The one feature of a paper that needs to draw attention of potential readers is its Title. The importance of this being very carefully worded is stressed. The chapter also covers the small sections of a paper that give information about the authors, their affiliations, which author is dealing with correspondence, the contributions of co-authors, any conflicts of interest, who to acknowledge and how to prepare reference lists. It mentions how in this electronic age papers can be tagged using a 'DOI'.

There are many difficulties in presenting data to the best advantage, using Figures, Tables, images, schemas, etc. Issues such as size, amount of data being included, optimal layout for ease of reading, and other problems are covered. Units, scale bars, statistical indicators, significance and a host of other matters are discussed. The place to present data is considered, i.e. whether some of the slightly less relevant findings or methods should go into 'Supplementary Information'.

The purpose of the Discussion is to tell the reader whether the data are likely to prove or disprove the hypothesis, presenting relevant arguments, consider in relation to previous publications. Indicating where caution in interpretation is needed, and qualifying conclusions as necessary.

This is a part of the scientific paper that today is often appended after rest of the paper has been reached. It has to give details of the techniques used, the reason for their selection and exact details of the procedures.The need for proper controls is discussed. Sources of materials have to be identified, modifications and limitations are to be included. Confidence in the data that emerges means that statistical tests must be appropriate. How this quite tedious section of the paper can best be assembled is explained.

This chapter introduces the reader to some of the procedures and problems that arise once a paper moves on to the publishing process. Publishing houses have different ways of operating through different modalities. Issues with proofs (who deals with them – author or publisher?) are discussed. The steps that occur after proofing are described.

A scientific paper is part of an ongoing sequence of findings. The author has to put this in context, which is the act of writing an Introduction, effectively the state of the art in the particular research project at the time of preparing a new paper. It should include seminal works from the past, but should also focus on the issues that have come in the more recent past. It needs to explain how the author arrived at the hypothesis that must be clearly included in this Introduction.

Authors are informed about the many problems of unethical practices in scientific publishing, notably plagiarism, duplication, multiple submission, fabrications, conflicts of interest and others. They are also pointed to places where they can get help in dealing with these issues.

Authors are instructed that the Abstract is the most important part of their paper and that it needs very careful attention. It must attract the attention of potential readers, be succinct and clear. The structured Abstract is more verbose, which is required by some journals. It should contain in particular the hypothesis and, in the shortest way, the overall conclusion of the findings. Below it the author indicates what are the most appropriate keywords, sets out the abbreviations used.

Editorial matters can be complex. These include how editors reach their decision, appeals against non-acceptance, revision and its difficulties, problems in creating the final version and moving it on to the publication procedure.

‘The Magisterium has proposed no definitive positive teaching on the precise relationship between divine causality and human free choice’. So writes Robert J. Matava in 2016, surveying the debates from Augustine to latter-day neo-Thomists. Matava's survey does not include Bernard of Clairvaux. Yet, Bernard's De gratia et libero arbitrio (c. 1128) contains a robust defense of the will's freedom from necessity. Exercised along with grace, it yields freedom from sin and freedom from misery in the next life. While Bernard's three freedoms became a standard item in the scholastic inventory, his account of freedom of choice, the theme of this chapter, is distinctive, in itself and in the light of his available authorities.

Thus far, scholars have contextualized De gratia in various ways. Some read it in continuity with philosophical traditions such as Platonism and Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Thomism, late medieval voluntarism, or even with thinkers as recent as Descartes and Nietzsche. More typically, scholars treat it as the work of Bernard as a mystic or a neo-Augustinian ‘last of the Fathers’. Those who consider more recent sources have settled on Anselm of Canterbury. The De gratia reflects both agreement with Anselm and departures from him. Far less attention has been paid to John Cassian, an author cited as a patristic authority in the early Middle Ages, recommended in the Rule of St. Benedict, and familiar to all in the Benedictine tradition. As this chapter argues, it is largely from Cassian's Collations that Bernard derived his strategy for defending the will's freedom from necessity, against Augustine, Anselm, and Cassian himself.

The end of the fourteenth century saw the first reform attempts of the Order of Preachers and the beginning of the Great Western Schism (1378). Elias Raymundus of Toulouse, elected as the Master of the Order in Avignon on 6 June 1367, was a fervent reformer. He seems to have already launched vigorous renewal inside the Order from when he was appointed as a vicar on 21 February 1365. Elias's activity as a reformer, however, has been overshadowed by the next Master of the Order, Raymond of Capua. This is evident in studies of Dominican history from the beginning of the twentieth century: for example, father Daniel-Antonin Mortier pointed out, in his major work on general masters of the Order of Preachers, that Elias's principal administrative act was the transportation of Thomas Aquinas's remains (d. 1274) from a Cistercian house in Italy to the Dominican convent in Toulouse, France, in 1368-1369. After making this important observation, Mortier does not try to combine Elias's efforts for reform and the establishment of the relic cult, nor the influence of the Schism on both of them. The same is applicable to more recent studies: the combination of all three – the reform, the Schism, and Thomas's relic cult – has remained without particular attention, which makes the issue worth approaching.

Nevertheless, those sources which tell us about the translation of Thomas Aquinas's remains were products of their age and, as such, they offer a way to analyze the impact of the reform and the Schism in those communities where the texts were used.

Hugh Metel (d. c. 1150), an Augustinian canon of St. Léon, Toul, in the region of Lorraine, has left us a collection of 55 letters and several poems. They are preserved in a manuscript belonging to the Benedictine abbey of Saint- Arnoul, Metz, copied sometime in the second half of the twelfth century. This manuscript, transferred to the Collège de Clermont in the seventeenth century and now in Berlin ( Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Phillipps, 1694), provided the basis for what is still the only printed edition of the letter collection as a whole, published by Charles Louis Hugo in 1731 within the second volume of his Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta. Hugo's edition was unknown to abbé Migne when he reprinted Mabillon's edition of just four letters of Hugh Metel, as an appendix to the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux within the Patrologia Latina. Given the rarity of the 1731 edition, it is not surprising that Hugh Metel is largely unknown to literary and historical scholarship, a fact that Constant J. Mews and I are now working to rectify.

Relatively unknown today, Hugh Metel was very well-connected to major religious men of his time and he strove diligently to widen his networks through his letters. The two main avenues he pursued were correspondence with influential men and involvement in contemporary issues, which he pursued with his remarkable rhetorical abilities and knowledge. Although he vehemently objects to rhetoric and language virtuosity, he seems to enjoy them in his own writing.

Emotions do not feature largely in the writings of Peter Abelard (1079-1142). To a certain extent, he lived and wrote just prior to the affective turn that would energize his Cistercian and Victorine contemporaries, for whom the taxonomizing of emotions and consideration of the impact of emotions on the Christian person formed an integral part of their thinking. Abelard's thoughts do turn often to the caritas of God, but deal less often with the emotional complexion of the human believer. What makes Abelard's approach to compassio, or empathy, so interesting, then, is the tension we can see between his desire to approach the emotion from the perspective of a Stoic philosopher and his need to encompass the infinite mercy of incarnated divine love within his worldview. It should not surprise us, perhaps, that a scholar who compiled the massive Sic et non with its dialectical readings should find himself able to comprehend the idea of empathy from a range of perspectives. Particularly interesting, however, is the generic contingency of Abelard's understanding of the nature and function of empathy, as he considers the emotion from the point of view of ethics as a philosopher, in personal terms as a suffering human, and in relation to the Redemption as a Christian and theologian.

Defining the Terms

There is no term for ‘empathy’ as such in Medieval Latin. The term ‘empathy’ is a late-nineteenth-century invention that arises out of German aesthetic theory and is quickly taken up by the emerging practice of psychoanalysis.

One of the major accomplishments of Constant Mews is his effort to establish Heloise as a thinker and a writer in her own right. Long before he joined her name to that of her husband in the title of a volume dedicated to ‘great medieval thinkers’, he had already pinpointed her intellectual impact on Abelard in an important article devoted to their readings of Jerome. Of the pair, she clearly was the one who had a greater familiarity with the Church Father. Asserting this fact was instrumental in Mews's identification soon afterwards of Heloise as the woman in the Epistolae duorum amantium, whose intimate knowledge of Jerome is remarkable. Jerome is also a central reference in what has to be considered as Heloise's intellectual masterpiece. Her famous ‘Dissuasion from marriage’ (‘dehortatio matrimonii’), inserted within Abelard's Historia calamitatum, relies heavily on arguments to that effect borrowed from Jerome's Contra Jovinianum. It is unfortunate that the study of misogynistic prejudices is itself sometimes encumbered by misogynistic preconceptions. Scholars often doubted that Heloise could have really built on her own a complex argumentation, putting to use a large number of classical examples. Since Abelard also used many of them in his Theologia christiana (written in or soon after 1122), it seemed logical to infer that he first gathered them at that time, before putting them to use again in the Historia calamitatum (around 1131). Yet, a closer textual analysis reveals that, in that chapter of the Historia, Abelard is indeed reporting extracts of the authentic letter Heloise had sent him around 1117, while refusing the wedding plans he had made with her uncle Fulbert.