While the influence of the Aristotelian topoi has been rather extensive in our western tradition, particularly in literature, it does seem that their methodology has not been fully understood. A number of factors have contributed to this: the absence in Aristotle of a forthright and formal discussion of what he has in mind, the neglect of the methodology after Aristotle, a partially misdirected emphasis given to the method by Cicero, one of the first to concern himself with the topics, and the continuation of the Ciceronian interpretation by Quintilian with whom it passed into the Middle Ages and the stream of our western tradition.

The three decades preceding the publication of the new Latin translation of the Psalter by the Biblical Institute in Rome in 1945 have seen a number of studies and articles which throw revealing light on the interpretation of Psalm 90.6. Discussing the laws of purification and diet in the Old Testament, J. Döller thought it possible to discover in the Bible a few faint vestiges of a popular belief in demons among the Israelites and saw a plague demon especially in ‘the destruction that lays waste at noonday’ (Ps. 90.6b). Referring to Döller's study, S. Landersdorfer pointed to a parallel Assyrian belief which regarded midnight and noonday as periods especially dangerous and haunted by demonic agencies, and was inclined to assume even for the Masoretic text the idea of a demon of night (6a) and a demon of noonday (6b). Both demons were thought to exercise their power especially at the hours of the chilling midnight cold and the scorching noonday heat, and to be responsible for certain bodily disorders, such as sunstroke and malaria fever, and for other diseases caused by the rapid changes of temperature in the southern deserts. In this case the psalmist would already have alluded to a popular belief, though such an allusion would not necessarily imply that he himself shared the view, Landersdorfer's article had been written ten years prior to its publication, that is, in a period when, owing to the disturbances during and shortly after the First World War, access to foreign publications was difficult and often impossible. Thus he was apparently unaware that, only about a year before the completion of his article, W. H. Worrell had pointed out some similar parallels from oriental countries.

Since the period between the two world wars the study of the Fathers has gradually taken a new direction. In the first place, the age of the masters was past; their brilliant, all-embracing structures laid the foundations, it is true, of the modern critical age, while at the same time they have left us with a profound sense of dissatisfaction. Many of the great classics of patristic scholarship of the past attained the level of universal statement only by means of a swift and perhaps over-hasty reading of the evidence — a good example of this would be some of Harnack's monumental work — and so there remains the endless task of revision, of the painstaking work of filling in a mosaic of detail, without which the broad vision of truth is unattainable. In the second place, ours is a perhaps more historico-critical attitude towards some of the areas of patristic doctrine. Although it is hazardous to make a generalization, it may be said that the modern approach to the Old and the New Testament is apt to be widely divergent from that of many of the Fathers of the Golden Age; and our task is rather to understand the techniques which they used in solving their exegetical problems.

With the fall of Constantinople to Crusaders from the West the Cistercian Order found a new area for development. Cistercians had taken an active part in the Fourth Crusade and they were ready to share in the process of settlement which followed hard on the conquest of the Empire and Greece. The fortunes of the Cistercians in the East waxed and waned with great rapidity, paralleling the course of the Latin Empire itself: between 1204 and 1276 the Order acquired at least twelve houses and lost at least nine of these. The interesting but unspectacular history of the Cistercian Order in the Latin Empire and Greece has received little attention, either from historians of the Order itself or from those scholars who have treated the history of the Latin conquest and occupation. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the foundation, development and final abandonment of the Cistercian houses in the Empire and Greece, to explore the activities of Cistercian abbots and priors in the affairs of the Empire, and to examine the contacts between Cistercians of East and West. But since the interest of the Cistercians in Constantinople and Greece began with their participation in the Fourth Crusade, consideration will first be given to their activity as Crusaders.

En vertu du c. 1508 du Code de droit canonique, qu'il s'agisse de prescription acquisitive ou de prescription extinctive, I'Église reçoit dans son droit propre la législation de chaque nation, sauf quelques réserves contenues dans les cc. 1509–1512. Dans quelle mesure les canonistes contemporains ont-ils tenu compte de cette nouvelle législation dans I'élaboration de leur doctrine de la prescription, eu égard, par exemple, au droit civil beIge ou français?

From the beginning of the Divine Comedy — ‘where the sun is silent’ — to the final vision of light, the poem is a carefully ordered hierarchy of light and shadows. We are not only asked to see clearly but we are asked to see qualitatively, to distinguish degrees of light and kinds of vision. It is in the last canto of the Paradiso that the degree of light is most intense and that our attention is called to a unique kind of seeing. With extraordinary insistence, Dante repeats some form of the verb vedere (to see) or a derivative there-of every few lines. The transition from time to eternity and from the finite to the infinite makes all the more sophisticated resources of language inadequate, and one must revert to a childlike form of emphasis, mere repetitions. This simplest of rhetorical devices is, by some miracle of art, adequate for the expression of the most unimaginable of possible experiences. In every line we feel something of Dante's joy in the possession of a ‘novella vista’ and his rapture in the divine vision, an effect conveyed by the very struggle to express the inexpressible. The struggles of course are those of Dante the pilgrim; Dante the poet is in perfect control of his artistic resources, and it is through the masterly rendering of inadequacy that the whole presentation becomes — paradoxically — adequate.

The medieval sources for the study of the organization and customs of the Spanish military Order of Calatrava have never been published. For information on this matter scholars have relied upon the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century difiniciones enacted by the general chapters of the Order. With the hope of stimulating interest in a subject which has long awaited analysis, the difiniciones or statutes of Abbot William II of Morimond, given in 1468, are printed here. This is the first in a series of projected editions of all the texts pertinent to the organization and customs of the Order in the Middle Ages. Abbot William's difiniciones, like those of his predecessors, issued during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contain useful details concerning the monastic practices of the knights of Calatrava.

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

From the earliest times the Roman pontiffs exercised the right of sending envoys - by dispatching their legates to synods and councils, by maintaning from the time of Leo the Great their apocrisiarii at the imperial court of Constantinople and later still in the kingdom of the Franks, by appointing bishops and metropolitans as vicars apostolic, and by entrusting at times even to secular princes a kind of legatine power. While the theoretical basis of their claim to this right may be said to have received its final formulation at the hands of John XXII in the year 1316, it was nonetheless more penetratingly analyzed and expounded by Pius VI and Leo XIII. It is upon the pronoun cements of these popes that the definition of this claim in the Code of Canon Law is based:

ius … a civili potestate independens, in. quamlibet mundi partem legatos cum vel sine ecclesiastica iurisdictione mittendi.

The medieval versions in Greek and Latin of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat made generally available to Christian writers a considerable amount of Eastern story material. The legend itself enjoyed wide readership in these and vernacular languages, and individual episodes provided the basis for further expansion. The viability of the legend in this regard owes much to the ten moral tales, or apologues, which appear during the course of the main story. These little fables proved attractive to writers for centuries, throughout and even after the Middle Ages, and they have long engaged the efforts of scholars to trace their route from ancient India to the English Renaissance stage. The apologues merit attention, however, in the form in which they were used in the eleventh century, for their application in the hagiographical context provides an interesting example of post-Scriptural parables and the allegorical interpretation of what might be termed ‘romance’ materials. This paper seeks to examine the attitudes toward parable, allegory and romance implicit in the ten apologues of the Vita.

The voluminous writings of St. John Chrysostom reflect the influence of the important movements and controversies of the fourth century: the spread of monasticism, the final conflict between Christianity and paganism, and the struggle between Nicene orthodoxy and Arianism, which came to an end, at least in the Eastern Empire, with Theodosius the Great and the first Council of Constantinople in 381. Each of these Christian groups — monks, Arians, and Nicene orthodox — had, as George Huntston Williams has clearly shown, its own distinctive attitude towards the imperial state.

Unter den Stücken der sogenannten Akten des Konzils von Pavia (865), die, wie an anderern Orte gezeigt, in Wahrheit eine Propagandaschrift kanonistischen Charakters des abgesetzten Erzbischofs Gunthar von Köln darstellen, ist der Auszug eines Briefes von Papst Hilarus (461–468) ‘ad Niciphorum et ad alios episcopos per provincias’ aufgeführt, der sowohl sachlich wie überlieferungsgeschichtlich besonderes Interesse beanspruchen darf. Zunächst sei zur Information vorausgeschickt, dass das Exzerpt an keiner anderen Stelle als eben in jener Guntharschen Sammlung zu finden ist und infolgedessen auch ein mit der Werbeschrift gemeinsames Schicksal erfahren hat, das bis heute für seine Einschätzung bestimmend gewesen ist.

In this passage, Lindsay prints ‘Verrucae aliud sunt: satiriasis aliud. Verrucae singulatim sunt, satiriasis vero una fortior, et circa ipsam plures inveniuntur.’ This seems corrupt, and it is known that Isidore did not live to revise his Etymologiae. ‘Verrucae’ can refer both to common warts and to pigmented nevi, the familiar brown moles; cf. Scribonius Largus, Conpositiones 228: ‘Si quando non exulceratas eminentias tollere sine ferro voluerimus, ut verrucas, naevos aliave eius generis …’ (ed. G. Helmreich [Leipzig 1887] p. 91f.). However, ‘satiriasis’ is discussed at Etymologiae 4.7.34 as sexual excitement of unusual degree, and may veil a reference to abnormal sexual acts or be confused with priapism. Some of, the MSS cited by Otto read phtiriasis for satyriasis, and this would demand translation as ‘louse infestation’; cf. Cassius Felix, De medicina 3: ‘In cachecticis corporibus id est mala habitudine affectis pediculosa passio generator quam Graeci pthiriasin vocant’ (ed. V. Rose [Leipzig 1879] p. 11). Other MSS read circa ipsam pruritus ex squammatione inveniuntur in place of circa ipsam plures inveniuntur, and the phrase pruritus ex squammatione suggests that pityriasis might correctly be read for satiriasis.

Readers of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae will recall the striking passage in 8.7 (Faral 125) in which Aur-elius, after the great victory over Hengist and the Saxons, calls together his leaders to decide what to do about the captive Hengist. Whereupon Eldad, Bishop of Gloucester, addresses Aurelius as follows:

Unlike Samuel, Bishop Eldad does not hew Hengist in pieces before the Lord; instead the Saxon is decapitated by the Bishop's brother, Eldol (who was not a churchman), and in fact is given a decent burial by Aurelius, who was, Geoffrey tells us, a moderate (‘ modestus’) individual. Yet it is almost beyond question that Geoffrey's whole account of the death of Hengist (for which there is no hint in his sources) is modeled on the biblical story of Samuel and Agag.

That William Langland, perhaps best known for his observation of contemporary English life, existed also in a world of Biblical allusion is apparent to anyone who turns the pages of Piers Plowman. Furthermore, the notes of Skeat and the recent study of Robertson and Huppe have clearly shown that the Biblical text reached Langland not directly, but surrounded by an accretion of commentary. Yet in relatively few cases is our knowledge sufficiently detailed to permit us to know with any degree of certainty the form or forms in which a given text reached Langland and the artistic purposes he made it serve. The present essay seeks to study in detail two Biblical texts - to show the evolution of the bodies of commentary with which Langland came into contact, and to examine the ways in which he adapted commentary, and on occasion even text, to fulfill his artistic intention.

Among the sources of Old English law upon which Bracton drew was the Instituta Cnuti, a twelfth-century version of Cnut's code, which that king is believed to have issued in 1027, or perhaps nearer 1020, under the inspiration of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester. So far as I have observed, Bracton made direct use of this source only when he was discussing theft, and he drew his scanty material from two widely separated articles of his original. The parallel passages are set out below, the words borrowed by Bracton being italicized.

Concluding his recent survey of the rise and crisis of medieval Slavdom, Francis Dvornik has rightly stressed that ‘it is the conserved memory of their storied past that has always inspired the Slavs in their ever-recurring struggles for freedom, and it will never fail to have significance for them.’

Within less than twelve months in the years 1955 and 1956 three senior members of the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University departed this life: Charles Rufus Morey, Albert Matthias Friend, and Earl Baldwin Smith. All three were scholars of distinction, and of all three it can be safely asserted that through their own work and through their influence upon their numerous students they decisively shaped the character and quality of American scholarship in the field of medieval art. This is especially true of Morey, who may be said to have made the tradition so hopefully inaugurated by Dr. Allan Marquand and to have passed the torch on to his pupils. If the invitation to catalogue the Museo Sacro of the Vatican Library was an extraordinary compliment paid to Morey, the master, the appointment to the office of Director of Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University was an outstanding distinction conferred upon Friend, his pupil. It was in this position that Friend's activities and influence assumed more and more international or cosmopolitan proportions, and so it came about that when the plan of a ‘Festschrift’ to be presented to him on his sixtieth anniversary was broached, not only colleagues and pupils of Princeton University, but more than one foreign scholar whom he had been instrumental in bringing to Dumbarton Oaks was invited to participate. The result was the volume now under consideration, which comprises in all thirty-two articles in the two fields of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For all the diversity of subjects treated, which is considerable, there is an extraordinary homogeneity to this liberal A dedicatory inscription composed in brilliant Greek was very appropriately prefixed to the volume, to complete an offering which Friend had the pleasure of receiving more than a year before his death.

Die weitausholende und verheissungsvolle internationale Zusammenarbeit zur Erforschung und Ausgabe der Werke der klassischen Kanonistik lässt es wunschenswert erscheinen, dass die handschriftlichen Bestände an noch nicht oder nur unbefriedigend ediertem Material immer luckenloser und im einzelnen genauer erfasst werden. Viel ist diesbezüglich schon geleistet worden. Manches bleibt aber noch zu tun.