Great disagreement over the plot of Sophocles' Philoctetes makes the terrain of critical discussion very slippery. Some critics argue that Odysseus knows from the beginning that both Philoctetes and his bow are the object of the voyage to Lemnos, while Neoptolemus realizes this fact only later; others, however, believe that Odysseus never realizes the need for Philoctetes himself but that Neoptolemus eventually does. A few argue that the audience understands clearly, from the beginning and throughout the play, that Odysseus and Neoptolemus are both aware of the need for Philoctetes as well as his bow. Different perceptions of the plot may lead to very different interpretations of the play. For instance, the critics who believe that Neoptolemus at first thinks he must bring only the bow to Troy often concentrate on Neoptolemus' alleged realization that Philoctetes is necessary, too, while those who believe that Neoptolemus is aware all along of the need for Philoctetes obviously center their analyses elsewhere. Some critics even try to make a virtue out of the confusion over the plot, though in different ways: believing that we cannot determine until late in the play what Neoptolemus and Odysseus perceive their mission to be, a few argue that the question must be irrelevant to understanding Sophocles' purposes; another finds the moral lesson of the play in the fact that a muddle exists.

It is an accepted paradox of late Roman studies that modern students have been more concerned to find culprits for the ‘fall of the Roman empire’ than were the people who actually lived through it. Gibbon, who believed the empire of the Antonines to be the apogee of human accomplishment, knew perfectly well what he was doing: chronicling the triumph of barbarism and religion. His approach influenced scholarship for centuries. Many more culprits have been found, including population decline, homosexuality, and (for a somewhat delayed fall) the Moslems.

Eine vollständige kritische Ausgabe der Werke des Patriarchen Anastasius I. von Antiochien, der von 558 bis 570 und, nach einem langen Exil, von 593 bis 598 die Geschicke der Reichskirche in Syrien leitete, wird anscheinend auch weiterhin ein Desiderat der Forschung bleiben. Die vorliegende Edition mochte eine kleine, wenn auch nicht unbedeutende Lucke schlieBen.

Sporadic attempts have been made in the past to demonstrate direct connexions between the various Celtic literatures and Beowulf; I think it fair to say that the proposed links have always seemed tenuous or imaginary and have not been taken seriously by most students of the Old English poem. A century of desultory comparisons, leading to a negative result, by persons qualified in either Old English or Celtic or neither, does not, however, exhaust the subject or indicate its irrelevance. It seems to me that a determined attack on the subject may indicate desirable approaches and cautions which students of Beowulf could consider as they contemplate further work on the poem. I shall organise my remarks under five headings: the possibility of Irish (or other Celtic) influence on Beowulf in particular and on Old English literature in general; archaism in the language and metrics of ‘traditional’ verse; problems of archaism and anachronism in ‘traditional’ literature; the search for a text-history of Beowulf with its consequent issues of transmission and problems of dating; and general historical questions.

The first two hundred lines of Cynewulf's Elene deal not with Elene's finding of the Holy Cross but with the events that lead to the conversion of her son, the emperor Constantine. They recount the invasion of his kingdom by a horde of Goths, Huns, and Franks; his fear and despair at the prospect of doing battle with such a vastly superior force; his nocturnal vision of the cross with its famous promise of victory; the crushing defeat he inflicts on the invaders the next day; his triumphant return to Rome, where he learns from his counsellors that the cross is the sign of God; his evangelization by a group of Christians; and his subsequent baptism. Only after all this does the quest for the True Cross get underway, at Constantine's bidding. Although the fifth-century Inventio Sanctae Crucis, Cynewulf's principal source, narrates these events in a few lines of bare, prosaic Latin, the Old English poet has turned them into the most extensive piece of amplification in the whole work, chiefly, but not entirely, by providing detailed descriptions of the invading and defending armies, and of the battle itself, in recognizably formulaic style with much skillful repetition and variation.

‘Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord’ (Gen. 10.8). This scriptural passage is familiar to many, but to historians of medieval astronomical literature Nimrod assumes a different profession. He stands as the principal character in a mythological astronomical handbook, the Liber Nimrod, cast in the form of a dialogue between the astronomer Nimrod and his disciple, Ioanton. This metamorphosis of Nimrod the Astronomer and his emergence into the medieval West is an interesting topic in its own right and one which this essay will examine.

The Repertorium of Hippocratic Latin Writings in the Middle Ages begun in Traditio 31 (1975) 99–125, and continued annually in the issues following, here resumes with XLV, Prognostica or Liber prognosticorum, as it was entitled in the Latin manuscripts.

Acknowledgment and thanks should here be accorded for the continued help of Mlle Marthe Dulong on Paris manuscripts and for the courtesy and assistance of librarians and conservators of manuscripts.

The work which is the subject of this article marked a major advance in the history of medieval political thought. Its significance, although perhaps not widely enough perceived, is well known to scholars specializing in the origins of conciliarism. This is not to suggest that William Durant the younger's contribution to the nascent conciliar theory has been exhaustively interpreted. On the contrary, it is probable that the systematic legal and political argument underlying his pointed demands has never been as fully understood as would have been possible or desirable. But Durant's theories lie beyond the scope of this article. It is instead addressed to the more fundamental question whether the available texts of the treatise are sound. It is somewhat surprising that this question has never been studied before, since the early modern printed editions, on which all previous work on Durant has relied, do not give the impression of being trustworthy. Upon inspection of the extant manuscripts it must be concluded that the unsuspecting faith put in these editions was ill-advised, to say the least. It is the thesis of this article that every known printed edition of the Tractatus de modo generalis concilii celebrandi is seriously flawed, and, furthermore, that the deficiencies have prevented scholars from arriving at an adequate interpretation of the nature and the scope of Durant's plan for reform.

The Somnium of John of Legnano, the great Bolognese lawyer of the fourteenth century, was first properly brought to the attention of scholars by G. W. Coopland in 1926. Professor Coopland's chief concern was with the relationship between this work and the much more famous Somnium Viridarii, composed about 1375 at the court of King Charles V of France, whose author made some substantial borrowings from John's slightly earlier work. Though he supplied a synopsis of its content, Coopland gave it as his opinion that John's work was not in itself of any great interest, apart from the section in it which is devoted to a defence of papal monarchy, a section which, as the author makes clear, incorporates into the Somnium a tract on this matter which he had composed previously. This probably is the most interesting part of John's much larger and more ambitious work, which seems to have been written in 1372, but our opinion is that the other sections have rather more in them to reward the reader than Coopland suggested. This is the justification for an attempt to describe the work in more detail than he did and to discuss briefly some parts of its content and arguments.

Though the Green Knight describes his challenge before Arthur's court as ‘a Crystemas gomen’ (283), and though some scholars have responded to this and other references in the poem and treated it as an entertainment or as essentially about games, most modern studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight concentrate on the difficult questions of moral behaviour which the poem raises. Though it is certainly full of violent movement and physical action, though it sets forth a world of arresting concrete specificity and colourful variety, the poem's most crucial moment (if it can be said to have one) occurs in the early morning quiet of the hero's bed-chamber when Gawain accepts the green girdle and agrees to ‘lelly layne’ (1863) it from Bertilak. It is a point at which the hero makes a clear moral decision to drop his skilful verbal defence against the Lady's propositions and to allow himself to be acted upon: ‘he Jmlged with hir ‘repe …] ooled hir to speke … he granted … hym gafe with a goud wylle …] oe leude hym acordez’ (1859-63). Most scholars agree with Gawain's own subsequent judgment that his moral behaviour was, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘fawty and falce’ (2382); but how his moral faultiness is to be measured and assessed, and how in conceptual terms it is to be analysed and described, are more difficult questions.

Some years ago I published in this journal the first fruits of my investigations into the fortuna of Galen in the Middle Ages. These concerned the Vatican codices. Since then, I have examined some 600 MSS on microfilm and learnt of other texts from published catalogues of manuscripts. My earlier strictures on Diels stand: he is inaccurate and incomplete. The present paper lists only manuscripts or portions of manuscripts not inventoried by him or by Thorndike and Kibre (TK). The resultant analysis will eventually be published in the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, edited by Professors P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz, the first volume of which appeared in 1960.

Jean Chrysostome, évêque de Constantinople de 398 à 404, suscita par ses réformes de nombreuses inimitiés chez ceux qu'il atteignait. Les mécontents résolurent de le perdre et n'eurent de cesse qu'ils ne l'eussent dépossédé de sa charge. A la suite de basses intrigues, il fut envoyé en exil, puis rappelé. Mais cet apaisement ne fut que de courte durée et les agissements des ennemis de Jean créant de nouvelles tensions dans l‘église de Constantinople firent nattre des troubles graves pendant la nuit de Pâques 404. C'est à la suite de ces troubles que Jean adressa une première lettre à l’évêque de Rome, Innocent, pour le mettre au courant des événements survenus à Constantinople et lui demander son intervention.

In a.d. 538 Cassiodorus left office as praetorian prefect in the regime of the Ostrogoth kingdom under Witiges. He remained in Ravenna and sometime in that year published his De anima. Between 538 and the capture of Ravenna by Belisarius (beginning of 540), Cassiodorus began his Commentary on the Psalms. He had completed at least the ‘praefationes’ and a commentary on the opening Psalms before he was sent, together with Witiges, Matasontha, and other members of the Ostrogoth court, to Constantinople.

The brief prologue to Aelred of Rievaulx's De spirituali amicitia is written with a disarming simplicity that allows the reader to follow it and feel its charm the very first time he comes across it. Aelred invites his reader into the intimacy of his own early life and shares with him the experiences from which his reflections on friendship, and his book, were to grow. It is a confidence which he is sharing, one that he must have revealed to many of his friends, and the reader is made aware of the privilege from the very first line: ‘Cum adhuc puer essem in scholis ….’ Nothing holds an audience or a reading public like a story, as Aelred well knew; and if the story is of the speaker or writer, it is of double value: it is an invitation to relax in the presence of the storyteller, the friend. Aelred's instinct is unerring. He is a skilled communicator, he is confident of his audience, he knows himself, and he wants his public to know him. How many medieval books have such an appealing incipit as this one- or rather, how few? How many writers of that, or any, period have presented the emotional upheavals of adolescence with such clarity and compassion in a mere dozen lines? And how many writers on the very subject of friendship have scored their overture in such a masterly fashion? The direct Augustinian quality is there unmistakably from the very start of this work; much as it will indeed owe to Cicero, its first tones have the vibrant, experiential directness of the author of the Confessions, from whom the opening four words are drawn (Conf. 1.11.17).

In the whole field of mediaeval hagiography, one of our most urgent needs is the establishment of trustworthy critical texts of James of Voragine's Legenda aurea, and of the Latin's various vernacular translations. Very soon after its first publication, the Legenda began to be copied throughout Western Christendom at a great rate, very often by professional scribes working for stationers who would expect them to write at speed while reproducing this encyclopaedia of the saints' deeds and marvels. Thus, from the beginnings of its manuscript tradition, corruptions and errors were introduced; and we still lack the means to correct them. For want of anything better, scholars must still refer to the edition of the Latin by Johann G. T. Graesse; but this cannot be used with any confidence. As Jacobus J. A. Zuidweg has observed in a summary of his findings, ‘Force nous était donc de nous servir de l’édition … quelque défectueuse qu'elle fût. Le texte de cette édition, qui fourmille de fautes se rapportant tant au texte même qu'à la ponctuation, est basé sur un exemplaire imprimé, datant du 15e siècle.’ Elsewhere, Zuidweg points out that Graesse's edition is incomplete, without, for example, James's chapter 73, dealing with Bede. The preparation and presentation of such critical texts would be a vast undertaking, more, probably, than could be achieved by any one person. Several gifted and zealous scholars have announced preliminary studies towards it, but have in the end found themselves defeated by the scope of the task and by its complexities. Not long ago, Konrad Kunze announced the inauguration of a card-index catalogue at Freiburg, which is to comprise all the Latin and vernacular manuscripts and printed texts of the Legenda aurea. This would now be indispensable for any proposed critical editions; but it does not seem that such editorial work is intended (Analecta Bollandiana 95 [1977] 168).

Ovid's exceptional popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is past dispute; the exact nature of his influence, however, is somewhat less clear. The medieval student first read Ovid early in his career at cathedral schools such as Orléans and Chartres, where his teacher taught him that the classical poets were wise and learned authorities who could offer a Christian much profitable instruction (in Ovid's case, this interpretation involved a considerable distortion, to which we shall return). The student also learned that imitating the Roman authors was a safe and respectable course to follow. As far as Ovid is concerned, medieval poets learned their lessons well. Whether writing in classical, quantitative meters or in medieval, accentual ones, the poets, when they turn to love, sing in the Ovidian vein.

One of the most memorable and hideous scenes in Njáls saga is the death of the apostate viking chief Bróðir. According to the account of the battle of Clontarf in the saga, after the Irish forces had won the victory most of Brian Boru's bodyguard left the king in order to pursue the survivors. Bróðir, who had been hiding in the woods near the battlefield, saw that the king was relatively unprotected, and took the opportunity to break through the line of men who were protecting King Brian and kill him.