Im Jahre 1959 hat K. Schneider in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaff die Ergebnisse der Erforschung des antiken Purpurs zusammenfassend dargestellt. Ein Überblick über die Forschungsgeschichte zur antiken Purpurfärberei zeigt, daβ die grundlegenden Erkenntnisse bereits 1842 von W. A. Schmidt erarbeitet wurden. Die Darstellungen von J. Marquardt—A. Mau, K. Faymonville, M. Besnier, H. Blümner, L. Brühl, W. Born und R. J. Forbes bieten Zusammenfassungen der Thesen Schmidts, fügen ihnen aber kaum wesentlich Neues hinzu. Von ein paar eigenen Akzentuierungen abgesehen, gilt das auch von den Arbeiten A. Dedekinds. Sie sind sowieso gröβtenteils lexikologischer Natur. Kein Urteil kann ich mir über die griechisch geschriebene Untersuchung von P. G. Moatsou erlauben; trotz intensiver Bemühungen war sie nicht zu bekommen. Soweit ich sehe, hat sie auf die Forschung praktisch keinen Einfluβ ausgeübt. Auch K. Schneider erwähnt sie nicht.

If Charlemagne had plans for his succession prior to 806, little has yet been said about them; equally little has been written about the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, a minor work of Paul the Deacon's. But lack of interest by posterity is only an incidental reason for associating the Metz Gesta with Charles's early dynastic planning. In 781, Charles visited Rome for the second time; important decisions about the Carolingian heritage were taken in connection with this journey. Soon afterwards, probably in 783, Paul was commissioned by a royal courtier to compose a history of the bishops of Metz. A careful analysis of Paul's narrative suggests that its purpose was not so much to celebrate the bishops of one diocese as to commemorate, however discreetly, certain events vitally concerning the entire Frankish church and kingdom. The Gesta may shed unexpected light on Charlemagne's designs for the transmission of his regna, as well as on the ideas inspiring his decision.

A passing reference to pagan gods in the preface to the Merovingian Vita Landiberti inspired a number of poetic elaborations in the reworkings of the Life of St. Lambert during the late Carolingian period. These include the opening chapters of the Carmen de Sancto Landberto, which deal exclusively with pagan myths; the Versus in Laude Beati Landberti; and passages in the Vita Landberti of Stephen, Bishop of Liege (901–920). This paper is concerned primarily with the first two of these reworkings, which contain the more elaborate treatments of pagan mythology. The inspiration for the inclusion of these passages, as well as the sources for their information about the pagan gods, form a curious chapter in the survival and transformation of the pagan gods in medieval Latin literature.

Anonymous vernacular homilies of the later Anglo-Saxon period have recently proved a fruitful field of investigation for scholars. Work in this area has enabled the investigator to recover themes and topoi available to the Old English writer, and has helped reconstruct the intellectual milieu in which he worked. Indeed, late composite homilies may reveal how homilists such as Ælfric were received and understood by subsequent generations.

The poetry of Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil (ca. 1078–1107) and Archbishop of Dol (1107–1130), has attracted little critical attention. As is the case with other figures of the ‘Loire School’ or ‘School of Angers’ such as Marbod of Angers or even Hildebert of Le Mans, Baudri of Bourgueil remains largely unknown outside of a small circle of specialists. Yet his voluminous poetic production, most of which was completed by around 1100, should be particularly attractive for students of High Medieval culture, both Latin and vernacular, since literary and amatory concerns form its dominant topics. His plea for unrestrained reading, his decriminalization of desire, his mastery of Ovid, his radical treatment of friendship, his allegorization of myth, his sense of the individual, his defense of poetry — all these are especially significant at such an early date. In this paper, I propose to survey the poetry and assess its overall achievement in order to facilitate future research on more restricted and detailed levels.

The conflicts commonly known as feuds, private wars (guerres privées), or vendettas constituted an important type of recurrent political process in Northern France during the later eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries, as well as in earlier and later periods. Because the conflicts to which medievalists have applied these terms could take different forms and cannot be routinely distinguished from other sorts of disputes and because at least one of the most common medieval terms for ‘feud’ — namely werra or guerre — covered such a wide and variable field of meaning, no rigorous definition of the medieval French feud for our period can now be formulated, or, perhaps, should ever be proposed. Nevertheless, the conflicts analyzed in this study of feuding and peace–making in the Touraine during the years around 1100 had several identifiable traits in common. The combatants were adult or at least adolescent males who came from relatively restricted and elevated social circles. A few were the lords of castles. The others, at least some of whom were explicitly identified as ‘noble,’ can generally be identified as the tenants or clients of castellans and/or as the men of a particular castle. All these men carried on feuds as members of armed groups, not as isolated individuals. While taking many different actions in feuds and striving for various goals through this political process, their avowed objective throughout these conflicts was to gain revenge for an alleged injury. This they tried to achieve by expressing, in conventionalized and well–understood ways, their hatred and loathing for their enemies and their anger. Nevertheless, because the opposing parties to feuds were never complete strangers to one another, but belonged to the same loosely defined regional community, conflicts of this kind could, in theory, be ended or at least temporarily halted in such a way as to create or restore amicable relations between groups that had previously been at war. Whether in practice such settlements could actually be established and create real social peace is another matter.

Early in the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon divided philosophical knowledge into four areas: theoretical, practical (i.e., moral), mechanical, and logical. He further divided mechanical knowledge into seven arts, parallel to the liberal arts, giving last place to theatrica, which he defined briefly as ‘scientia ludorum.’ It proved to be the most controversial of his seven categories. Some twenty years ago W. Tatarkiewicz studied Hugh's idea, its sources, and its appearance in a few subsequent texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance; later Nancy Howe added a reference from Petrarch. Since then, the concept of theatrics has seldom been treated in itself, although we now have substantially more evidence of its pervasiveness in medieval thinking, as a result of further scholarship on the Didascalicon and on the history of the mechanical arts. Drawing on these sources and on previously unreported material, this study attempts to describe in some detail the progress of theatrica during roughly the first three hundred years after its appearance in the works of Hugh. The medieval history of this idea does not tell us much about the theater, but it does tell us quite a lot about medieval attitudes toward play, entertainment, and performance, topics that learned circles did not often discuss extensively or dispassionately.

Thomas of Hales has long been recognized as the author of a fine Middle English lyric, the ‘Luue Ron.’ He is also known to have written a sermon (or meditation) in Anglo-Norman, and a few manuscripts of a Latin life of the Virgin, Vita Sancte Marie, have also been attributed to him. Modern accounts of his life depend almost entirely on an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

The intensification of intellectual endeavour which characterises the twelfth century is manifested in the art of rhetoric no less than in the other fields of learning. Two new types of theoretical manual represent the trends of twelfth-century rhetoric: the artes dictandi, which apply rhetorical doctrine to the composition of letters and documents, and the artes poetrie, which are primarily concerned with the writing of verse. This creative momentum continued after 1200, particularly in Italy, where dictamen underwent rapid development. There the ars notarie emerged as a semi-autonomous discipline, which was exclusively devoted to the composition of legal documents. Moreover, Italian dictatores of the thirteenth century began to turn their attention to secular speeches, creating a new offshoot of dictamen which is sometimes called the ars arengandi. Boncompagno of Signa's Rhetorica novissima (finished in 1235) is by far the most ambitious of these new treatises on public speaking. Most of the early works on oratory are collections of models, consisting either of exordia or of entire speeches. The Rhetorica novissima, however, not only provides models, but attempts to lay out a completely new theoretical foundation for the art of speech-making.

When Morton Bloomfield reviewed David Burr's The Persecution of Peter Olivi, he noted that Olivi's reputation, no matter how interpreted, has been too much estimated in terms of his association with the spiritualism of Joachim of Flora. To get a more balanced view, he contended, we need more study dealing with other aspects of Olivi's career. It is as a step in the fulfillment of this need that we present an edition of Olivi's Quaestiones logicales.

Entre las ciudades que jalonan el itinerario del incansable viajero que fue Ramon Llull, Pisa ocupa un lugar especial. Al contrario de Génova, Montpellier, París etc. el encuentro de Ramon con Pisa fue casual y no estaba en los planes y afanes de su larga y azarosa vida. La estancia de Llull en Pisa fue relativamente corta, no llegó a durar un semestre, y sin embargo fue una época fecundísima en la producción literaria luliana. En Pisa escribió o terminó de escribir Ramon Llull una serie de obras de gran importancia y que, a juzgar por el número de manuscritos en que se conservan, pertenecen al grupo de obras lulianas más leidas en los siglos posteriores: Ars brevis, Ars generalis ultima, Liber disputationis Raimundi christiani et Homeri Saraceni, Liber clericorumy Liber de centum signis Dei.

Burgundio of Pisa's undated Graeco-Latin version of Galen's chief work on differential diagnosis, the De locis affectis, proved less popular than its rival, the Arabic-Latin rendering, though it was studied and utilized by an influential teacher at Bologna, Taddeo Alderotti († 1295). The Arabic-Latin version (Inc. ‘Medicorum non solum moderni ….’) is ubiquitous. Burgundio's translation exists in only five copies, viz. Erfurt Amplon. F 278, saec. XIVin., fols. 84ra–117ra (= E); Città del Vaticano, Codex Vaticanus Barberinianus Latinus 179, saec. XIV, fols. 15ra–36vb (= C: lacks a whole quaternion); Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, Codex 286, saec. XIV, fols. 84ra–116rb(= D); Cesena, Bibl. Malatestiana Dextr. Plut. 23 cod. 1, saec. XIV, fols. 46ra–85rb (= F); and Venice, Bibl. Nazionale Marciana, VII.11 (XIV, 7), saec. XIV, fols. 41ra–43vb (= G.) This last is a fragment only.

These pages conclude the Census and Bibliography of Medieval Manuscripts Containing Apocalypse Illustrations begun in Traditio 40 (1984) 337–379 and continued in Traditio 41 (1985) 367–409. They contain the descriptions of nine groups of manuscripts. Three of these groups comprise illustrated Apocalypses: Alexander Minorita Apocalypses (nos. 118–122), Later German Apocalypses (nos. 123–132), and Miscellaneous Apocalypses (133–137). The remaining six groups comprise manuscripts that, although not illustrated Apocalypses, contain five or more illustrations of the Apocalypse: Miscellaneous Bibles (nos. 138–145), Liber Floridus manuscripts (nos. 146–152), Moralized Bibles (nos. 153–158), Historiated Bibles (nos. 159–167), Books of Hours (nos. 168–170), and Miscellaneous Manuscripts (nos. 171–172) R. Emmerson would like to thank Peter Klein for his helpful suggestions. Recognizing that, despite our best efforts, this Census and Bibliography may include some errors and omissions, the authors would be grateful to receive corrections and additions for a future edition.