Thomas Campion in his Observations in the Art of English Poesy remarks: ‘Poesy in all kind of speaking is the chief beginner and maintainer of eloquence, not only helping the ear with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raising the mind to a more high and lofty conceit.’ This comment finds many parallels in treatises on literary criticism and the art of poetry in the English Renaissance, and is singled out for quotation here only because it calls attention to both of the major contributions of poetry to rhetoric, namely assistance in the development of artistic prose (especially when it includes the element of rhythm) and inspiration in the province of Invention.

Two days before Charlemagne was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans,' Pope Leo III swore an oath in order to affirm his innocence of any crimes attributed to him by his enemies. Sound reasons exist for making an assumption that there was a close relationship between these two events. Since there is no indisputable evidence in the sources concerning the motives that led to Charles' coronation, every important event prior to this act has been analyzed by historians for its potential bearing on the matter. Further, the two most important individuals, pope and king, were participants in both affairs. The hand that bore the Gospels when an oath of purification was sworn in the presence of the Frankish king was the same hand, the pope's, which placed the crown of empire on a Frankish head. Thus it has been argued that Leo gave Charlemagne the new dignity in order that the Frank might use his imperial power to chastise the papal enemies. Against this view the countering argument has been made by some historians that Leo's oath was humiliating, a fact which reduces to an absurdity the thesis that the main initiative could come from the papal Curia. Thus the oath has been considered the key to a proper evaluation of the coronation itself.

Le ms. H. 308 de l'É cole de Médecine àMontpellier contient une collection de textes patriotiques et conciliaires qui a livré plusieurs pièces de grande valeur. En 1656, le jésuite P. F. Chifflet en a tiré de très importants fragments de l'ouvrage perdu de Fulgence de Ruspe, Contra Fabianum. Il a également servi àSchwartz, avec un seul autre ms. de Paris, pour son édition d'une lettre de Jean II, déjà publiee par Sichard. Le même critique l'utilise aussi pour de nombreuses pièces des conciles de Chalcédoine et d'É phèse. En préface de son édition de la lettre de Jean II, il a donné une description du contenu, et il nous avertit qu'il l'a faite d'autant plus volontiers qu'il s'agit d'un genre d'ouvrage fort peu étudié. Je crois pouvoir apporter ici des indications précises sur l'origine de la collection.

Of the many scholars who have dealt with the Old French poem of the Alexis, none has attempted to offer a thorough detailed study of the structure of the poem, analyzing the development from beginning to end, from a position taken within the poem itself. By the earlier generation of critics (Diez, Gaston Paris, and Becker), we are offered only generalities, mainly favorable, rather than serious studies of our poem; with the later critics (Foerster, Winkler, Spitzer, Elise Richter, and Curtius), by whom the poem has been studied more closely, but never in a consecutive, step-by-step way, we find largely the tactics of attack and defense. The puerile objections raised by Foerster can only make us smile, today; but even Winkler, who was much more sensitive by nature to the aesthetic excellence of our poem, was prevented by his unfamiliarity with medieval traditions from appreciating fully the poet's craftsmanship, and even from interpreting justly the basic spirit of the poem: that of rigorous, harsh asceticism as it is revealed in the character of Alexis. One of those who attempted to confound Winkler, though she mentions his name only once, was Elise Richter, who sprang to Alexis' defense (as if he were an individual with whom she could identify herself) and sought to turn the tables by attacking the insensitivity of Alexis' parents, too little interested in his personal development. A year earlier, however, Spitzer had already given the real answer to Winkler's charges against Alexis the saint: having been struck by the fact that the objections of Julius Schmidt against the ‘cruel' nature of the martyr Polyeucte were of the same brand as those of Winkler against Alexis, he proceeds to explain Corneille's play in the light of the Alexis, and the Alexis in the light of the tradition which inspired it: the ascetic tradition of imitatio Christi, according to which the qualities of absolutism and of insensibility to the emotions of others, as well as of oneself, are prerequisites for those who would seek to imitate perfectly the martyrdom of Christ.

When in the early morning hours of February 14, 1130, Pope Honorius II closed his eyes forever, a crisis within the Church of Rome broke into the open which long had been in the making. The forces which had dominated the Curia for eighty years, which had given to the world the great popes of the Reform, were challenged and swept aside by the revolution of an energetic minority which during less than a decade had steadily increased its influence in the Sacred College. Its undisputed leader was the Chancellor Haimeric, a Frenchman who had been appointed to his high office in 1123 by the French Pope Calixtus II. It was he who devised the measures which were to insure the succession to his party, measures which under the circumstances were bound to result in an uncanonical election, and, as a natural consequence, in a second election by the outraged majority.

James the Venetian and Greek is slowly emerging from the darkness which has shrouded his name and personality for seven centuries. He now appears as a learned canonist who would be called upon to give advice on important matters, and as the most active and successful pioneer of Latin Aristotelianism in the tweltfh century. He was probably the first to translate into Latin Aristotle's Physics, De anima, Metaphysics, and parts of the Parva Naturalia; he translated anew, after Boethius, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistici Elenchi; some commentaries on this latter group of works were either written or translated by him; he also rendered into Latin a prologue to the Physics. Ten generations of Latin-speaking scholars and philosophers read the Posterior Analytics almost exclusively in his translation; his versions of the Physics, De anima, three books of the Metaphysics, and some of the Parva Naturalia held the ground almost unchanged for more than a century, and, not substantially revised, for two more centuries. Our philosophical language owes to him many of its technical terms. Hardly anything is known of the circumstances of his life, and only vague hypotheses may be formulated on his possible connections with other learned men of his time, particularly with John of Salisbury. It may well be that his interests developed in the atmosphere of Constantinople, saturated with Aristotelian studies, in or around the university where the pupils of another Graeco-Italian philosopher, Ioannes Italos, were keeping alive and renewing the traditions of the fifth and sixth-century commentators of Aristotle.

1. —Wir wissen, dass sich die Lehre der Kirche bezüglich des Paulinischen Privilegs (= P.Pr.) um 1140 gefestigt hatte und demselben die Kraft zuschrieb, das Band der Naturehe zu lösen. Nach 1234 dagegen tritt schon Göffredus von Trano mit seiner Summa super rubricis decretalium (1241-1243) als ausdrücklicher Zeuge der Interpellation auf:

Among the many personal faults with which Petrarch, in his dialogue entitled The Secret or The Soul's Conflict with Passion, let himself be charged by St. Augustine, there was one which he found harder to renounce than any other. In reply to Augustine's reproach: ‘You are seeking fame among men and the immortality of your name more than is right,' Petrarch could only say: ‘This I admit freely and cannot find any remedy to restrain that desire.' In fact, throughout his life Petrarch was well aware that ‘to the whole people I have been a favola,' as he declared in the introductory sonnet of his Rime Sparse, and he showed himself constantly determined to perpetuate his fame beyond death, as his Epistle to Posterity and numerous other autobiographical documents demonstrate. His effort bore fruit, for the life of no other literary figure of the fourteenth century, not even that of Dante, was told more frequently and fully by the writers of the Renaissance than that of Petrarch. Among his biographers we find some of the greatest Italian humanists, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Filippo Villani, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Pietro Paolo Vergerio and Gianozzo Manetti. But, interestingly enough, for the period of the first century after Petrarch's death in 1374, there exists not a single biography which was composed by a non-Italian writer. This fact is the more notable when we remember the tremendous reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during his own era and afterwards, in France and Germany, and even in remote England, where Chaucer, in The Clerk's Prologue, sang the praise of ‘this clerk whose rethoryke so sweete enlumed al Itaille of poetrye.' The anonymous Bohemian scholar who, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, brought together an anthology of Petrarch's works, did not himself write a biography but simply used the one written by Vergerio. Interest in the personalities and achievements of the great poets and artists arose first in Italy, and it was there that the traditional literary form of ‘the lives of the illustrious men' was filled with a new spirit and content. From this point of view it appears characteristic that the first biography of Petrarch by a non-Italian was composed only after the passage of a hundred years following his death and that it was written by a man like Rudolph Agricola who was more than any of his northern fellow humanists influenced by Italian traditions and who, at the same time, was to become ‘the founder of the new intellectual life in Germany.’

In the opening piece of Dom Morin's edition of the sermons of St, Caesarius of Arles, his Admonitio … vel suggestio humilis, addressed at large to his fellow-bishops, we find a passage in which the author's intention seems not to have been clarified by the editor's emendation. Caesarius, having exhorted his readers to the fulfilment of their pastoral duties and against the desire for the wealth of the world, at length reminds them of their calling to be saints — a name, sanctus, suited indeed to the whole Christian people, but especially appropriate to bishops — and continues his argument in the following words (those particularly in question here italicized):

In 1906 the distinguished Breton hagiologist, the late Abbé F. Duine, wrote as follows (Bré oiaires et missels des é glises et abbayes bretonnes de France anté rieurs au XVIIe sié cle = Bulletin et mé moires de la socié té arché oloqique du Dé partement d'Ille-et- Vilaine xxxv, 189): 'II Y aurait aussi une étude àfaire sur la version de la Bible usitée dans l'ancienne église de Bretagne … Il serait désirable qu'on en fit autant pour les passages de la Bible employés si fréquemment dans notre vieille hagiographie celtique. Cependant on devra tenir compte de ce fait: que I'écrivain citait ordinairement de mémoire ou parfois paraphrasait légérement.

Apart from the Purqaiorium S. Patrieii, the Naoiqaiio Brendani (NB) produced the most important literary tradition associated with Ireland. The accounts given by the English monk of Saltrey and the later Continental pilgrims of their experiences in Lough Derg show only indirect traces of the Irish vision literature, and the literary tradition of these accounts has been almost entirely non- Irish. In its Irish type, vision literature is more directly represented by the Visio Furseai and the Visio Tundali The tradition of the former, however, is also entirely non- Irish; that of the latter was Irish only in its beginning, while its ramifications down to the nineteenth century are entirely Continental.

The list of manuscripts dealing with the work of Cistercian writers is not the result of any systematic search into the possibilities of English libraries, but rather the by-product of work, carried out over a number of years, on the writings of Saint Bernard and Saint Ailred of Rievaulx. In scanning the pages of manuscript catalogues or in examining the manuscripts themselves, one naturally came upon a number of Cistercian texts, which, though irrelevant to one's studies at the time, were noted down on scraps of paper in case they might prove interesting later on when one had more leisure. As the notes increased and the hoped-for leisure grew less and less as the days went by, the possibility of using them within a reasonable time seemed extremely slender. On the suggestion of my friend and collaborator, Dom Jean Leclercq, they are being printed now in case they may prove useful to other students who are interested in the same group of writers and who may be glad to find, within a small compass, information that must otherwise be hunted for throughout many books.

In editing a number of short poems from Codex graecus 385 (fol. 73r-100r) of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, I have found Greek translations of two well-known medieval Latin hymns, the ‘Adoro te devote latens veritas' (86v-87v) and the ‘Ave verum corpus natum' (82v). Being aware that there exist unsolved problems in connection with the Latin originals of these works, I shall here set forth certain observations suggested by the Greek versions, hoping that the presentation of this material will help towards the solution of those problems.

In her Radcliffe monograph The Sources of the Parson's Tale, Miss Kate Petersen concluded that the ultimate sources of the Parson's ‘litel tretys’ were two thirteenth-century Latin works: the Summa Casuum Poenitentiae of St. Raymond of Pen afort, from which Chaucer drew the material on penance; and the Summa de Vitiis of Guilielmus Peraldus, from which came the discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins. Because of its highly persuasive parallels and careful construction, Miss Petersen's study has won very general acceptance. In the present writer's opinion, however, there is one aspect of Miss Petersen's work which is perhaps worth some reconsideration, and that is the positiveness of her identifications of the ultimate sources of the tale. Can it be successfully maintained, as Miss Petersen would have us believe, that exactly here and here we may fix the ultimate limits of the sources upon which Chaucer drew in the Parson's Tale?