Although we still lack a critical edition of Caxton's Golden Legend or any modern edition of the Gilte Legende, several scholars have contributed notable studies on the English versions of the Legenda Aurea. As far as Caxton is concerned, these studies have been confined to assessing his personal contributions, to deciding which French and English versions he used, and to discussing how he may have adapted the French, English and Latin texts of the Golden Legend which he had in front of him. It has of course also been recognised that a large section of Caxton's printed edition (corresponding to pp. 105–244 of Ellis's edition) was taken from a non-Legenda source and that much of this section is based ultimately on the Bible. But nothing has been done to examine this section in detail to determine where Caxton got his material and how he arranged it. This paper is devoted to an investigation of some of the problems involved in this part of the Golden Legend in order to provide a basis for further study and also to contribute to our understanding of Caxton's method as editor.

When Christian Friedrich Kling published Berthold des Franziskaners deutsche Predigten in 1824, he opened the study of the great thirteenth-century preacher to theologians, historians, and Germanists alike. Although Berthold had never been completely forgotten, was his fame rather than his actual sermons that were recorded by poet and chronicler. The sermons themselves remained, as most of them do still today, in manuscripts accessible to only a few scholars.

The discourse of Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532) on the Golden Age is here published for the first time. It is edited from what seems to be the only extant version, found in manuscript in the Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distrital of Évora, Portugal. The discourse was delivered by Giles in a somewhat different form in Saint Peter's basilica in Rome on Dec. 21, 1507, at the request of Pope Julius II and in his presence. The king of Portugal, Manuel I (1495–1521), had written to Julius from Abrantes under date of Sept. 25, 1507, to announce to him some great news. The king, recently informed of three important events regarding his interests in the Far East, now wanted to communicate his information to the pope: the Portuguese, under the leadership of Lourenço de Almeida (?-1508) had landed in Ceylon and obtained from the most powerful ruler there an agreement to pay an annual tribute to the Portuguese crown; on March 18, 1506, de Almeida won an important naval victory over the Zamorin of Calicut; and in the same year another Portuguese fleet discovered the island of Madagascar.

Boniface VIII entered his pontificate with a single great ambition, to which he reverted at every opportunity during the troubled years of his reign. Repeatedly, he called for a new crusade to restore the foothold lost to Christendom in the Holy Land only four years before his accession. To accomplish this revitalization of the ancient ideal of the papacy, he persistently sought to use his authority to make himself arbiter of an overall European peace. The indispensable requirement in this plan was the establishment of some agreement between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, whose confrontation in Aquitaine was steadily moving toward an open war which would involve their various allies throughout Europe. Accordingly, within two months of his election, Boniface appointed legates to both countries to negotiate a peace.

Hymnological research has reached a very crucial stage during the past fourteen or fifteen years. The steady flow of publications in this field has never really stopped since the middle of the nineteenth century, which saw several attempts to make hymnological material scattered in medieval manuscripts accessible to hymnologists and philologists alike. Nineteenth-century hymnodists had little idea of the riches and depth of medieval Latin hymnody, and the impasse caused by their ‘misconceptions’ and preconceived ideas is still reflected in the erroneous interpretation and improper handling of many Latin hymns by early editors and hymnodists. Of the early editions of medieval Latin hymns there are only two (those of Daniel and Mone)1 that still have source value; most of the others have merely historical significance or offer manuscript readings not adequately evaluated by subsequent editors.

Any discussion of the intellectual life in fourteenth-century Italy is inevitably directed by the personality and achievement of Petrarch. Although we no longer believe that a whole new age begins with him, although we recognize considerable medieval elements in his work, we still regard him as the father of the strongest movement in the Renaissance–humanism. After his long years of succesful work, that was at once well publicized and well remunerated, there could be no inversion of the hour-glass. From him there proceeded the splendid parade of Boccaccio, Salutati, Guarino, and Bruni. There can be no quarrel with the general truth of this Petrarchan primacy, but, as in all historical abstractions, there are some unfortunate results. These are particularly prevalent in the decades before Petrarch. His shadow is over the whole period. We have difficulty in appreciating his predecessors as anything but precursors. If we resist the temptation to dismiss them all as unimportant, we are nonetheless constrained to deal with them as relative to a later Petrarch, as the very term prehumanism implies. The period is obscure enough without adding this element of ambiguity to it. Unable to jettison the term, we can still underline its inadequacy and establish the substantial nature of the movement, even without reference to Petrarch.

Much recent scholarship on the period of the Investiture Struggle and the reform of the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries has suggested that the origins of these reforms lay not merely in the desire for moral regeneration, but in the conscious wish to return to the antique, Biblical, patristic, and Roman models of the Christian life represented by the early, pre-feudal Church. What modern historians have sometimes called ‘Germanic Christianity’ or ‘feudal Christianity’ was felt to be a pattern of institutions which had at least partly corrupted the life of the early Church. This explains the great concern of the Hildebrandine Party to rid the Church of those abuses which they felt had grown ‘especially since the time when the government of our church passed to the Germans. … But we, having searched out the Roman Order and the ancient custom of our church, imitating the old Fathers, have ordered things to be restored as we have set out above.’ The reaction against the immediate past in favor of a more perfect antique model manifested itself in the notion, expressed throughout the period, that custom must always be judged by natural law and by truth: ‘the Lord said: “I am the Truth.” He did not say: “I am the custom”; but “I am the Truth.” The reformers became impassioned to restore the ancient discipline, to rediscover the ancient laws of the Church, to bring monasticism back to its original purity, and in all this to use what they believed to be the ancient forms of the Christian life as a model by which to compare and criticize the Christianity of their own times. An extensive and varied literature appeared dealing with the problem of what the ancient ideal of the Christian life had been, a literature which began both to speak frequently of the ecclesia primitiva, and to use this idea as a model by which to reform the Church. Often this literature passed beyond the use of the idea of the ecclesia primitiva as a tool of reform to the use of the idea as a basis for the discussion of the more basic problem of what the perfect form of the Christian life had been or should be. In this regard, ‘reform’ signified not only the restoration and reestablishment of the forms of the Christian life of the past, but also the search for the continuing perfection of both the individual and the Church. The nexus of ideas associated with the Augustinian reformatio in melius was in this respect close to the idea of ‘renewal.’ Men not only returned to the forms of the past, but also explored ways of introducing new structures and forms of life into the Church.

In an important study which appeared in 1956, Professor E. A. Thompson discussed imperial policy in southern Gaul during the first half of the fifth century. According to Professor Thompson the purpose of the Romans in settling four groups of barbarians in southern Gaul between the years 418 and 442 was to control the Bacaudae who, he contends, threatened to overthrow the existing social and economic order. By focusing all his attention on the Bacaudae Professor Thompson distorts Roman policy by attributing to it a precision which it lacked. A less selective study of the evidence suggests that Rome's policy in southern Gaul (and probably throughout the Empire as well) was directed toward control of all the potentially and actively hostile elements in the Empire rather than, on balance, being preoccupied exclusively with the activities of the Bacaudae.

My intention is to cast some additional light upon the history of Milanese civilization during the mid- and later ninth century and to do so by way of describing and comparing some of that period's Lombard literary and artistic creations.

In 1964 Professor Sesto Prete published a description of the contents of two fifteenth-century manuscripts, MS 100.42 in the Cathedral Library at Toledo and Cod. Vaticanus Barberinianus latinus 42. He called these T and B respectively, and they will be so referred to here. T contains 169 humanistic items as opposed to 76 in B. The manuscripts have 32 items in common.

Walter Burley's De Motu Animalium has never appeared in print. Our edition of this work was prepared from six manuscript copies: Erfurt SB Amploniana Q. 312 (XIV century) fols. 78r–81r; London Lambeth Palace 70 (XIV) fols. 144r–147v; Lambeth Palace 74 (A.D. 1390) fols. 30r–32v; Oxford Magdalen College 80 (XIV) fols. 177v–180v; Oriel College 12 (XV) fols. 115–119; Vaticana Vat. lat. 2151 (XIV) fols. 239r–244r. The Magdalen (afterwards M.) manuscript is the most complete and is followed closely by Amploniana (A.), though A. is almost impossible to read by itself owing to the crabbed and scratchy manner in which it was written. Oriel (0.) makes the most omissions; it is incomplete and anonymous. The two Lambeth Palace MSS follow each other closely. L. 70 is anonymous and L. 74 is incomplete. Vatican was the original manuscript upon which our edition was based. It is an excellently preserved text but not quite sufficient by itself to constitute a safe reading of Burley's work. Our edition can claim to be critical to the extent that six manuscripts were consulted.

In Act II, scene iv of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Queen Catherine is confronted by the start of divorce proceedings against her. One of the two cardinals delegated as judges by the pope is Henry's faithful servant, Cardinal Wolsey, a man little likely to be an impartial judge of the legal merits of the famous case. And so the Queen says to him:

I do believe

Induced by potent circumstances, that You are mine enemy, and make my challenge You shall not be my judge.

Shakespeare does not today enjoy a wide reputation as a canonist, but he has here described with some correctness the canonical recusatio. This is the right, under certain circumstances, to challenge and remove a papal judge delegate for interest, prejudice, or unfitness for office.

La tradition manuscrite des homélies Πɛϱὶ ὰϰατλᾐπτoν est particulièrement riche. C'est une preuve de l'intérět durable qu'elles ont suscité à travers les siècles. Mais cette richesse pose des problèmes difficiles à résoudre. Il faut, de toute nécessité, chercher des principes de classification qui aident à mettre un peu d'ordre parmi ces nombreux témoins.