While certain of the faithful say that in the mystery of the body and blood of Christ, daily celebrated in the church, nothing takes place under a figure, under a veil, but it is performed with a naked manifestation of truth itself, others bear witness, however, that these elements are contained beneath the figure of a mystery, and that it is one thing which appears to the bodily sense but another which faith beholds. No small divergence is to be distinguished between them.

In Section 1 of the present essay I present evidence that in the early twelfth-century nominalists were called vocales, a name that only later was replaced by nominales. In Section 2 I argue that ‘vocalism' arose about 1080, one generation of scholars before Roscelin. Since Garlandus' vocalistic Dialectica could be thought to provide evidence of an even earlier origin of the theory, Section 3 will deal with the date of this work, which has wrongly been assigned to the mid-eleventh century or earlier. Sections 4–6 will present a number of unpublished texts by vocalist authors, and the Appendix will supply editions of vocalist texts commenting on or otherwise discussing Porphyry's Isagoge.

In his account of twelfth-century ‘cosmologists,’ Winthrop Wetherbee has pointed to an essential problem in the interpretation of Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1182–1183). He argues that the major theme of the poem is ‘the working out of the relation of the Arts to Theology that culminates in Prudentia's vision of God’; given this, Wetherbee argues that there is ‘something gratuitous and anticlimactic about the ensuing psychomachia and the new earthly order to which it leads,’ especially when the ‘virtues associated with the New Man are largely secular.’ The conclusion to which these observations lead is ineluctable: ‘Whatever its significance, the idealism of the “triumph of Nature,” as Alan calls it, is difficult to reconcile with the radical subordination of earthly knowledge in the central books of the poem.’

The more we learn about the quantity and diversity of the copies, commentaries, and adaptations of Ciceronian rhetoric that have survived from the medieval period, the more we are led to ask why these materials were preserved and how they were used. The question of practical utility has especially concerned those students of medieval commentaries on the De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium who are faced with the task of explaining why these treatises continued to be copied and studied long after the demise of both the Roman law courts and the Roman schools. While the use to which the ars dictaminis was put is considerably more evident, there is still much to be learned about the circumstances in which it was taught. Since twelfth-century teachers of dictamen generally saw themselves as the heirs of Cicero, study of their works and the curricula in which they found their place often casts light on the status of rhetoric instruction as a whole. Nowhere is this complementarity so manifest as in central France, by the mid-twelfth century widely regarded as the foremost center for study of the auctores. During the second half of the twelfth century, even as the concise, functional artes dictandi from Italy were rapidly establishing themselves alongside the more traditional commentaries on the classical rhetorics, the French grammar masters were busy refining the synthesis of ars grammatica and ars rhetorica, of Horace and Cicero, preserved in Matthew of Vendôme's Ars versificatoria (ca. 1175).

Muse of the unique
Historical fact, defending with silence
Some world of yours beholding, a silence
No explosion can conquer, but a lover's yes
Has been known to fill.
W. H. Auden, ‘Homage to Clio’

The Clio and Calliope evoked in the prohemia of Books II and III of Troilus and Criseyde are handily glossed in Chaucer editions as Muses of history and epic poetry respectively, but without citations of sources for these attributions. Stephen A. Barney's notes in The Riverside Chaucer suggest that in both evocations Chaucer is following Statius rather than Dante, and both he and B. A. Windeatt mention the marginal gloss ‘Cleo domina eloquentie’ in MS Harley 2392 of Troilus. Vincent J. DiMarco's note to the name Polymya in Anelida and Arcite identifies her as Muse of ‘sacred song,’ after her name-sense ‘she who is rich in hymns,’ but DiMarco does not elaborate on her pertinence to the context of the poem. There is little in current Chaucer criticism on schemes of attributes for the Muses; and yet without an idea of what values for the Muses Chaucer is drawing upon, it is difficult to appreciate their thematic force in Troilus.

That medieval culture included misogynous aspects has long been recognized. Only through the study of its specific lineaments in particular works, however, can the nature of that misogyny at particular junctures be understood. The content of antifeminist or misogynistic rhetoric varied greatly over time and space during the Middle Ages, although most medieval writing that directly attacked women drew on the classical and patristic traditions exemplified by Juvenal and Jerome. Misogyny, of course, was never the whole story, only a part of a complex cultural valuation of the feminine. Nevertheless, it clearly was an important theme in much medieval writing. Medieval writers used misogynistic topoi for purposes other than attacking women, but in doing so they perpetuated conventions that had an impact on women in medieval society. This article looks at the misogynistic aspects of one work, John of Bromyard's Summa predicantium.

Some twenty years ago, when few major books of Galen were available in modern English, one of his lesser writings, the treatise Περὶ μαρασμοῦ was published in translation. Even while this translation was in press, Pearl Kibre unearthed in the Vatican Library a text De marasmode secundum sententiam Galieni, which was composed by Bernard of Gordon at Montpellier in the early 1300s and is the only systematic discussion of marasmus in the medical literature for some fifteen centuries after Galen. By further coincidence, these two texts made their appearance just as several historians of science and of medicine were drawing attention to the ancient and medieval interpretations of life as the interaction between ‘innate heat' and ‘radical moisture'—precisely the paradigms in which the concept of marasmus was rooted. In 1974, in a seminal article on the Humidum radicale in thirteenth-century medicine, Michael McVaugh offered a first assessment of Bernard's discussion. His positive appraisal suggested that the text was worth editing and analyzing on its own terms, an enterprise that became more feasible with the recognition of additional manuscripts, references, and implications. A critical and annotated edition is presented here, together with an effort to collate Bernard's treatment of marasmus with his other works, with the teachings of his colleagues, and with the Galenic tradition.