Die germanische Mythologie, die als Lehre von den Mythen begründet wurde, hat sich seit den Tagen Jacob Grimms langsam zu einer Wissenschaft von der Religion der Germanen entwickelt, die sich nicht mehr auf die literarisch fixierten Göttersagen (in den Edden, bei Saxo Grammaticus usw.) beschränkt, sondern alle Äusserungen des Glaubens an das Übersinnliche auf germanischem Volksboden sammelt, einordnet, erklärt.

A small manuscript of only five leaves in Paris, Bibl. Nat. N. A. franç. 10176, which receives a brief notice in the catalogue, contains an early, and so far as known a unique, medieval translation into French of the article from Suidas's Lexicon and of a part of the Testamenta XII Patriarcharum. Both of these works were translated from Greek into Latin by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235–1253. A description of the manuscript follows.

There has recently been a pronounced turning toward the study of English syntax as a separate department of linguistics with its own technique. If, however, the study of English syntax is an attractive and fruitful field, it is too often a most bewildering and deceptive one. Aside from the external dangers of slipping off into irrelevant semantics or into morphology, there is an ever-present danger in the analysis and exposition of the strangely illogical fabric that holds our language together.

Terza Rima is a series of threes, the two outer lines of each riming with each other, the inner line riming with the two outer lines of the next three; in homely terms, like a pile of paper cones set into each other. The first rime in a canto and the last therefore occur only twice, but all the rest three times; none is dropped before a new rime is begun, or, except at the beginning and end of a canto, is confined to a single terzina. A consequence of this structure is that, while (if the sense permits) one or more terzine may be cut off at the beginning or end of a canto without detection of the loss, this is impossible anywhere else; the alternation of rimes and the linking with the preceding and following terzine would be upset. Accordingly omission of lines or passages occurs in the manuscripts with notable rarity.1 This result of the verse form no doubt is well known to some, but, so far as I find, it has never been mentioned in print.

Though since the beginning of the twelfth century scholars have been wondering why Girard de Roussillon was so called, few and unsatisfactory answers have been found to that question. The redoubtable Girard, called in legend de Roussillon, has nothing to do, in history or in legend, with the province of France called Roussillon. The action of the chanson de geste which bears his name never takes place in that province, nor is he ever called its lord. Why, then, is he called de Roussillon?

In Dr. Carleton Brown's admirable study of the narrative which supplied the basis for The Prioresses Tale he pointed out that Chaucer made use of a thirteenth-century exemplum of a Miracle of our Lady. Although the earliest extant versions are of the thirteenth century, the story had its origin before 1200. There is, however, a striking similarity between the details of Chaucer's poem and the Latin exemplum C vi, which Dr. Brown has printed from a collection of Miracles of the Virgin in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS. A.5.10, Lib. ii, Cap 87, written in the fifteenth century. This post-Chaucerian version offers a number of points for comparison: a little boy passed twice a day through the Jewry singing his antiphon. So in Chaucer: Twies a day it passed thurgh his throte, As I have seyd, thurghout the Juerie, This litel child, as he cam to and fro, Ful murily than wolde he synge and crie O alma redemptoris everemo.

Through the notion of corruption, we come to the third example of bug sb. in Moufet's great pioneer work of entomology, of which the first two had been attached to the dung-beetle. As already described (l, 1037), the Insectorum … Theatrum was finished in 1590, though not printed till 1634.

(Other words treated here are Old French (Norman) a voiz, avois, voi, aei; English avoy, hoy, ahey, hey; Provençal aei; Portuguese eoi; Italian voi.) THE recent systematic analysis of the Chanson de Roland with reference to the exact positions of the word aoi in the Oxford manuscript seems definitely to reveal that that puzzling word is almost exclusively used only when there is some sort of shift in the narrative or a distinct pause or a break in the story.

Like the English language, English law may be regarded as the fusion of two great cultural forces—the Germanic “folk-laws,” expressed in the early dooms of Æthelberht (c. 600) and in the laws of Alfred and Canute; and Roman law, as interpreted by the Norman conquerors, and set forth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Glanvill and Bracton. From this fusion has developed a body of law which, in scope and influence, is probably without parallel in modern history. It is interesting to see how many of its basic principles find expression in the common proverbial wisdom of the folk. These proverbs correspond, on a popular level, to the Latin legal maxims of the learned, which represent the concentrated experience of generations of lawyers.

In 1538 John Barlowe, an adherent of Surrey's enemies, exclaimed, “[Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey!] It ys the most folish prowde boye that ys in Englande.” Although Barlowe's companion, George Constantyne, was at one with him in his hostility to the political and religious conservatism of the Howards, he retorted ironically, “What, man, he hath a wife & childe, & ye call hym boye?” and continuing, he ridiculed Barlowe's use of the phrase “folish prowde” as equally inept. Soon after Surrey was executed, however, unfounded traditions began to modify the point of view exemplified by Constantyne's refusal to take Barlow's remark seriously. The repetition of these misleading traditions for more than three centuries has so distorted the conception of Surrey's character and the interpretation of his actions that the justice of Barlowe's remark has come to be accepted without question.

The similarity in structure and content between the South English Legendary and the Legenda Aurea was recognized more than fifty years ago by Horstmann, although he ruled out as wholly impossible the idea that the English author could have made use of the Latin collection.

Although the Joie de la Cort episode in Crestien's Erec has been the center of many a stormy controversy, no adequate explanation has been provided for two puzzling features—the significance of the title and the purpose of the mysterious horn on the stake. Critical discussions, however, have shown that the episode contains Celtic elements. Even so conservative a scholar as J. D. Bruce concedes that “Celtic parallels seem to establish the Celtic origin of the episode.” And Gaston Paris, F. Lot, Philipot, Bruce, and Gruffydd are among the notable critics who accept the Celtic derivation of Mabonagrain and other names. Professor Archer Taylor, too, has demonstrated that the motif of the vacant stake is characteristically Celtic. All this evidence indicates that we may find an explanation in Celtic tradition for the title and the horn.

The most complete and detailed study of a specific medical case in Chaucer is the account, in The Knight's Tale, of Arcite's injury, his gradually developing symptoms, the diagnosis of their underlying causes, the treatment applied, and the patient's eventual death. Boccaccio's Teseide describes the youth's accident but does not record the attempts of the physicians to save his life: the entire passage is an interpolation by Chaucer. The probable source of the poet's remarkably accurate knowledge of medicine is revealed by an examination of the medical chapters of the greatest of mediæval encyclopedias, the Speculum Majus of Vincent of Beauvais.