo Grammaticus and showing how some Anglo-Saxonists have doubted that Beowulf supports an interpretation making Hrothulf a murderer. But when the poet's allusions to future treachery are ambiguous, at least for modern readers, in order to exonerate Hrothulf fully one must go to traditions about the Scylding dynasty outside the poem. Scandinavian regnal lists (including one that Saxo himself incorporates) consistently contradict the event the Saxo passage has been used to prove, as they agree on a sequence of Scylding rulers with names corresponding to those of persons in Beowulf. Attention to this traditional sequence exposes Hrothulf's murder of Hrethric as a logical impossibility. Moreover, the early medieval method of selecting rulers suggests that neither did Hrothulf usurp the throne of Denmark. In sum, careful scrutiny of the best Scandinavian evidence and rejection of the worst reveals Beowulf's “treacherous Hrothulf” to be a scholarly fantasy.

Through an Anglo-Norman case study, this article highlights the value of normative liturgical material for scholars interested in the role that saints’ cults played in the history and identity of religious communities. The records of Anglo-Saxon cults are largely the work of Anglo-Norman monks. Historians exploring why this was the case have therefore concentrated upon hagiographical texts about individual Anglo-Saxon saints composed in and for monastic communities in the post-Conquest period. This article shifts the focus away from the monastic to those secular clerical communities that did not commission specific accounts, and away from individual cults, to uncover the potential of historical martyrologies for showing how such secular communities remembered and understood their own past through the cult of saints. Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3518, is a copy of the martyrology by the ninth-century Frankish monk, Usuard of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, written in and for Exeter cathedral's canons in the mid-twelfth century. Through investigation of the context in which it was produced and how its contents were adapted to this locality, this article uncovers the various different layers of the past behind its compilation. It further suggests that this manuscript is based on a pre-Conquest model, pointing to the textual debt Anglo-Norman churchmen owed to their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.

The discovery of a copy (in Lincoln MS 230) of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Sentences in three books (starting with the hexameral discussion that follows the treatise on the angels in the four-book version edited by Brady) makes possible for the first time investigating the development of the Lombard's theological teaching during his Parisian teaching career and the fortuna of that teaching outside of Paris. The fact that the Lombard began his early-career lectures on the Sentences in precisely the same place as he began his lectures on Genesis means that all of his teaching originated with Scripture. Moreover, the fact that Lincoln MS 230 is one of many early copies of the Lombard's Parisian teaching found in English cathedral libraries — Lincoln's Cathedral Library has another manuscript containing another copy of the Sentences, Lincoln MS 31, this one on four books, almost certainly copied within the Lombard's lifetime — has revealed the inadequacy of Brady's edition for scholarly understanding of the Lombard's career and teaching. Until now, no scholar paid much attention to the fact that Brady's choice of manuscripts was largely arbitrary and that his edition reflected the state of the Lombard's text around the time of Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus this discovery makes clear that the Sentences, like Gratian's Decretum and Comestor's History, developed over time. The Sentences were not, as so long assumed, a book written by the Lombard late in his career but rather the product of lectures delivered over the course of his career. The discovery of a treasure trove of English manuscripts preserving the Lombard's earliest extant Parisian teaching will enable scholars for the first time to trace the origins and development of the institutional practices of the cathedral school of Paris right up to the time of its transformation into the University of Paris.

Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada's Historia Romanorum depends, when describing some of Aeneas's adventures and the origins of Rome, both on the anonymous paraphrase of the Excidium Troie called Excidium, and on the paraphrase of Paul the Deacon's Historia Romana copied in some manuscripts related to the codex Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek Hist. 3. Some features of Jimenez de Rada's Historia de rebus Hispanie also follow the paraphrase of Exordia Scythica copied in the same family of manuscripts. The antigraphus of the Bamberg codex, probably written in Campania in the tenth century, seems to have been the textual model for Jimenez de Rada, a man who used to travel to Italy and visit the papal court. Besides proving this fact, this paper aims to follow the steps of Excidium Troie, a text whose presence in medieval Spain is detectable, although in a particular version, in some manuscripts of the late 13th century.

Se procede a la identificación de algunos de los versos incluidos en el De rebus Hispanie de Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (1170–1247), hasta ahora no identificados.

The Virgin Mary, as Mother of the Word, has long been associated with early literacy training in the medieval West, an association that, as this article argues, connects her to The Marriage of Philology and Mercury's Lady Grammar. While Gary P. Cestaro has demonstrated the ways in which representations of Lady Grammar became more maternal throughout the medieval period, this article demonstrates how and why the Virgin Mother took on the persona of Lady Grammar in both verbal and material arts from the High to the Late Middle Ages. It explores the famous sculptures of the Virgin and Lady Grammar on the Royal Portal at Chartres Cathedral, the writings of grammatical theorists that led to these depictions, and the thirteenth-century artes poetriae that portray Mary as a Christian Grammatica. From St. Augustine's declaration that grammar is a “guardian” to the claims of Gervais of Melkley, John of Garland, and Eberhard the German that Mary is the mother of beautiful expressions, grammatical thought and practice in the medieval West led to a characterization of the Virgin, guardian of the Word in her womb and parent to Wisdom, as the supreme teacher and exemplar of Latin. Adopting Lady Grammar's iconography of the nourishing breast, classroom text, and punitive whip, the Virgin Mary is not only connected to basic Latin instruction but also comes to embody its principles.

Despite its rarity, hermaphroditism is often discussed in medieval texts in theoretical and practical contexts by canonists, theologians, and natural philosophers. For the canonist or theologian, hermaphroditism raised questions concerning baptism, marriage, entry to clerical orders, and legal status. For the natural philosopher, the hermaphrodite seemed to violate the strict dichotomy of male and female. Here I examine Albert the Great's natural-philosophical treatment of hermaphroditism. Albert rejects the view that hermaphrodites constitute a “third sex” and instead invokes Aristotle's authority to show that hermaphrodites are a “monstrous” flaw in nature. He carefully investigates the manner in which nature produces hermaphrodites in the womb and introduces a discussion of the generative capacity of hermaphrodites themselves. He concludes that they are incapable of reproducing in and of themselves (i.e., they are incapable of auto-fecundation) although they seem able to generate in another individual through coition.

Saint Augustine “hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse,” declares a couplet early in Chaucer's retelling of the story of the Roman rape victim and suicide Lucretia — prompting the majority of modern commentators to conclude that the poet either never read Augustine's treatment of the story directly, or subsequently forgot what it says, or speaks here with deliberate irony. How, they ask, could anyone familiar with that text (City of God 1.19) judge it to be compassionate? But a second look reveals that the question has some positive answers, particularly when one attends not merely to the single chapter that names Lucretia but also to the surrounding thirteen-chapter discussion of rape and suicide in general. There Augustine shows compassion in several concrete ways that later summarizers omit and most modern readers overlook; the text even includes “compassion” in the strictest etymological sense of an attempt to feel-and-suffer-with a rape victim by imagining her inner world. Close attention to Chaucer's poem (the fifth in the Legend of Good Women) then uncovers more positive evidence for direct knowledge of Augustine, namely several apparent Chaucerian innovations in the story — most dramatically the fact that his Lucretia swoons just before the rape rather than “yielding” — that are easy to explain if the author was influenced by the City of God but are unnecessary or simply puzzling if not. A brief conclusion suggests points at which Chaucer's direct knowledge of Augustine's text might affect our interpretations of other poems.

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.