Among the mediæval debates which have enjoyed the widest currency and have retained their hold on popular interest for the longest time is the contention between Wine and Water. Poems on this subject are extant in most of the languages of mediæval Europe; and the tradition has persisted with surprising vitality through more than seven centuries down to the present day. The bickerings of these two ancient foes may still be heard on the lips of the peasantry of Germany, France, and Spain, and a fragment of the same dispute was sung not long since as a nursery rhyme in Devon.

The chief general fact we need notice concerning the animals appearing in our ecclesiastical literature between 650 and 1500 is their double responsibility, to God and man. Toward God their duty is accomplished when, like the birds of St. Francis, they have duly rendered to Him their chorus of praise and thanksgiving. Man they must serve, first, as examples; second, as illustrations to his reflective mood of spiritual truth; third, by direct personal ministration to him.

In a previous study, I have aimed to show that, in Medieval France, personal relationships among men played a more important rôle than they do in modern times; that, therefore, there often arose a fixed code of rules to govern such relations, which assumed the character of formal institutions; that the study of personal relationships in Medieval France is, as a consequence, of greater importance than would be an examination into similar modern alliances; that there were two general kinds of personal relations: the relations between the seigneur and the follower, and the relations between follower and follower.

When the student of medieval literature busies himself, as he must so often do, with the chronological sequence of an author's works, he finds himself saying that a given writing was ‘published’ in a given year. What does the word ‘published’ mean? Obviously it must mean something different from the modern process of printer's proofs, advance notices, public sale, and book-reviews. When the textual critic strives to wrest from the existing manuscripts of a medieval work the evidence which shall enable him to reconstruct the author's original autograph, he finds himself speaking of copies made directly from this autograph. Under what conditions were these earliest copies ordinarily made? To both literary historian and textual critic it should be of service to make as clear as may be just what was involved in the act of publication before the discovery of printing introduced the sort of publication with which we are now familiar, and to determine under what conditions an author's work might circulate during his lifetime.

The personal history of Mrs. Behn, commonly called the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by authorship, has long been regarded as unusually interesting. The daughter of a barber named John Johnson, she was baptized at Wye, Kent, 10 July, 1640. She was buried in London, 20 April, 1689. We find that her career, as generally related, falls into three principal episodes. (1) With a relative whom in Oroonoko she calls her father, and who was appointed lieutenant-governor of Surinam, she went to that colony, where she met the royal slave who is the hero of her story, and where she remained until about 1658. (2) She married a London merchant of Dutch extraction, named Behn, but was widowed by 1666. (3) In the latter part of 1666, while acting as a political agent at Antwerp, she gained, through a Dutch lover of hers named Vander Albert, early information of the famous raid by De Ruyter on the English ships in the Thames and Medway; but her timely warning was ridiculed by the British government officials, and she retired from the secret service to devote herself to literature. Momentary doubts whether these data are not in some particulars inaccurate have occasionally been expressed during the last sixty years; but the suspicions, never very strong, have always quickly died away. The story as outlined above has been substantially accepted and retold, not only by the compilers of popular works of reference, but by scholars like Walter Raleigh, Richard Garnett, W. H. Hudson, H. S. Canby, and Miss C. E. Morgan, as well as by those who have made a special study of Mrs. Behn,—namely Edmund Gosse, P. Siegel, and E. A. Baker.

Owing to the lack of a complete Corpus of the Sicilian poets, the student of this period has to seek the repertory of the group in a number of different sources, and it is in the hope of greatly lessening his labors that the following study has been prepared, offering the essential materials in a compact form, and so arranged that it may be quickly and easily consulted. First we discuss the constitution of the Sicilian group of the age of Frederick II, then give an alphabetical list of the poets, with a few biographical notes and references under each, and the numbers of their poems, in the accompanying Index of First Lines. In the Index of First Lines there will be found under each poem references to the important manuscripts and editions; also an indication of the metrical scheme. As such a collection of material offers a natural opportunity for an examination of the metrical forms of the period, an analysis of the technique of the canzone and the sonnet is added.