Venantius Fortunatus is the last major Latin poet of late antiquity. Born near Treviso in northern Italy, he studied grammar and rhetoric in the still thriving schools of Ravenna before moving in 566 to Gaul, where he sought to employ his literary education and talents in the service of Merovingian and Gallo-Roman patrons. Fortunatus's poetry gives ample evidence of his early studies: he shows familiarity with classical poetry, especially Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, and with the main Christian poets of late antiquity. In a passage at the beginning of his verse Life of St. Martin, Fortunatus lists Juvencus, Sedulius, Orientius, Prudentius, Paulinus, Arator, and Alcimus Avitus as preeminent in Christian poetry, thereby naming all of his most important Christian Latin predecessors.

In The Glory of the Martyrs, a collection of miracle stories completed by the early 590s, Bishop Gregory of Tours included a chapter on the Burgundian king Sigismund. A Catholic convert from the Arian Christianity of his father, Sigismund had founded a monastery at Agaune, the present St.-Maurice, Switzerland (Wallis/Valais), in the year 515. After he died in 523, at the hands of Chlodomer, one of the sons of Clovis, his body lay in a well at St.-Péravy-la-Colombe near Orléans (where the Franks had thrown it) until the abbot Venerandus brought it back to St.-Maurice in 535/36 for burial. Over the next fifty years or so, Sigismund gained the reputation as a saint and as a source of healing power over fevers. About Sigismund's posthumous fame, Gregory recorded that “whenever people suffering from chills piously celebrate a mass in his honor and make an offering to God for the king's repose, immediately their tremors cease, their fevers disappear, and they are restored to their earlier health.” Gregory's reference to a mass in honor of Sigismund is as unusual as is the very existence of such a celebration, for the Missa sancti Sigismundi is an early and peculiar example of a new development in the Latin liturgy in late antiquity, the missa votiva or votive mass. Votive masses differed from traditional forms of eucharistic celebration because they could be offered for a particular purpose and at the special request of a member (or members) of a congregation. Unlike the Missa sancti Sigismundi, however, most other early votive masses had generalized titles such as missa votiva or missa pro vivorum et mortuorum. The mass in honor of St. Sigismund is, as far as I can tell, unique in its appeal to the intercession of a particular saint for a specific purpose—the cure of fevers.

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.”

William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to his death in 1249, was one of the first theologians of the thirteenth century to take into serious account the philosophical works that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the early decades of the thirteenth century. William showed a great deal of openness toward the works of those to whom he referred as “Aristotle and his followers,” and obviously drew upon them, even going so far as to adopt the Avicennian arguments for the existence of God as the being that is necessary through itself, and to claim that the Avicennian expression, “necesse esse per se,” is the proper name of the first principle. On the other hand, he also firmly rejected many Aristotelian doctrines when he found them to be in opposition to the faith.

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.

On sait fort peu de choses sur le frère mineur Jean de Ripa. Selon quelques manuscrits (Rome, Vatican latin 1083 et 6738; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, latin 15369, tous les trois du XIVème siècle), on hésita entre ce nom et celui de Jean de la Marche. En ce qui concerne sa vie, les historiens laissent insatisfait leur lecteur. Lucas Wadding, dont le premier tome des Annales (1650) couvre la période allant de 1301 à 1350, se fonde sur une épitaphe pour le présenter comme un “homme docte.” Il signale que vers 1350 on érigea le couvent de Ripa Transone et il précise qu'au couvent de Paris “brilla Maître Jean de Ripa Transone, vulgairement appelé Ripa, qui n'eut pas son pareil en son temps, ainsi qu'en témoignent ces monuments que sont sa Lectura sur les quatre livres des Sentences et son Commentaire du Livre de l'Ame.” De son côté, le frère Félix Peretti de Montalio, vicaire général, voit en lui un “théologien et philosophe très illustre.” Outre les deux précédents ouvrages, il lui attribue un Traité des Vices et des Vertus. Le manuscrit Vatican latin 1083 lui attribue également des Sermones de tempore et sanctis et un traité De formalitatibus.

Die hier zum erstenmal im Druck erscheinende, lateinische Übersetzung des Werkes Galens De motibus dubiis ist durch eine einzige Handschrift überliefert. Es handelt sich urn Vaticanus palatinus latinus 1211. Die Übersetzung stammt aus der ersten Hälfte des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts und wurde von einern zweisprachigen Arzt aus Reggio, Kalabrien, besorgt. Er dürfte griechischsprechendem Urnfeld entstarnrnen, worauf sein Farniliennarne Deoprepio, der auch der Name eines angesehenen Notars der Gegend war, hindeutet. Dokurnente der Zeit aus dieser Gegend zeigen, daß die griechische und die lateinische Sprache und deren jeweilige Schriftzeichen abwechselnd verwendet wurden.

The dispute between the Durham Benedictine Uthred of Boldon and members of the mendicant orders on the issue of ecclesiastical possessions was only one in a series of intra-clerical controversies in England during the later fourteenth century. Spanning a decade from the early 1360s to the early 1370s, it occupies a crucial area between the attack on mendicant privileges by Richard FitzRalph, the archbishop of Armagh, and Wyclif's denunciation of the endowed church. C. H. Thompson first pointed to the importance of this period between the activities of FitzRalph and those of Wyclif for the development of political thought. The issue has recently become more pressing with Wendy Scase's identification of the development of a “new anticlericalism” in the later fourteenth century. Older traditions of anticlericalism, she claims, had as their targets specific classes of cleric. These traditions, however, were established during this period on a new basis that allowed them to become anticlerical in the fullest sense of the word. “The old traditions of opposition to clerics were developed and unified in a new polemic which opposed all clerics. This was the essential strength and danger of the new anticlericalism.” The present study concentrates on one central aspect of this extension of the anticlerical polemic: the attack on ecclesiastical endowment.

The later Middle Ages was the high moment of the popular, vernacular sermon, yet relatively few examples of extraliturgical sermons can be recovered from the written evidence. Latin collections of sermon cycles—those preached in the context of the mass liturgy and saints' days—were produced in large quantities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, functioning more or less directly as exemplars for the actual sermons that would then be preached in the local vernaculars of western Europe. In England, such Latin sermon collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often include some vernacular materials, especially lyrics, and many treatises are extant that provide priests with the materials to make sermons on a wide range of topics and for an indefinite number of occasions. Of the relatively few English sermons and sermon collections extant from the period, however, by far the greatest number are, like the Latin cycles, those keyed to the cycle of Sunday texts and to saints' days, whose very formality militates against a sense of them as representative of the most common forms and themes of vernacular sermons, particularly those earnestly preached on the occasions like that which Chaucer satirically describes in the Summoner's Tale, when “ther wente a lymytour aboute / To preche, and eek to begge, it is no doubte” (3.1711–1712). With so few examples of non-liturgical sermons extant, our sense both of the reality and of the satire is incomplete.

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:

Valentino da Camerino is the only one of the teachers of Thomas de Vio Cajetan to be expressly mentioned by any of Cajetan's earliest biographers. Indeed, he is mentioned by only one of these, Bartolomeo Spina da Pisa. Spina had been commissioned by Cajetan to oversee the publication of the first edition of his commentary on the Pars Secunda Secundae of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. When the work appeared on 20 August 1518, it included a preface by Spina which is largely biographical in content and laudatory in tone. The reference to Valentino as having been Cajetan's teacher was clearly intended as a compliment to Cajetan and testifies to the kind of reputation that Valentino must have enjoyed even after his death in 1515.

The editor of the Translatio Vetus, Joanna Judycka, remarks of the anonymous translator that he knew his métier. Indeed, the translation, apart from some minor omissions, is extremely competent. Some of its various features mentioned by Dr. Judycka are, in fact, common to many medieval translations from the Greek into Latin; for example, the confusion of the present and future, the rendering of ἄν with the optative by utique with the future indicative, and the handling of the all-pervasive articular infinitive (so common and important in scientific prose). Nor are the discrepancies in number and degree characteristic of any one author or school. Only a detailed analysis of the translator's Sprachgebrauch, such as L. Minio-Paluello contemplated before his death, can reveal the identity of the translator.

In his Libro de las Profecías, Christopher Columbus collected numerous scriptural passages that he believed supported and prophesied his explorations. According to Delno C. West and August Kling, editors of a recent edition, translation, and commentary on the book, Columbus, his son Ferdinand, and Gaspar Gorricio, a Carthusian monk, completed their transcriptions of most of these sources in 1501/1502, although a few additions may have been made as late as 1505.