Simeon bar Sabbae, metropolitan of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and second primate of the Persian Church, fell victim among the first to the general persecution of Sapor II. The date of his martyrdom has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it is the purpose of the present paper to prove that the saint's death occurred, not on Good Friday, as has always been supposed, but on Sept. 14, and in the year 344 A.D.

An oath was sworn by Pope Leo III at St. Peter's on December 23 of the year 800 before a synodal assembly at which Charlemagne presided; it occupies a central place among the events that culminated, only two days later, in the coronation of the Frankish king as Imperator Romanorum. The document customarily known as the text of this ‘oath’ was in 1899 edited by Karl Hampe, and in 1906 by Albert Werminghoff, who followed his predecessor ad verbum usque, as he says. The apparatus of both editions establishes the insertion of a slightly reedited oath in the Decretum of Burchard of Worms. Ivo of Chartres and, in an apologetic treatise, Gerhoh of Reichersberg follow Burchard without major changes. The variants listed by Hampe and Werminghoff indicate that they both distinguished between the basic text of the oath in the oldest, ninth-century MS, Würzburg M. p. theol. fol. 46 (and its descendants, the Monacenses 6241 and 27246, saec. x-xi), and the oath's transmission by Burchard and the above-named authors who depend on Burchard. And Hampe assigns the twelfth-century Vaticanus 1348 to the Burchard tradition, when he says that its readings largely correspond with Burchard's (‘paene omnibus conveniunt Burchardi Wormat. decret. …’). Both scholars are fully conversant with the textual history of the document; they reprint in the notes the abbreviated version of the oath in Gratian's Decretum, and the text in a Roman Ordo which represents a version re-written in accordance with certain concepts of Roman law. The Burchard-tradition has been discussed in a recent study. Some of the changes made by Burchard in the original text of the oath are readily understandable. The variant in … conspectu, instead of in … basilica, probably resulted from a scribal dittography, because the same expression occurs in the oath of purgation in the lines preceding and following the correct reading. The variant adversum, instead of adversus, is an emendation of the original text. Burchard evidently recognized the resemblance between the original reading, ‘qualiter homines mali adversus me insurrexerunt and Psalm 53.5 ‘quoniam alieni insurrexerunt adversum me.’

In many medieval calendars the calendar proper for each month is preceded or followed by a verse (or several verses) treating of one (or one each) of the following subjects:

1. (a) the zodiacal sign

2. (b) the number of solar days

3. (c) the number of lunar days

4. (d) the position of the nones

5. (e) the Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian names

6. (f) the Roman traditions of the name and significance of the month

7. (g) the climatic conditions (aeris qualitates)

8. (h) the evil days (dies Aegyptiaci).

The study of medieval calendars has been so much preoccupied with their chronological and heortological aspects that, to my knowledge, these verses have never been the subject of a comprehensive investigation. In many editions they have been omitted as extraneous matter.

L'Epitome in philosophiam fut publié pour la première fois par B. Hauréau, en 1859, conjointement au De contemplatione et eius speciebus en appendice à son ouvrage Hugues de Saint-Victor. Nouvel examen de l'édition de ses oeuvres. Mais la présentation n'était qu'une simple indication et ignorait apparat critique et historique aussi bien qu'étude du texte. Au demeurant, quatre manuscrits seulement — de Paris — étaient signalés, deux autres — de Douai et d'Oxford — devant être découverts ensuite. Ce sont ces six manuscrits que nous aurons à étudier: les quatre de Paris, trois de la Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS lat. 15.315, 14.506, 14.659, un de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS lat. 717; le manuscrit de Douai, MS lat. 366; le manuscrit d'Oxford, Balliol College, MS lat. 296, et nous nous demanderons comment se présente la question de l'authenticité hugonienne de l'Epitome et quelles sont les caractéristiques des manuscrits qui nous en présentent le texte.

The Paris manuscript, lat. 3922A of the Bibliothèque Nationale, contains an important group of legal works, written in the early part of the thirteenth century, some of which have in recent years interested historians of the canon law. One section (fols. 118v-126v) has not, to my knowledge, been described fully in print. In 1951, Dr. Walther Holtzmann, who had examined it some years before, kindly brought it to my notice. The bearing of this section on the questions posed by other parts of the volume cannot be thoroughly appreciated until the volume has been examined as a whole: for this we must await the description by Mme. Rambaud, conservateur au Cabinet des Manuscrits, who is engaged in cataloguing the canonistic manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale. For the moment, an analysis of this section may have some value in throwing light on the methods of compilators and in discovering a few new or improved texts. The whole volume seems to emanate from the Anglo-Norman school and Rouen was probably its place of origin. The collection of decretals on fols. 148r-167v has therefore been suitably christened ‘Rotomagensis.’ It may be convenient to style it ‘Rotomagensis I’; then the collection on fols. 211r-227v, based upon Compilatio I, may be called ‘Rotomagensis II,’ and the section with which this article is concerned becomes ‘Rotomagensis III.’

Before the invention of printing and of easy multiplication of copies of a text, memory inevitably played a greater part in education, and basic textbooks were often expressed in verse in order to aid the memory. Of such works a number by named and known authors has come to us entire: in the field of elementary Latin grammar, the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei, written in 1199; in arithmetic, the Carmen de algorismo in 284 hexameters by the same author, who further wrote on computus; in botany and materia medica, the post-Carolingian poem of ‘Macer,’ consisting of 2269 lines on 77 herbs; on gems, the eleventh-century Liber lapidum of Marbod, in which sixty stones are described in 734 hexameters. Some of these texts were added to by succeeding generations, as in the case of the Regimen sanitatis ascribed to the medical school of Salerno. For the most part this last is in rhymed hexameters:

Hec bona sunt ova — longa, parva, quoque nova;
Et gallinarum tibi sint et non aliarum.

Boni sunt pisces, si cum vino bene misces;
Quod si non misces, forsan damnum adipisceris.

Salvia cum ruta faciunt tibi pocula tuta;
Adde rosam florem, minuit potenter amorem.

But sometimes not, as when a pick-me-up is advised for the morning after:

Si nocturna tibi noceat potatio vini,
Hoc tu mane bibas iterum et fuerit medicina.

Sometimes the practice of versification was extended to indicating the author of the text. A copy of the exposition of the Microtegni of Galen which Urso of Todi delivered at Avignon in 1198 says at the start:

… Quare Ursus vocetur indicat versus,
Laudensis medicus medicisque fidelis amicus,
Quos super hanc partem Avenione duxit in artem.

Increasingly we become aware of the medieval background of the Italian Renaissance. The secular, worldly spirit, associated with the Renaissance and always existing in the practical life of men, was already finding abundant intellectual, rationalizing expression in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ‘L'esprit laïque’ flourished among the legists at Bologna and the legal advisers of kings, leading through theories of public law and the state to the extreme ‘statism’ of Machiavelli and recent times. Following the revival of Roman law and the rise of national states, the new study of Aristotle and the extreme Aristotelianism of the later thirteenth century contributed to the political secularism of the fourteenth century (William Ockham and Marsiglio of Padua), as it did to a secular emphasis on morality. Not to mention many manifestations of a worldly appreciation of nature in the literature and art of the twelfth and the following century, the naturalistic treatment of love condemned at Paris in 1277 is strikingly similar in spirit to ideas in Lorenzo Valla's De voluptate. And classical humanism of the kind associated with Petrarch and his followers, rather than with the humanism of the twelfth century (John of Salisbury), although there is much common to both kinds, was beginning to appear in the thirteenth century among the ‘civil servants’ (notaries and secretaries) of the Italian communes.

Few problems in medieval constitutional history, and perhaps none in English constitutional history, have occasioned more irreconcilably different interpretations than the problem of the meaning and significance of the coronation oath of 1308. Divergent interpretations began in the seventeenth century, and they have continued to provide the substance of an interesting historiographical problem ever since. It is doubtful whether complete agreement on all of the specific questions raised by the oath will ever be reached, but at the present stage of debate there are still questions which have neither been raised nor answered. The purpose of this paper is to raise one of these questions and, by providing an answer, to narrow further the limits within which there is still disagreement concerning the oath which Edward II swore at his coronation.

This preliminary list of incipits grew out of a card-file which I made to help me in the preparation of The Seven Deadly Sins published in 1952. It has been much expanded as a result of study in various libraries abroad and of a systematic search of certain manuscript catalogues and books. It can provide, I think, the nucleus for a complete list of incipits of Latin works on the virtues and vices, although at present it is far from complete or free from errors. Guides of this sort, I know from experience, can be of immense help in the wilderness of medieval manuscripts and through the labyrinth of medieval bibliography. I have no illusions about its state of perfection, but, inasmuch as the final form of this type of work must depend on the labors of many, someone must offer his contribution as a first step.

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 medieval Latin translation of the two Liturgies of Constantinople — ‘St. Basil’ and ‘St. John Chrysostom’ —published from the twelfth-century Paris MS, Nouv. acq. lat. 1791, in 1943, the concluding prayer of the first of these two formularies, “‘Ηννσται καί τετέλεσται, contains a clause which, as was noted at the time, had not been found in any Greek MS. Now, after more than twelve years, two Greek MSS have been discovered — Sinait. 961, of the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and the liturgical roll No. 2 of the Laura, of the early years of the fourteenth century — neither of which indeed contains the interpolation of the Latin version in its entirety, but sufficient to warrant publication and study, for we have here the first trace — and more than a mere trace — of the clause, Si quid dimisimus, which has for so long been a baffling problem. Not unnaturally, this discovery has been the occasion of a re-examination of both the Latin version and the attempted reconstruction of the Greek original, with the result that more than one textual problem overlooked in the preparation of the first edition now stands out more clearly defined. This is especially true of the interesting rendering, ‘nutrimentum’ concerning which more is said below (Text, line 11 and Note 5).

Die Berliner, aus dem Besitze von Phillipps erworbene Sammelhandschrift Lat. oct. 199 enthält unter ihren 65 Blättern auch 7 zusammengehörige Pergamentblätter aus dem 12. Jahrhundert mit Bruchstücken eines Lucankommentars, so dass auf fol. 1 sich zunächst einmal ein Stück über die Verse 1.412-4 findet; es folgt dann auf fol. 6 und 7 und fol. 2ra ein grösseres Stück über kosmologische Anschauungen, entwickelt an Lucan; eine Vorgesetzte Überschrift vor diesem Teil ist weggeschnitten, fol. 2rb und 2v sind nicht beschrieben. Über die Herkunft der Blätter vermuten die in der Anmerkung genannten Mitteilungen: ‘Sie [die Hs.] wird wohl aus einem westfälischen Kloster stammen. Man würde auf Corvey schliessen, wenn die Bruchstücke des Lucankommentars als aus Vacca's Kommentar stammend zu erweisen wären, von dem im Mutterkloster Corbie im 12. Jahrhundert eine Handschrift vorhanden war.’ Diese Vermutung und weiter das Zitat in Zeile 243: ‘alluditur in Alexandro, ubi ait: vetitumque mari se mergere plaustrum,’ wo die Mitteilungen an eine antike Alexander-dichtung denken, rechtfertigen das Interesse des Philologen. Ich lasse zunächst den Text folgen.

Toward the end of his Troilus and Criseyde (5.1457-1533), hereinafter TC, Chaucer has Cassandra set about interpreting for her young brother Troilus his dream of seeing Criseyde (5.1233-42) in the arms of a boar and in due course includes a twenty-six line summary of the last eleven books (II-XII) of Statius' Thebaid. This summary occupies TC 5.1485-1510, i.e., stanzas 213-216, except for the end of stanza 216, where Cassandra passes on to other matters. In all manuscripts of TC (essentially sixteen) except British Museum MS Harleian 2392 (siglum H4) and Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 163 (siglum R), there are inserted between TC stanzas 214 and 215, and accordingly as near the middle of Cassandra's summary as is practicable, twelve Latin hexameters outlining in very sketchy fashion the twelve books of the Thebaid at the rate of one hexameter per book. This Latin twelve-line argument will be referred to hereinafter mostly as Arg. with line number.

In 1953 there was issued from the Brepols press of Turnhout (Belgium) a modest paper-bound fascicle of a hundred pages that had a double importance for students of patristics. Not only did it supply, among other things, critical texts (one of them never before printed) of two of the writings of Tertullian; it gave tangible proof that a new edition of all the earlier Latin Christian writings, announced as a project five years earlier, had gone beyond the planning stage and, in this small yet solid specimen, was actually in being — the Series latina of a Corpus Christianorum (CCL) directed by the Benedictines of the Abbey of St. Pierre, Steenbrugge (Belgium). Since then, that initial fascicle has made a new appearance as the opening part of a full, 750-page volume that presents half of Tertullian's works and forms the first of the series. To it Volume II has added its own total of 900 pages to bring Tertullian (and Ps.-Tertullian) to completion. At other points in a carefully pre-established sequence, yet other volumes have come to hand: the Tractatus of St. Augustine on the Gospel of St. John (36) and the sermons of Caesarius of Arles (103, 104). It is this two-year yield of five volumes, seen in relation to the total design for the Series latina of the new Corpus, that is the subject of the present, brief survey.