The following essay is concerned with the significance of the references to the realm of heroic myth in Euripides' Orestes. It will deal with the way in which Euripides constructs the context of myth in which the action of the play is set and the importance of this perspective for interpretation of the drama. My object is to show that this dimension of the drama is both more explicit and significant than has been commonly recognized. I believe that an examination of the references to the traditional tales about the house of Atreus will reveal that they are not just a bow to either the conventions of the Attic stage or the sensibilities of the audience, but rather that they form an important component of Euripides' drama. In most studies of the play the significance of these references has been neglected; few critics or commentators have expended much interest or enthusiasm on this facet of the drama, and the references to this dimension of the drama's experience have tended to be regarded with little more than antiquarian interest. Consequently, before I turn to the examination of the mythical references in the Orestes, I would like to comment briefly upon two interrelated areas of inquiry which have tended to support this general attitude toward the play; these are the problems of interpretation posed by the play as a whole and then the very problematic question of Euripides' attitude to myth.

Horace opens his Ars poetica with several comparisons between the arts to illustrate the 'structural’ decorum which all unified works must share. Later, he develops an extended analogy between painting and poetry, introduced by the phrase ut pictura poesis, to illustrate the nature of the 'stylistic’ decorum necessary to please, and to continue to please, the critical reader. In an earlier essay entitled ‘The Meaning of Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis,’ I tried to show how this analogy (361–5) concludes the preceding discussion of faults which may and may not be overlooked in a long work (347–60). In the present paper, in addition to collecting further evidence for this interpretation, I shall argue that the lines in question (361–5) form, at the same time, a transitional introduction to the following analysis of the kind of pleasure appropriate to poetry and of how it may best be protected (366–90).

The tradition of Roger Bacon's Opus maius has many confusing aspects. No single MS contains all parts of the work, and several parts are transmitted separately, out of their original context and in different versions. Several reasons can be given for this confusion. One reason is that Bacon himself incorporated the same material into different projects and on each occasion adjusted the material to its new environment. Similarly, as he informs us, the text of the Opus maius itself was the outcome of several drafts. Another reason is the sheer bulk of the Opus maius. When Bacon sent it off to the pope he had to divide it into four separate volumes.

In 1245 King Henry III undertook the reconstruction of Westminster Abbey. In addition to transforming the Romanesque basilica of Edward the Confessor and erecting an octagonal chapter house, he provided for a mosaic pavement in the sanctuary. The pavement is centrally located within the church (Fig. 1). It lies in the first bay east of the crossing, occupying nearly the entire length and rather less of the bay's width. Directly before it, now separated by a pair of steps, is the high altar. A detail of the northeast corner reveals its present state of preservation (Fig. 2). In spite of frequent restoration numerous mosaic tesserae are either missing or damaged; and the solitary letter E in the border is one of the last survivors from the extensive verse inscription that once accompanied the pavement. To appreciate the pavement's former splendor, one must turn to older depictions, in particular an early nineteenth-century aquatint by J. White (Fig. 3). Although mosaic patterns are occasionally simplified and the remaining bronze letters of the inscription omitted, the engraving provides a reasonable impression of the overall design. A large central disk is surrounded by four intertwining circles. These are in turn inscribed in a square whose sides devolve into another set of four circles. A second square, with its sides rather than its corners now facing the cardinal points, encloses the configuration. The guilloche which appears along three sides of the square originally enframed the entire composition. The missing portion of the eastern side was destroyed in 1706 when the altar designed for the Royal Chapel in the Palace at Whitehall was installed in the Abbey choir and only later restored around 1866 by George Gilbert Scott. Although the pavement is today the mere shadow of its former self, no one can doubt that originally it was an extraordinary creation. Its richness of design and prominence of position alone suggest that it held an important place in the king's plans for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey. It is therefore surprising to find that the sanctuary pavement and its inscription have not yet been subjected to a thorough analytical examination.

Writers and thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were widely engaged in the reception and transmission of a variety of earlier works, and recent scholarship has perhaps concentrated too much on the special case of the reception and transmission of the Greek and Latin classics. A study of the publishing history of the Aristotle commentaries of Thomas Aquinas may throw light on a different phase of the same general process, the Renaissance fortuna of a medieval rather than of an ancient author.

The following pages continue the survey or Repertorium of Hippocratic writings in the Latin Middle Ages before 1500, begun in Traditio 31 (1975) 99–126 and continued in succeeding issues. This issue covers twelve tracts (including some fragments and spurious compilations): VIII. De Cancro, IX. Capsula Eburnea (De Carnibus), X. Chirurgia, XI. De Cibis or Diaeta, XII. De Comate, XIII. De Contemptu Mundi, XIV. Dies Critici, XV. Dies Egypliaci, XVI. Dinamidia, XVII. Dogma, XVIII. De elementis, and XIX. Epidemiol.

On 12 and 13 July 1316 the abbey of St-Denis was the scene of a curious and unusual service performed for King Louis X of France, who had died and been buried at the abbey more than a month before. As Geffroy de Paris relates, Philip, count of Poitiers, ‘made his way to St-Denis and there, grieving and downcast, he did his brother's service’; another chronicler, more explicit, says that ‘in Philip's presence were celebrated obsequies for his brother King Louis.’ Fuller information is found in the accounts kept by Geffroy de Fleury, future argentier of Philip V, for what he terms the obseque of Louis X, performed for the king's trespassement. In the account are recorded expenses for a chapelle used for the occasion, and, to make the border, cover, and ceiling of the chapel, 14 aunes of red silk worked with the royal arms and 16 double aunes, two pieces of sky-blue silk, and five black cloths; money was also spent on workmen who went to St-Denis to put the chapel in place — ‘tendre la chappelle’ — and on the nails they used to do their work. Finally, two Turkish cloths were bought ‘to put over the body,’ and the 22 1. par. paid for these cloths represented more than a third of the entire cost of the funeral, which amounted to 59 1. 6 s. par. The evidence in Fleury's account supplements the chroniclers' terse references to the ceremony, but no more than the chronicles does the account suggest the significance of the strange service: the only double funeral ever held for any king of France.

Those familiar with the latter parts of Piers Plowman will recall that Need makes his mysterious entrance immediately after we have witnessed the origins of disharmony in the redeemed field of Dobest. When several shady characters claim discipleship to three of the cardinal virtues, we may suspect a note of cynicism in their professions; but one (the brewer) has openly defied Conscience altogether.

Boccaccio's first work, the Caccia di Diana, is generally considered a playful allegory of ‘courtly’ love. Although the poem's literal content cannot be reconciled with its allegedly amorous message, critics have cited the discrepancy as a characteristic example of the youthful author's failure to appreciate the importance of narrative unity. There is, however, reason to believe that we have been mistaken both in our understanding of the Caccia's meaning and in our evaluation of its artistic merit. Like Dante's Commedia, Vita nuova, and lost sirventese, Boccaccio's primary models for this early narrative, it is, in fact, a carefully planned numerical composition. The symbolic implications of the numbers hidden in the text suggest, moreover, that Diana's hunt and the miraculous triumph of her rival, Venus, form a fictional veil designed to conceal an emblematic victory of virtue over vice and an allegory of conversion from bestial lust to Christian love.

For most of Chaucer's readers the Parson's Tale provides a conclusion to the Canterbury Tales that is at best drab, at worst a betrayal of all that is thought to be most Chaucerian. Even sympathetic readers find it something to argue away rather than interpret, a strategy that finds its logical fulfillment in the unsympathetic claim that Chaucer is not really responsible for the tale at all. Manly expressed this view with admirable forthrightness: ‘the Parson's Tale… was probably never composed by Chaucer, the two uncomposed fragments of penitential treatises found in our MSS under that designation being at best only loose materials, translated by Chaucer for future use, and copied by his literary executor as the Parson's Tale only because Chaucer's chest contained no other piece of prose that seemed appropriate to the Parson.’ While few contemporary critics would have the temerity to engage in these bibliographical speculations, many of Manly's assumptions are in fact still with us. On the question of originality and date, for instance, Professor Donaldson has recently described the tale as ‘apparently translated by Chaucer from the Latin of some manual directed at helping priests in the performance of their spiritual duties,’ and adds that 'scholars generally agree that the translation was made at an earlier stage in Chaucer's career. ‘ On the work's coherence — or lack of it — another recent commentator has approvingly quoted a remark first made in 1901 by Mark Liddell: ‘none of the Latin, English, or French treatises on this subject that I have seen (and I have examined a great number in the hope of finding the source of Chaucer's work) is so confused and disproportioned as Chaucer's is.’ Similarly, in commenting on ‘the disjointed nature of the links' between the part on penance and that on the sins, Morton Bloomfield speculates that this ‘indicates an early stage in the combining. Chaucer, who left the Canterbury Tales unfinished, would probably have provided the proper links, but he did not have time. ‘ While this view of the Parson's Tale as journeyman's work completed early in the poet's career is not entirely unanimous, it is close to a consensus.

Despite G. R. Owst's important studies, medieval English sermons have been examined only sporadically, and too often, as Siegfried Wenzel has noted, such investigations have treated sermons merely as structural analogues for the works of Chaucer and others. Fortunately, in recent years Wenzel himself and others have reaffirmed Owst's principal concept: sermons are mirrors reflecting the social and literary milieu of their time. This renewed interest in the sermon as historical document, however, may encounter a criticism made of Owst's own procedure, namely, a tendency to select items of significance from a wide range of material without adequate attention to the immediate context of each. The printing of a complete sermon, with its mixture of historical allusion, literary motif, and social commentary—a potpourri of the interesting, the dull, the unusual, and the commonplace—provides not only a necessary balance in method, but a better perspective of the sermon as a literary construction in its own right.

Precise differentiations between the pictorial techniques referred to by the terms σκιαγϱαφία and σκηνογϱαφία in the fourth century b.c. have proved difficult to establish. The terms occur most often in illustrative metaphors which compare these techniques with restrictions or deficiencies in various disciplines such as metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, optics, ethics, rhetoric and poetry. It is difficult to judge, however, from the metaphors illustrating these limitations just what these techniques were and how they were evaluated in themselves as types of artistic representation. One might use, that is, a skiagraphic sketch, roughed-out in shadow and shading and probably viewed from some distance, to illustrate the incompleteness of knowledge, or use a carefully contrived skenographic perspective, characteristic of stage scenery, to illustrate the deceptiveness of sophistic argumentation, without regarding either artistic method as illegitimate in itself. This paper will deal primarily with the metaphorical applications of these terms in order to clarify further the nature of the literary styles which were described by comparisons with them. Further clarification of the metaphorical illustrations may, in turn, suggest further consideration; for the history of art.

In his Quaestiones et responsiones (PG 89.524d–525b) Anastasius Sinaita tells a story about three magi, Apollonius of Tyana, Julianus, and Apuleius, a story which he says is found ἐν τοῖς τῶν ἐϱχαιοτέϱων ἐνδϱῶν διηγήμασι. When Rome was suffering from a plague, the emperor Domitian summoned the three magi to the city and asked for their help. Apuleius told the emperor that he could put an end to the plague in a third of the city within fifteen days. Apollonius claimed that he could perform the same feat in another third of the city within only ten days. But Julianus, objecting that the plague would destroy the city before fifteen days could pass, put an end to it immediately in the remaining third of the city. Domitian then asked Julianus to free the other two-thirds of Rome from the plague, and he quickly did so.

L'idée de la nécessité pour un missionnaire de connaître la langue de ceux qu'il évangélise nous apparaît aujourd'hui comme une évidence. En fait, cette idée ne s'est imposée que tardivement. En Occident, l'évangélisation a d'abord suivi les cadres géographiques de la domination romaine et a, par suite, bénéficié de la langue du pouvoir. Seules les tentatives — d'ailleurs fructueuses — des moines irlandais dans le monde germanique constituaient une approche d'un monde totalement nouveau, quoique déjà pénétré d'influences méditerranéennes. L'Empire d'Occident et le triomphe de la Papauté au IXe siècle imposent l'idée d'une ‘Chrétienlé’ souveraine. En Méditerranée orientale, nous voyons les Byzanlins partagés entre le complexe de supériorité des Grecs envers tout ce qui est ‘barbare’ et le désir de convertir les hordes slaves, désir qui aboutira à la formalion de l'alphabet cyrillique et à tout un effort de traduction de textes d'abord, d'adaptation musicale ensuite, etc. Mais, ce faisant, les Byzantins se sont liés à tout un mécanisme politique d'influence et de prédominance entre Églises sœurs mais rivales. L'idée d'ouverture aux non-chrétiens comme tels ne sera reprise qu'au XIVe siècle par des moines russes suivant la colonisation du Nord-Est, notamment avec la formation d'une ériture ziriane par Saint Étienne de Perm.

One of the last shades whom the pilgrim Dante encounters in Hell is the pitifully nostalgic and vengeful Master Adam. By his own admission, the lute-shaped grotesque has been burnt at the stake for counterfeiting the gold florin and rained into the tenth bolgia along with the swinish impersonators, the reeking liars, and the leprous alchemists stacked against each other like pans. Although various historical models for the now immobile, water-logged sinner have been suggested, he is most commonly identified as the shade of Adam of Brescia, a false coiner employed by the Counts of Romena to debase the monetary standard of the Florentines. This deduction corresponds well with the evidence of the text, for Master Adam both names the wretched souls for whose sake he has left his body burnt and locates the place where he sinned amid the cool green hills of the Casentino. Yet Dante's portrayal of the hydroptic contains elements which seem to allude to a context larger than that defined by the historical Adam of Brescia whose counterfeiting of coins led him to the stake. For as probable as the historical and geographical identification may be, it does not fully account for the counterfeiter's metamorphosis into a water-filled lute, for his nostalgic fixation on his pleasant homeland, or even for his eternal confinement with the deformed shades of the falsifiers of the body, the word, and the goods of nature. When these and other details of the passage are studied against the bodies of extra-literary knowledge available to Dante, however, they reveal that the Master Adam encountered by the pilgrim is not only the shade of an historical counterfeiter, but also a type of the unredeemed and unredeemable Old Adam.

The recovery of the work of an author previously known only through citations and references in other manuscripts is always an exciting event. Although rare in any area of medieval studies, such finds broaden our knowledge of the intellectual development and open up new aspects for study. It was through a fortuitous paralleling of citations in Gregory of Rimini with an anonymous Sentences-commentary at the Franciscan convent in Fribourg that Damasus Trapp, a ground-breaker in fourteenth-century scholastic studies, discovered the Sentences-commentary of an English Benedictine still known only as Monachus Niger. More recently Jan Pinborg has connected the fourteenth-century citations to the Magister Abstractionum with a work otherwise known as the Sophismata of Richardus Sophista. The following discovery, although not at present of the same importance to the field, shares one thing in common with Trapp's discovery. It provides us with yet another text from the same period of Oxford thought and may in fact also be by a Benedictine, a group that was numerically strong at Oxford but from which we have had almost no extant work to study.