In his Epitaphios for the emperor Julian, composed in Antioch at some point between 365 and 368, Libanius describes an embezzlement trial that was held most likely in 359, in which Julian ruled against the accused, defying the wishes of Constantius II’s praetorian prefect, Florentius. Libanius puzzlingly suggests that the trial prompted Julian’s campaign to rebuild fortresses in Batavia and to restore shipments of British grain blockaded by barbarian forces. Scholars have yet to explain the causal and chronological relationship between these events. This article suggests that Libanius’s narrative is a propagandistic representation of several distinct stages of the taxation dispute Julian fought with Florentius. With the aid of recent advances in our archaeological understanding of agricultural practices in Britain and on the lower Rhine, the article argues that in response to this dispute, Julian’s Batavian campaign was intended to disrupt longstanding access by barbarians on the lower Rhine to the later Empire’s military supply mechanisms.

The study of late antique and early medieval urban religion in the Iberian Peninsula suffers from a dearth of datable and localizable source material. Martyr passions abound, as do liturgical texts, but these almost always survive only in later manuscripts, filtered through monastic libraries and scriptoria. How far these copies preserve the genuine texts performed in earlier cult remains an open question. This article intervenes in this discussion by focusing on a somewhat unusual cult known as the ‘Innumerable’ or ‘Eighteen’ martyrs of Zaragoza. The cult’s Passion text survives in two variant redactions. One originates from the sixth-century city of Zaragoza, the cult’s center, while the other derives from the Carolingian monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in ninth-century Paris. These divergent lines of transmission make possible a comparative study that both elucidates the process of ‘monasticization’ that the Passion underwent in Carolingian hands and vindicates the relative conservatism of the Iberian lines of transmission. Indeed, the Iberian manuscripts retain a remarkable amount of distinctly local material, thereby presenting a rich case study in the civic and oral sensibilities of martyr passions. This article places the Passion back in its civic context, amidst the complex and fractious religious life of Visigothic Zaragoza, complementing the burgeoning interest in communal liturgical and ceremonial life evident among historical liturgists and musicologists. More broadly, it shows that Iberian passions are indispensable texts for historians of urban religious expression and civic Christianity in the Visigothic period.

The letter written by Archbishop Manasses I of Reims (c. 1069–1080) to papal legate Hugh of Die in early 1080, first published by Jean Mabillon in 1687 and traditionally known as the Apologia, offers a vigorous defense of archiepiscopal prerogative against legatine authority during the pontificate of Gregory VII. Long thought to be the original letter sent to Hugh, the Mabillon text is, in fact, a later, expanded recension of the archbishop’s letter created to support resistance to Gregory VII’s reform agenda. The original, shorter version of Manasses’s letter survives uniquely in a little-studied, sixteenth-century copy at Wolfenbüttel. The expanded recension was likely compiled as part of a legal dossier assembled to defend ecclesiastical traditions and clerical privileges, including marriage, in the church province of Reims. Through a textual analysis and comparison of the versions of Manasses’s letter, what once was seen as a singular protest emerges as a strategic text within a broader regional pushback against Rome and reveals how local clerical networks harnessed legal tools to challenge papal reform. The history of the letter’s preservation and reproduction, from Mabillon to modern editors, in turn demonstrates the necessity of querying the manuscript and printed evidence of sources from the eleventh-century reform period to better understand how they were deployed and how modern editorial choices have shaped our reception, and hence our assumptions, about the texts.

Most scholars tend to focus on the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Anselm of Aosta’s Proslogion and they often consider any meditative features to be of little importance. I will argue that reading the Proslogion as a meditative text can be justified based on the manuscript evidence and its textual history. A careful examination of the manuscript witnesses to this text reveals at least four versions, which enabled different readings of the text. I will argue that one version was a more meditative reading, namely, the first version of the Proslogion. That focus is also attested by the type of texts that travelled with this version from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Having established the validity of such a reading, I will bring to the surface the features of the Proslogion that make it a meditative text. Of the many possible outcomes focusing on the meditative features of the Proslogion, this essay will explore only one here: the fool of chapter two emerges not as some heretic, pagan, or proto-atheist, with whom Anselm has engaged in intellectual combat. Instead, in the mimetic tradition of meditative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fool is Anselm himself and, by extension, the reader.

This study both reveals and resolves a basic problem elided by the historiography of early kabbalah. The problem is that scholarship has followed obsolete research from the 1940s by putting a single fragmentary text to a task that it is unfit to perform. More than eighty years ago, Gershom Scholem adduced a short fragment copied in sixteenth-century Italy to show that the kabbalists’ signature doctrine of divine androgyny goes all the way back to the earliest medieval authority to whom kabbalistic knowledge is traditionally ascribed, namely, the Provençal sage Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières (the Rabad, per his acronym). After reviewing the contents of the fragment and exposing its paratextual relationship to the Rabad’s Baʿale ha-nefesh, this study provides ample grounds for dismissing the fragment’s ascription to the Rabad, and, more generally, for rejecting the attribution of any kabbalistic writing to this foundational figure. The study then proceeds to collate the fragment with an early-fourteenth-century family of texts associated with Shem Ṭov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon—texts expounding the wisdom of Naḥmanides—to establish the late provenance of a fragment, thought heretofore to date to twelfth-century France, espousing a doctrine that scholars believed had shaped the tradition from the beginning. The conclusion, which discusses the ramifications of removing the (Pseudo-)Rabad fragment from the archive of early kabbalah, is followed by an appendix containing a suite of paleographic evidence supporting the arguments advanced in the study.

This article explores medieval Jewish and Christian interpretations of an enigmatic biblical commandment—the mandate to incinerate a red heifer to produce waters of expiation (Num. 19)—as a case study to examine interreligious dialogue in medieval exegesis. It features a critical edition and translation of one such reading by the fourteenth-century Italian poet and intellectual, Immanuel of Rome. Immanuel’s commentary is contextualized both in his own oeuvre as well as in the broader field of contemporary Jewish thought. The article also examines Immanuel’s red heifer exegesis as a unique example of a biblical passage glossed differently in two of the author’s commentaries, which sheds new light on his exegetical methodology. As a biblical precept no longer observed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the red heifer serves as a useful tool to demonstrate the approaches of Jewish scholars who insisted on the integrity of the biblical commandments but grappled to rationalize an especially cryptic ceremony. On the other hand, it also exhibits various exegetical modalities adopted by Christian glossators who struggled to discern the precept’s literal meaning in light of a predominant tradition of allegorical interpretation. When contextualized within the environment of medieval Jews, Christian scholastics, and the mendicant orders, readings of the red heifer rite highlight the interchange of approaches that transcended religious and even temporal boundaries. The article concludes by demonstrating the impact of mendicant vernacular preaching on Jews of the Italian peninsula, focusing on the red heifer interpretation as an example of such dialogue.

This paper seeks to examine various aspects of Templar general chapters and also to draw some comparisons with the general chapters of other orders. Origins, frequency, length, and location are discussed, together with the size and composition of the chapter. The functions of chapters, including legislation, appointments to leading offices, alienation of property, and justice, are considered. The question of capitular seals is also investigated. For many topics the surviving evidence is limited, but some claims that have been made about Templar general chapters are challenged. The evidence about alleged early chapters is not convincing. It seems that chapters were expected to be held annually and not at intervals of five years. There is evidence to show that chapters were occasionally held in western Europe as well as at the Order’s headquarters and other places in the East. Lastly, the assertion that Hospitaller general chapters were more representative than those of the Temple is questioned.

In this paper, I examine the Oratio habita in enarratione Lucii Apuleii, the written version of a speech pronounced by the Bolognese master Filippo Beroaldo the Elder. An inaugural speech for his commentary on Apuleius’s Golden Ass, this text was printed in November 1500 and has, until now, remained unedited and untranslated. In the introduction, I argue that Beroaldo, by imitating Aulus Gellius in his speech, reproduces a distinctive trait of Apuleius, the embodiment of one’s model, thus reducing the distance that separates him from Apuleius. This technique, I contend, reflects a very close relationship with the text and its author (Apuleius), who is not only read and commented on but also ‘lived’ and embodied. In the commentary, I highlight the complex structure of Beroaldo’s speech, analyzing the rich intertextual relationship that he entertains with the ancient authors.

This article presents three new discoveries of Carolingian epistolae formatae from Provence and Catalonia, which update recent editions of the texts in question and offer clues about their historical context and purpose.

Couched within a question about the culpability or innocence of a rape victim in a dramatic case in Gratian’s Decretum lies a quotation attributed to Saint Lucy. This early Christian martyr from Syracuse enjoyed increasing popularity and devotion in northern Italy and beyond by the twelfth century. Gratian appeals to her story and to her own statement as his first authority within this section of his famous textbook, Decretum C.32 q.5, in order to argue that a woman’s chastity or modesty (pudicitia) cannot be tarnished or taken away through physical force. If she does not consent to the act, she is not guilty and her purity remains. This note discusses the story about Lucy, explains the liturgical centrality of narratives like it, and, with an examination of several twelfth-century manuscripts, tracks down the source (or likely source type) for the dialogue Gratian quotes. In doing so, it highlights a hitherto underappreciated source for Gratian’s Decretum, namely, hagiography.