During the past decade there has been a significant shift of emphasis in work on the medieval canonists. The traditional studies on the literary history of canonistic sources and on problems of specifically ecclesiastical jurisprudence continue to flourish, and, indeed, have been stimulated by the plans for a new edition of Gratian's Decretum; but alongside this work, and complementary to it, there has appeared a new trend, a lively interest in the content and influence of canonistic doctrine concerning public law and political theory. This trend, moreover, shows all the international diffusion — and even, perhaps, something of the interplay of national susceptibilities — that its exponents have discerned in the work of the medieval canonists themselves. It is especially interesting that notable contributions have come from England and the United States as well as from the more established centers of canonistic studies.

In the first of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton,' appear the following lines:

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
……………
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Eliot returns to the image of the garden and the children in the last of this cycle, ‘Little Gidding‘:

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness…
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Thanks to several biographical studies based on Cardinal Rampolla's monumental Santa Melania giuniore, senatrice Romana, the history of the early-fifth-century heiress and ascetic, Melania the Younger, is fairly well known. Her grandmother, Melania the Elder was an even more notable figure in the history of the Church during the second half of the fourth century. She is of particular importance in tracing the history of late-fourth-century asceticism and monasticism. Round her career, in a way, revolve many of the historical and chronological problems in connection with Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia, Paulinus of Nola and Severus Sulpicius. Details of her travels are our surest approach to datings and to the authenticity of much of the material found in Palladius' Lausiac History. At the same time, she was an extremely interesting, well-travelled, and forceful figure coming at the apex of the western patristic period. Hence her career bears pointed scrutiny.

Lorsqu'on lit dans les documents du 13e siècle qu'un jeune noble a reçu les armes, le ceinturon de la militia ou l'épée, qu'il est devenu ou a été fait miles, ou encore qu'il a été promu à la militia, on traduit tout naturellement que ce jeune noble a été ‘adoubé’; on exprime par ces mots la cérémonie de remise des armes par laquelle il a été ‘fait Chevalier’ et est ainsi entré dans l'Ordre de la Chevalerie. Mais lorsque cette remise d'armes se passe au 9e ou au 10e siècle, bien avant que la chevalerie telle qu'on l'entend généralement soit apparue, on ne peut évidemment pas donner à cet événement la même signification ‘chevaleresque.’

Als der Bischof von Burgos, Pablo de Santa Maria, 1429 im Alter von 80 Jahren für seinen Sohn Alonso gleichsam als geistliches Vermächtnis einen Kommentar zur Heiligen Schrift schreiben wollte, da brauchte er nicht von vorne zu beginnen. In der 100 Jahre zuvor (1322–32) verfaßten Postilla litteralis des französischen Franziskaners Nicolaus von Lyra († 1349) lag ihm ein Kommentar vor, der weithin den Vorstellungen des zum Christentum konvertierten ehemaligen Rabbiners entsprach, nämlich ein Kommentar, der in ständiger Auseinandersetzung mit der jüdischen Exegese die ganze Bibel in ihrem buchstäblichen Sinne erläutert; Pablo de Burgos konnte sich damit begnügen, Additiones zur Postilla des Nicolaus zu schreiben.

The last canto of Dante's Paradiso brings the Commedia to an appropriately climactic end: to a point of closure matched by few or—as most Dantists would probably be willing to put it—any other works of art. One explanation for this is that what the ending reveals all but forces on the reader a retrospective look at the vast terrain that has come before. The richness of the end emerges from and folds back into the richness of the entire work. Thus the vision at the end constitutes an intense paradox. It is the climax of the journey but also its ground, its final cause but its formal cause as well. Everything that has come before can only be fully understood in terms of that final vision. Indeed, it has now become something of a commonplace in Dante studies to say that to finish reading the Commedia is finally to be able to begin to read it.

For over a century, liturgical manuscripts from the Augustinian priory at Klosterneuburg have tended toward a misleading androgyny. While scholars have long known that Klosterneuburg was a double house, with separate precincts for men and for women, many have been content to regard the liturgical manuscripts preserved there as reflecting the institution as a whole, or of the men in particular. To be sure, some manuscripts have always been recognized as women's books. For other manuscripts, though, such gendered associations have proven elusive. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in discussions of Klosterneuburg's twelfth-century antiphoners (A-KN 1010, A-KN 1012, and A-KN 1013). Among the earliest musical manuscripts in German-speaking Europe to show pitches on a staff, these manuscripts have been seen by many scholars as reflecting the use of Klosterneuburg generally, if at all, while a few scholars have associated them with the women of Klosterneuburg specifically. Whether the result of an unusual placement for the feast of the Dedication of the Church or the conformance of the musical notation with that of manuscripts known to be associated with the women, the occasional assignments of the twelfth-century antiphoners to Klosterneuburg's women were more a consequence of what was not known about the women and their liturgical practice (the date for their church's dedication, for example) than of what was known. The very lack of information about the liturgical practice of Klosterneuburg's women, moreover, has cloaked an even larger obstacle to understanding the liturgical manuscripts used by the women and the liturgy that was expressed within them. For all the attention given these manuscripts, and for all the consideration given to the possible connection between these manuscripts and the canonesses, few scholars have considered the possibility that the liturgy celebrated by Klosterneuburg's women might have been independent from that of the men.

Medieval historians, diplomatists, and canonists alike will welcome the news from Gottingen that Professor W. Holtzmann is preparing the critical edition of a corpus of papal decretals of the twelfth century. It is altogether fitting that this project should be undertaken by a scholar universally recognized as the foremost authority on the decretal collections; and also that he should have decided to detach it from the G6ttingen Academy's monumental enterprise, as designed and directed for over forty years by the late Paul Kehr, which has as its ultimate goal a complete edition of the twenty thousand odd papal letters extant from the earliest times to the accession of Innocent III-an enterprise which we may not hope to see completed within this generation. Professor Holtzmann, in the course of his connection with the general Papeturlcundenuierks, has come to realize that the decretal letters of the twelfth century offer both an historical interest and a critical problem of their own. The first is easily seen by their paramount significance, especially since the pontificate of Alexander III, for the development of Canon law in doctrine and its consolidation in practice; the second consists in the peculiarities connected with their being transmitted in collections made by canonists for the use of canonists. The purpose of such collections, i.e. the intention to serve, broadly speaking, the needs of schools and courts, entailed certain well-known textual developments, resulting in a sharp contrast with any kind of archival tradition: neglect of formal elements of the individual letter, especially of its protocol and eschatocol; abbreviation of its juridically irrelevant portions; dissection, at least in the systematic collections, of slecretals dealing with divers matters in order to distribute their contents under several titles, etc.

This is the second of several essays investigating the continuity of literary theory and of the principles which may account for its development. In the first, ‘The Ancient Hypothesis of Fiction: An Essay on the Origins of Literary Theory,’ I described how the nature and sources of literary terminology might indicate the premises upon which a theory of literature, in the sense of fiction or poesis, was conceived and defended. The adoption of terms from medicine, politics, ethics, geometry, dialectic, and rhetoric by those who first discussed the purposes and deficiencies of fiction reveals the way in which a theory of literature may have been forming in its borrowed vocabulary prior to the recorded documents, as well as the ways in which later theorists would perceive, define, and defend their critical principles. Since the premises of its emergence were to determine its methods of survival and transmission, I shall briefly recapitulate my previous analysis of them as an introduction to the present essay.

The most outstanding event in the history of the military orders at the end of the thirteenth and start of the fourteenth centuries was, of course, the dissolution of the Temple. This was not, however, an isolated happening. Although the accusations which led to the abolition of that order had been publicly voiced only shortly before the Templars‘ arrest, the proceedings against the Temple took place at a time when criticism of the military orders in general was mounting, and this growth of hostile opinion no doubt facilitated Philip IV's attack on the Templars. Ever since their foundation the military orders had been subjected to some criticism, but much early censure had been of a kind which might be directed against any religious establishment, especially by members of the secular clergy who found that their authority and resources were being impaired by the privileges which the military orders and other religious institutions enjoyed: it was not primarily concerned with the orders’ contribution to the struggle against the infidel. But as the fortunes of the crusading states declined, the military orders became increasingly criticised for their inadequacies as defenders of Christendom. Defeat in the Holy Land had to be explained by faults on the Christian side rather than in terms of Muslim superiority, and the military orders were an obvious target for attack. The authors of the numerous crusading proposals which were put forward in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries were inevitably influenced by this growing criticism, and many crusading plans therefore included suggestions concerning the military orders. Those who drew up proposals did not themselves provide a reasoned or detailed account of the orders' faults or attempt to judge to what extent these failings contributed to Christian defeats, but the criticisms on which they based their plans were clearly not altogether groundless: although some strictures were ill-informed or excessive, the policies which the orders themselves pursued certainly provided a starting-point for the growth of hostile opinion. Yet some writers did not seek merely to remedy existing defects in the orders; they sought also to discuss what the role of the military order should be in the struggle against the infidel, and thus viewed the subject in a rather wider context.

Recent scholarship presents us with a difficult choice between two main trends: Deor as artistic transformation of a charm; and Deor as a ‘veritable Consolatio Philosophiae of minstrelsy.’ Morton Bloomfield's 1964 article compared the form of Deor to that of charms and concluded that it is ‘either a sophisticated, Christianized charm … or a poem influenced by the charm form and meant to suggest its prototype.’ Although strikingly original and brilliantly documented, Bloomfield's idea has not won many followers because a few years after its publication the Boethian trend, announced in Lawrence's 1911 phrase quoted above, set in strongly; following Murray Markland (1968) a series of scholars have pursued the trail of Boethian influence in impressive, if overingenious, articles. Now even essays dedicated to the formal-critical (rather than literary-historical) consideration of the poem usually include an obligatory tip of the hat to the suffering senator, and I think it would be fair to say that the standard view of the poem now combines the older notion of a general consolation with specific Boethian influence into what we might call a mild pseudo-Boethian optimism. The Boethian reading seems to me vulnerable judged under its own principles; but rather than trying directly to refute it, the present contribution will attempt to stake out the essentials of a new position between Bloomfield and Boethius by means of new external evidence. The present effort will, however, remain at the level of a prolegomenon to interpretation; depending on the reception of the present arguments and conjectures, I would hope to offer a fuller reading of the poem and its context in Old English literary history.

It has been some years since any attempt has been made at a comprehensive re-evaluation of the work of Roger Bacon, although he is perhaps as alluring and mystifying as ever, and more or less creditable studies of various aspects of his work continue to emerge at regular intervals. For the most part, these do little to dispel the myths and countermyths that have always surrounded Bacon's work. The main source of this confusion must obviously be Bacon himself. By diligent searching in his various works and fragments of works, he can be made to say practically anything the commentator wants him to say.

This study is concerned with Augustine's use of habit (consuetudo) to explain man's reluctance to raise his mind to God, and his difficulty in doing good. In the books that will be examined here, consuetudo is nearly always used in a pejorative sense, and can thus be translated as bad habit (be it of a psychological or ethical nature). Habit as a formal instrument of thought was known to Augustine early in his life from a reading of the Categories. There he learned that habit was a quality of a substance, not a substance itself: ‘One kind of quality let us call habits ἕξιϛ and conditions (διάθεσις). A habit differs from a condition in being more stable and lasting longer. Such are the branches of knowledge and the virtues. Justice, temperance, and the rest seem to be not easily changed.’ Augustine was also aware of the idea of habit as a second nature (consuetudo secunda natura), i.e. a tendency which is created by one's own activity, and which in turn produces effects in a predictable sort of way. This idea was a commonplace of the ancient world, and may have come to Augustine through the professors of rhetoric, who taught speech and composition through the inculcation of good habits.

The search for the sources on which Chaucer's Parson's Tale is based reached a stage of temporary finality when, in her contribution to Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Germaine Dempster summarized and refined the results of half a century of investigations. By then it had become clear that the outcome of Kate Petersen's earlier study had stood the test of over three decades and that, in consequence, the Parson's Tale may be considered as ultimately deriving from two Latin summae of the thirteenth century, that of Raymond of Pennafort (for the sections on Penitence) and that of Peraldus (for the treatment of the Seven Deadly Sins). At the same time, Mrs. Dempster recognized that neither summa is the immediate ancestor of the Parson's Tale, but that, for a number of reasons, the Tale must be thought of as immediately deriving from one or several intermediaries between it and the two ancestral summae. Although a number of Latin and vernacular religious manuals were suggested for such a role, none of them is really close enough to a substantial part of the Parson's Tale to be looked upon as a source or even a close analogue. Hence a mood of pessimistic resignation has settled on the whole question of sources, aptly summed up in Professor Bloomfield's account:

The parallels given by scholars do not prove any direct borrowing on Chaucer's part. When we find close similarities, we find also that they occur in the most traditional details…. Miss Petersen's argument that the section on the chief sins comes from an adaptation of Peraldus' work seems to be little justified, except in the most general sense. Her parallels are not particularly impressive. The question must, at present and possibly forever, rest in abeyance.

The study of Hiberno-Latin exegesis is a young medieval discipline. As the name suggests, it deals with the exegesis of the Bible by Irishmen writing in Latin. In practice, this discipline is confined to the period from the coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century to the Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth. Furthermore, it deals almost exclusively with texts from Irish circles on the continent because so few texts survive from Ireland itself. Scholars had long known of Irish exegetes like Sedulius Scottus and Aileran the Wise who were usually well-known or at least unquestionably Irish. The works of many Hiberno-Latin exegetes simply languished in anonymity — until 1954.

Recent interpretations of the Old English poem Judith have discussed it either in the light of the interpretations suggested by Ælfric, or in terms of widely known patristic treatments which antedate the poem. Thus Professor J. E. Cross refers to Ælfric's Letter to Sigeweard, and discusses the poem as an exhortation intended for ‘contemporary stiffening’ of resistance to the invading Danes. Professor B. F. Huppé, who cites both the Letter to Sigeweard and the peroration of Ælfric's homily on Judith, revives an interpretation originally proposed by T. G. Foster in 1892, and later supported by A. S. Cook in his 1904 edition of the poem: that the heroine Judith was meant to represent Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, in her victorious exploits against the Vikings of the eastern Danelaw, so that the poem is a celebration of English success in countering Danish attacks. This particular interpretation was discussed by Timmer in his introduction to the Methuen edition of Judith, and dismissed, primarily for the reason that there is no evidence that an Old English poem written about a religious figure could symbolize a secular hero. A perhaps more compelling reason for dismissing Huppé's interpretation is the West Saxon ‘conspiracy of silence’ about Æthelflæd: a southern poet of the tenth century would hardly have praised the Mercian leader when West Saxon policy was to cast ‘a blanket of official silence over all [her] achievements.’ In more general terms, however, Huppé agrees with Cross that the poem is a patriotic work, with ‘direct relevance’ to the situation in England, and he elaborates on the idea that the heroine is depicted as an example of ‘heroic virtue.’ In this, his interpretation relates to a third recent interpretation, that of Jackson J. Campbell. Like Huppé, Campbell considers the poem in the light of the exegetical commentaries on the Vulgate Book of Judith. There are not a great number of these, but they are all similar, or easy to relate to one another. The Fathers discuss Judith tropologically as an example of chaste widowhood, or simply as an example of chastity, ‘chaste purity’ (Aldhelm), the life of the dedicated contemplative, vowed to chastity (Jerome); in this case Holofernes represents the flesh, or carnal temptation, ‘the vice of the wicked flesh’ (Aldhelm). Secondly, they see her as a type of the Church, cutting off the head of the Old Serpent symbolized by Holofernes. Most Anglo-Saxons who knew the story of Judith would probably have known these stock interpretations; in particular Campbell shows how the poem suggests the interpretation that Judith is a type of Ecclesia.

More than fifty years have now passed since M. R. James published his British Academy lectures on the Apocalypse in medieval art under the title The Apocalypse in Art (London 1931). As we approach the coming of the second millennium, the last few decades have witnessed an exponential rise in the number of scholarly publications dealing with apocalyptic imagery in the Middle Ages, particularly with regard to illuminated manuscripts. An increasing number of scholars entering this fascinating field of research each year has created a genuine need for more direct and convenient access to the wealth of material that now exists on this rich and complex subject. The project for the present census and bibliography of manuscripts containing Apocalypse illustrations, c. 800–1500, was developed from the authors' individual research and was prompted by the recognition that every medievalist who wishes to work with this material must first invest considerable time and energy in gathering this sort of data and bibliography before any serious research can begin. Our compilation is therefore designed to serve primarily as a helpful starting point for scholars from all disciplines in medieval studies with a research interest in some aspect of medieval Apocalypse illustrations.

While certain of the faithful say that in the mystery of the body and blood of Christ, daily celebrated in the church, nothing takes place under a figure, under a veil, but it is performed with a naked manifestation of truth itself, others bear witness, however, that these elements are contained beneath the figure of a mystery, and that it is one thing which appears to the bodily sense but another which faith beholds. No small divergence is to be distinguished between them.

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.

The ordinances on the Jews of 1223 and 1230 are generally described as the beginning of effective general legislation by the Capetians, yet agreement on the constitutional importance of the ordinances has not produced agreement on their precise meaning and significance. On the one hand, historians such as Esmein, Viollet, Declareuil, Chénon, Perrot, Fawtier, and Olivier-Martin, who followed Flammermont and Luchaire's analysis of royal legislative power, have held that all the provisions of both the 1223 and the 1230 ordinance bound both those who had consented and those who had not, and were applicable throughout the kingdom. On the other hand, an older view stemming from Brussel and Petiet, followed hesitantly by Glasson, and most recently advanced by Petit-Dutaillis, has maintained that, although the 1230 ordinance was applicable in its entirety throughout the kingdom, the ordinance of 1223 either applied in its entirety only to those who had consented to it, or else contained only one provision applicable to those who had not sworn to observe it. This disagreement results partly from ambiguities in the texts, but it is also a result of a failure to set the ordinances in the context of their avowed purposes.