Few taxes have been as enduring and as evocative of identity as the Christian ecclesiastical tithe, arguably “the most important tax in the economic development of western Europe.” The secular enforcement in 779 of the tithe's collection by the church clearly marked a decisive moment in its evolution, but its earlier origins as religious law have been much more elusive. Scholarship over the past five decades has made clear that mandatory tithing to the church was not a custom of early Christianity but rather something that developed in late antiquity, with our first unambiguous evidence of a developed theory of the tithe coming from sixth-century Gaul. The key figure providing that evidence was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 469–542).

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.

Hrabanus Maurus's De institutione clericorum is a masterpiece of clerical formation, emblematic of the Carolingian Renewal and esteemed by thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. In the third book, Hrabanus juxtaposes Augustine's teachings in De doctrina christiana with Gregory the Great's instruction in the Regula pastoralis to craft an original case for a close connection between wisdom and moral life in priestly training. Hrabanus's effort concretizes long-standing concerns of Carolingian reformers reiterated in landmark reform documents from the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Moreover, throughout his life, Hrabanus periodically returns to his work on priestly formation for words and ideas to undergird subsequent efforts at integrating education with pastoral practice in a variety of genres, including his model sermons, his encyclopedic commentary, and his handbook for missionary conversion. In addition to highlighting Hrabanus's individual genius as one who adroitly applies traditional authorities in novel ways to contemporary problems, this study illumines the crucial role played by monasteries like Fulda as engines for the Carolingian reform.

The medieval military orders were religious institutions whose members had professed a life of combat and prayer that integrated them into a religious landscape sharply defined by diversity. And yet still very little is known about the military orders’ religious functions in the dioceses in which they held ecclesiastical possessions. By focusing on one military order in particular, the Order of the Temple, this study aims to achieve two goals: first, to provide a critical overview of recent scholarship in the emerging field of military order (and especially Templar) religion, and second, to examine aspects of Templar religious involvement in medieval society in general and the reactions of senior clergymen to the Templars’ religious engagement on the parish level in particular. It argues that the Templars proved very keen to expand their network of parish churches and that in so doing they proved willing to engage with the lay public on a much larger scale than has hitherto been believed.

Who schulde now knowe emperours, wonder of philosofres, other folwe the apostles, but hir noble dedes and hir wonder werkes were i-write in stories and so i-kept in mynde? … For storie is wytnesse of tyme, mynde of lyf messager of eldnesse — John Trevisa's translation of Polychronicon.

“One can only grant the theological faculty the arrogant claim that the philosophical faculty is its maidservant (leaving aside the question of whether the latter bears the torch before, or carries the train after her mistress) on the condition that she is not banished or gagged.” Thus wrote Immanuel Kant, paraphrasing Peter Damian, in his Der Streit der Fakultäten of 1798, shortly after being freed from a ban on writing about religion. Kant argued that the role of the philosophy faculty in universities was to lay down the truth for the use of the more practically orientated higher faculties, including that of theology. It could only perform this function if it was totally free.

When, in the first canto of Purgatorio, Vergil requests permission to ascend through the Mountain's seven kingdoms, Cato issues instructions for the requisite purification. Vergil complies, descending with Dante to the base of the island, where he applies the morning dew to remove dirt and tears from Dante's eyes and cheeks, and girds Dante with a smooth rush. This brief drama, said to restore the color to Dante's face and to prepare for a meeting with the primo ministro (98–99) of paradise, is both the most densely ritualized moment of transition between the first two canticas and the thematic centerpiece of Purgatorio 1.

A manuscript which was once thought to have belonged to Petrarch and which is now owned by the Free Library of Philadelphia, currently catalogued as MS Lewis European 53, contains several items of interest to historians of philosophy and science. Included among the twelve mostly anonymous treatises in the codex (see below) are three hitherto unnoticed witnesses to the Aristotle commentaries of the Oxford master of arts, Adam of Buckfield. The sixth item in the collection is one of six surviving copies of Adam's commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, four already having been listed in Charles Lohr's inventory published in this journal and the fifth, in a Munich manuscript, having recently been brought to my attention by the same scholar. The ninth item is a copy of the first recension of Adam's commentary on the De sensu et sensato and the tenth item a copy of the first recension of the same master's commentary on the De generatione et corruptione. None of these works has been edited.

Although the theological problem of doctrinal development had to await the historical perspectives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to receive extensive consideration and more precise formulation, it was not entirely neglected up to that time. In the twelfth century Anselm of Havelberg († 1158) undertook a remarkable discussion of the question, and other medievals, such as Abelard and Saint Thomas, indicated a certain awareness of it. Augustin Renaudet has called attention to Erasmus' efforts to come to grips with the idea of evolution or mutation in doctrine and discipline; and a recent book has described in some detail the form which the question took among the scholastics of Salamanca. Both of these studies focus our gaze upon the sixteenth century and suggest that in that period the problem intruded with some insistence upon the consciousness of Christian thinkers, although in a problematic different from that of our day. The purpose of this article is the presentation of a text of the humanist and reformer, Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532), which explicitly engages the topic and articulates it in a way which deserves notice.

MS Chapel Hill 522, fols. 159r-202r, contains a hitherto unidentified manuscript of the Latin Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, a medieval astronomical almanac known to and used by Chaucer. Sigmund Eisner has already identified fifteen MSS of the Kalendarium, none of them complete, and has published an edition for the New Chaucer Society. Although Chapel Hill's manuscript is also incomplete, it does contain important materials missing from Eisner's base text, MS Oxford, Bodleian Laud. Misc. 662 — namely, all the lunar eclipse figures and the tables of ascensions and equations of houses for Aries and Taurus. In this paper I provide a brief introduction to Nicholas of Lynn and medieval kalendaria, followed by a summary description of CH 522, fols. 159r–202r, which contains a list of the other astronomical and mathematical texts bound with Nicholas of Lynn's Kalendarium in the book. Then I present my reasons for believing that CH 522 was an early MS, perhaps one intended for use as an exemplar. Finally, I add two plates from the MS and a full list of textual variants for CH 522, collated against Eisner's edition.

The late Edmund Bishop's suggestion that Merovingian liturgical circles had possibly been influenced by a ‘Gregorian’ type of Service Book seems to have remained unnoticed and unappreciated. Yet it has appeared to me to be important for the early history of the Gregorianum. Scholars have always had a sense of frustration about this Sacramentary since no manuscript earlier than that of Cambrai 164, written about 811 or 812, for Bishop Hildoard of that see, has come down to us. To get behind this text has always been their goal, and it has often been assumed that the ninth-century Sacramentary of the Chapter Library of Padua did in fact contain such a text. Whether this is so or not (and Rev. Klaus Gamber has recently shown there are grounds for rejecting it), the series of documents here examined would seem to point to the years circa 680, as marking the terminus ad quem of the Gregorianum.

In his discussion of the Third Commandment, the author of Dives and Pauper raises the question, “Why wolde God makyn þe world mor in þe numbre of sexe dayys þan in ony oþer numbre of dayys?” Like many commentators in the hexameral tradition, he answers the question by referring to one of the mathematical properties of the number six:

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.

In the following pages the Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages, begun in Traditio 31 (1975) 99–126 and continued in succeeding issues, resumes with a number of tracts which, though for the most part spurious, circulated under Hippocrates' name. Included are the so-called XX. Epistolae (communications regarding various aspects of medicine or medical history dating from before the ninth century to the fifteenth century), and the brief tracts entitled XXI. Epitomum, XXII. De Equis, XXIII. Experimenta, XXIV De Farmaciis, XXV De Febribus, XXVI. De Flatibus, XXVII. Gynaecia, XXVIII. De Herbis, and XXIX. De Humoribus. The number and variety of these texts provide ample evidence for the continued reverence for the noted physician of Cos.

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury (ca. 640–709/710) conceived and practiced an idiosyncratic style of Latin prose called “hermeneutic,” which was characterized mainly by lexical peculiarities: neologisms, graecisms, archaisms, poeticisms, distributive numerals, and other varieties of contrived or recherché diction. The principal model of the hermeneutic prose style was, of course, Aldhelm's treatise on virginity, the Prosa de virginitate (hereafter Pdv). Aldhelm probably wrote the work in the 670s. Partly — if not mainly — because of this influential treatise, hermeneutic Latin became a vogue in seventh- and eighth-century England, and practitioners of it flourished on the continent, too. Alas, ninth-century Viking incursions put an end not only to hermeneutic latinity but also to native literature. Not until the 920s would interest in hermeneutic Latin be renewed, and after a few more decades Aldhelm's prose work became one of the most intensively studied books in Anglo-Saxon England. In fact, the complexity of Aldhelm's prose led to copious glossing.

Toutes les lettres de Jean Chrysostome qui nous sont parvenues datent de la fin de sa vie; elles s’échelonnent entre l'année 404 où il fut exilé et l'année 407 où il mourut. On en compte deux cent trente-six, parmi lesquelles dix-sept sont adressées à Olympias, diaconesse de Constantinople. C'est sur le texte de ces lettres, exclusivement, que portera notre étude.

Early medieval Irish society was highly stratified, possessing a formalized ranking structure, and ritual played an important part in legitimizing the possession of rank and office, especially kingship. Power was ultimately dependent on physical force, but was maintained through the control of land, agricultural production, exchange, and—in particular—livestock. The basis of power, however, was inherently unstable. Although some kingdoms and dynasties exhibited powerful centralizing tendencies, political power was essentially transitory, a product of the pattern of royal succession and the segmentary nature of royal dynasties. According to Ó Corráin, “great overkingdoms are dismantled by fission and segmentation, and are built up again by later dynastic expansion and reconquest.”