“Aτη was an important concept for Aeschylus. A merely numerical comparison of the passages in which ἄτη appears in pre-Aeschylean authors with the number of such Aeschylean passages makes this clear. In what remains to us of Greek literature from Homer to Pindar ἄτη occurs fifty times. In the seven extant plays of Aeschylus the word occurs with certainty forty-eight times. Thus, in the work of one author whose career spans the first four decades of the fifth century ἄτη is employed approximately as often as it had been in the remaining literary tradition of the previous three centuries.

This study is concerned with Augustine's use of habit (consuetudo) to explain man's reluctance to raise his mind to God, and his difficulty in doing good. In the books that will be examined here, consuetudo is nearly always used in a pejorative sense, and can thus be translated as bad habit (be it of a psychological or ethical nature). Habit as a formal instrument of thought was known to Augustine early in his life from a reading of the Categories. There he learned that habit was a quality of a substance, not a substance itself: ‘One kind of quality let us call habits ἕξιϛ and conditions (διάθεσις). A habit differs from a condition in being more stable and lasting longer. Such are the branches of knowledge and the virtues. Justice, temperance, and the rest seem to be not easily changed.’ Augustine was also aware of the idea of habit as a second nature (consuetudo secunda natura), i.e. a tendency which is created by one's own activity, and which in turn produces effects in a predictable sort of way. This idea was a commonplace of the ancient world, and may have come to Augustine through the professors of rhetoric, who taught speech and composition through the inculcation of good habits.

The hide was a common form of land tenure in pre-Conquest England. Scanty documentation and ambiguous statements in the sources have made it difficult, however, for economic and social historians to understand the evolving meaning of hide in the period from Bede to 1100. The present study attempts to clarify some of the problems surrounding this word by a re-examination of the sources and by an analysis of terminology in land-tenure institutions related to it. The results of the investigation show that revisions in land tenure during the later Anglo-Saxon era prepared the way for the introduction of Norman methods for governing the English countryside.

The transitus — the crossing of the Red Sea — is beyond question the central episode of the Old English Exodus poem. Like other episodes of that difficult work, it presents several very curious features which have long been the subject of scholarly attention. One such feature is that the Israelites, mustered in their divisions on the shore of the Red Sea, are described as beginning to move forward into the sea as if they were going into a battle. Not only the direction of this readiness to fight but the readiness itself seems incongruous: their enemies are behind them and not in front; in well known fact the Israelites are fleeing from the Egyptians.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the Norman Conquest, an interest elicited in part by the nine-hundredth anniversary of that momentous event. Among the specific aspects of England's relations with the duchy of Normandy that have attracted the attention of scholars has been that of King Edward's bequest of the Anglo-Saxon crown to Duke William. These studies have touched lightly upon the role of Godwin, earl of the West Saxons, in the affair. A prominent, perhaps at times dominant figure at court during the first decade of Edward's reign, he has traditionally been portrayed as a staunch foe of Norman influence in England. Indeed, Godwin's opposition to the Confessor's pro-Norman policy is generally held to have brought England to the brink of civil war in 1051 and to have led to the flight of him and his family from the kingdom shortly after. Consequently it is strange to hear of the earl having given, with other members of the witan, an oath recognizing the duke of Normandy as Edward's heir and, moreover, having surrendered a son and grandson to secure his pledge. If the earl did make these concessions, and conceivably others, an explanation, in view of his alleged anti-Norman attitude, is desirable. There has been, however, no logical, cohesive account of his part in the succession crisis advanced. The tendency has been either simply to reject evidence that appears to be contrary to accepted theories or, if taken into consideration, to interpret it in a manner that has resulted in a wholly inconsistent picture of Godwin's conduct.

Some years ago I called attention to these words of the early thirteenth-century decretalist, Vincentius Hispanus, on the powers of the pope and of the prince: ‘… sit voluntas pro ratione.’ What is the meaning? Did Vincentius hold that the supreme authority was arbitrarily absolute, that the voluntas of the monarch must in all circumstances be accepted as reason itself? Must we believe that he advanced a doctrine of unlimited absolutism — of the pope in the Church and of the emperor in the Empire? And that he anticipated a theory of sovereignty as the authority and powers of the ruler subject neither to the law nor to the laws?

In 1255, in his commentary on the fourth book of Peter Lombard's Sentences, Thomas Aquinas rejected a solution to the problem of sacramental causality, one that was enjoying a certain degree of popularity in the mid-thirteenth century. The opinion that Thomas rejected was that the sacraments effect grace not through an inherent, created virtue but rather through a pact, covenant, or ordination of God that guarantees grace to the person who receives the sacraments, if the latter are properly administered and the recipient places no obstacle in the way of their effectiveness. This type of sacramental causality, termed causality sine qua non, was usually illustrated, Thomas informs us, with the following example. A king might decree that any person possessing a certain leaden coin would receive 100 pounds. In such a case, it would not be the leaden coin that causes the reception of the 100 pounds, but rather the arbitrary acceptation of the token by the king. For Thomas, the leaden coin would be only the occasion for the reward, not its cause. Therefore Thomas rejected this solution which, it seemed to him, would make the sacraments nothing more than the occasion or accidental cause of grace. He sealed his rejection by equating such causality with the way in which the racial color of the builder of a house could be said to be the cause of the house. Thomas maintained this position throughout his life, and, although he altered his solution to the problem of sacramental causality, he in no way altered his rejection of the type of causality based on the example of the king and the leaden coin.

‘The second division of Piers Plowman,’ writes Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘is essentially organized around the journey of the mind into itself.’ This observation seems true and vital to our understanding of the poem, yet the nature and course of that inward journey have never been conclusively determined. There is no general agreement on the identities of figures like Wit, Inwit, and Imaginatif. Perhaps more importantly, there is no agreement on the precise relationship of these personifications to each other, to their own speeches, to the Dreamer's progress or lack of progress, or to the nature of the poem's allegory. This article examines the inward journey in an effort to explain something of the nature of Langland's psychological lore and its connections with other elements of the poem. It hopes to show that such an explanation can best be derived, not from scholastic tags somewhat haphazardly applied to Langland's personifications, but rather from the traditions of ‘monastic,’ moral psychology consistently applied both to the poem's larger development and to a significant number of its details.

These pages continue the inventory of Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries published in Traditio 23 (1967) 313–413, 24 (1968) 149–245, 26 (1970) 135–216, and 27 (1971) 251–351. The commentaries have been arranged alphabetically according to the author's first name, with a brief bio-bibliographical note and indication of manuscripts and editions.

In a recent article on the Florentine synodal constitutions of 1327, I took note of the rubric de testamentis et ultimis uoluntatibus, which ordered executors to pay directly to the bishop one-third of all legacies left indistincte ad pias causas seu pro anima. Another third of such bequests was to be paid directly to the testator's parish rector, while the remainder supposedly was to be distributed by the executors to pious causes. Under pressure from the commune, this mandate was struck in 1330. I stated the reasons for communal opposition, and made a limited attempt to show the canonical background of the bishop's unsuccessful ordinance. Citing the European-wide use by the secular clergy of the decretal Super cathedram (1300) to recoup income lost to the friars, the article concluded that Florence's demand for direct payment of a third on indistincte was an extreme — but not unique — formulation of a trend within one contemporary school of jurisprudence to amplify the testamentary rights of the secular clergy. The bishop's attempt was bad law, and even the lawyers whose opinions had encouraged the bishop in his formulation — before all, the great canonist Giovanni d'Andrea — crushed such attempts on indistincte with strong and decisive consilia.

The romanesque façade of the abbey church of St.-Gilles in the diocese of Nlmes has been a subject of debate among art historians for many years. This controversy has been centered on the design of the church's façade [Fig. 1]. In addition to a series of colonnettes supporting archivolts that surround the tympana over its three western doorways, the St.-Gilles façade also possesses two free-standing columns flanking the central doorway that support nothing, a peculiarity which has led scholars to conclude that the plan of the façade was changed during the remodeling of the church in the twelfth century. The debate has focused on the dating of this change. A number of dates have been suggested, based on the façade's sculptural style, on dated inscriptions in the crypt, and on documents dealing with the church fabric. The art historians of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries dated the redesigning of the façade between 1116 and the middle of the thirteenth century, though the tendency of more recent scholarship has been to narrow the range of dates to between 1116 and the 1140s.

Because Robert Grosseteste's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is now seen as having provided the framework for a dynamic study of Aristotle's moral philosophy, more significance must be attached to what itself became the standard translation in the Middle Ages. That Grosseteste was responsible both for the full translation of Aristotle's text and for the translation of the Greek commentaries which accompany the Ethics in twenty-one known manuscripts modern scholars are now in agreement. Grosseteste's work on the Nicomachean Ethics has been dated confidently to the 1240s, arguably to 1246–47, and scholars have tended to stress the rapidity with which the Aristotelian ethics were assimilated in the thirteenth century, in contrast, for example, with the slow progress recorded by John of Salisbury on the Posterior Analytics in the twelfth. These results of recent research seem, it should be notd in passing, strangely at odds with the verdict of Roger Bacon, that there was comparatively little work on the Ethics in his period. He, Grosseteste's most ardent admirer, appears not to have known that this master translated the text and comments: ‘Tardius communicata est Ethica Aristotelis et nuper lecta a magistris et raro.’

A most pernicious problem contributing to the economic woes of English monasteries in the early-fourteenth century was mismanagement. This condition was usually, if not almost universally, present and derived in part from the fact that the administrators of religious houses, especially the small ones, were not well trained for the complexities of their tasks. The official records of the royal chancery abound with notices that monasteries suffered from this malady, and the entries in these records follow a pattern, repeating time and time again a variety of standard charges. Having perhaps endured internal dissension that had contributed to the economic difficulty, monasteries became impoverished by indiscreet rule, their goods were wasted, and they experienced mismanagement. In addition, the documents assert that these troubled monasteries suffered from indebtedness, that lax discipline prevailed, and that lands of religious corporations were alienated illegally. Finally, the entries maintain that the ill-advised sale of corodies, and the unwarranted grants of pensions contributed to a depressed monastic economy. To illustrate these observations upon defective monastic administration, reference to specific examples is needed.