According to Aristotle all heavenly movement is ultimately due to the activity of forty-seven (or fifty-five) ‘unmoved movers'. This doctrine is highly remarkable in itself and has exercised an enormous historical influence. It forms part of a world-picture the outlines of which are as follows. The universe consists of concentric spheres, revolving in circles. The outermost of these bears the fixed stars. The other either bear planets or, insofar as they do not, contribute indirectly to the movements of the latter. Each sphere is moved by the one immediately surrounding it, but also possesses a movement of its own, due to its mover, an unmoved, incorporeal being. (It was these beings which the schoolmen designated as the intelligentiae separatae.) The seemingly irregular movements of the planets are thus viewed as resulting from the combination of regular circular revolutions. The earth does not move and occupies the centre of the universe. Such was Aristotle's astronomic system, essential parts of which were almost universally adopted by the Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages.

Students of the history of Greek procedure generally hold that public administration of justice originated in a prehistoric habit of settling disputes between individuals by voluntary waiving self-help and resorting to arbitration. This ancient custom is supposed to have been gradually developed into a system under which the parties were denied the right to seek realization of their claims by private force and compelled to submit their cases to authorities designated and empowered to try the claims and hand down binding judgments. Litigants are believed to have been forced by an ever increasing pressure of public opinion, as well as by the growing power of the rulers, to refrain from armed feud and blood-vengeance, and to seek the decision of the princes who by virtue of their social and personal preponderance were predestined to act as arbitrators. After the consolidation of the state, their jurisdiction, according to the prevailing theory, became a legal institution and passed, after the abolishment of the early monarchy, to the aristocratic city magistrates, and later, in the democracies, to the popular courts. As an intermediate stage, the existence of a system of ‘obligatory arbitration’, indirectly enforced by the public disapproval of those not complying with it, has been suggested for the type of society known from Hesiod's Works and Days.

St. Augustine has long become the common and universal boast of Christianity. The Catholic Church sees in him one of the foremost witnesses of her tradition of teaching. She has given him the title of Doctor gratiae; upon him, down the course of ages, she has ever lavished her praises. But the early Protestant reformers, too, have turned to him as their forerunner, alleging their own doctrine to be his. Men of thought and scholars of diverse creeds and sects are flushed with admiration for him and are profuse in their eulogies. Yet, surely, these individuals and religious bodies cannot all rightfully claim him to be one with them in faith without a contradiction. He must belong either to the Catholica, which he so assiduously and indefatigably defended for so many years, or be an Anglican, or a Protestant of some other sort.

In 1887, on the basis of a Berlin manuscript, a German philologist, Valentin Rose, published the Greek text of the Life of St. David of Thessalonica. Before that date some scholars had conjectured that a Life of this Saint existed; but their expectations were finally realized only in 1887 when Rose's edition came out.

While the Mozarabic Rite has been the subject of numerous and important studies, the riches of its hymnody have never been adequately displayed. Abounding in interest for the inquirer in the field of early medieval religious poetry, it is equally rewarding to the historian who would be acquainted to some extent with ways of thinking familiar to Visigothic and Moslem Spain. The English scholar, Frederic Raby, was aware of this when he wrote of Mozarabic hymns, ‘They form the raw material for an important research which would help to elucidate the state of religious and intellectual culture during the obscure centuries of the early Middle Ages.’ Clemens Blume, the great Jesuit hymnologist, a generation earlier had reached the same conclusion when he published his edition of Hymnodia Gothica in the twenty-seventh volume of the Analecta hymnica medii aevi.

Following certain suggestions of the late Edmund Bishop, Father Joseph Jungmann, S.J., in his excellent book, Die Stellung Christi im liturgischen Gebet, discusses at some length the type of prayer which in the West was generally known as ‘Apologia Sacerdotis', though other titles too, are not infrequently found, e.g., ‘Excusatio’ or ‘Accusatio Sacerdotis', and occasionally some such neutral heading as ‘Oratio S. Ambrosii’, ‘Oratio S. Augustini’. The relevant material has been gathered by Abbot Cabrol, who presents a most useful (and at the same time curiously misleading) list of the prayers which belong to this class in his article, ‘Apologies' (DACL 1, 2591–2601). To this list very little, if anything, remains to be added, but for the sake of completeness there will have to be included in any corpus of apologies, if such a collection is ever undertaken, the interesting cento which is here published—as far as I am aware, for the first time.

Interest in the problem of Roman law in Henry de Bracton's De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae has recently started up with renewed vigor and with increasing emphasis upon the European rather than insular character of his treatise and upon the necessity of studying it ‘within the framework of the European legal (especially legistic and canonistic) literature of his time.’ But among the important elements of Roman law in Bracton the familiar maxim, ‘quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur’ (the words of Justinian, C. 5, 59, 5 §2), has been overlooked. In this study I wish to show how Bracton was influenced by the maxim (henceforth referred to simply as q. o. t. — quod omnes tangit), and how his acceptance of it may have some significance for its appearance in royal writs by which communities were summoned to send representatives to Parliament. For towards the end of the thirteenth century and later, the kings of England and France, when they needed extraordinary taxes or national support in quarrels with Pope Boniface VIII and consequently had to obtain the consent of great nobles, prelates and communities of lesser free men, sometimes stated in the preamble to summonses to an assembly that the cause of the convocation was a serious or difficult business (ardua negotia) touching (contingentia or tangentia) both king and kingdom. The presence of tangere or contingere in a context of the kind resulted, although students of representation have not observed it, from the influence of q.o.t. as an equitable principle in legal procedure—this will become apparent after the legal meaning and the terminology current in the thirteenth century are examined.

The Anglo-Norman Manuel des Pechiez, one of the more important works in that language, and one of the more influential literary monuments of thirteenth-century England, has never been carefully edited, and, until recently, had never been studied in detail. Dr. E. J. Arnould's survey of the poem and of its place in English letters provides us with a revealing study of the sources of the work, and of its subsequent influence, with a consistent, if debatable, history of the text. Since I, also, have examined the manuscripts with a view to determining the history of the Manuel, using material and methods somewhat different from those employed by Doctor Arnould, my findings may be useful, especially in validating his conclusions, in so far as we agree.

Students of medieval scholasticism are accustomed to apply the name ‘conceptualism’ to Ockham's doctrine concerning the nature and scope of universals. This seems to be an apt designation, provided that its meaning is not burdened with idealistic connotations. Unfortunately, quite a number of neo-scholastics qualify conceptualism as a doctrine which severs the bond between thought and reality, and is therefore essentially idealistic. Small wonder, then, that such a conceptualism imputed to William Ockham falls an easy prey to their violent, and to a large extent justified, attack against idealism in general. However, as far as Ockham's conceptualism is concerned, their victory in this regard is an illusion, for the simple reason that his alleged idealistic conceptualism does not exist. Hence it appears to us that Ockham's genuine conceptualism enjoys, for the time being, a relative security from neo-scholastic criticism.

The originality of the imaginative concepts, terms and symbols of the classical Spanish mystics has elicited several philological approaches. All of them try to explain or rather to account for this originality. Each of these different methods, however, is characterized by a striking onesidedness and exclusiveness of view. In order to find out where further research has to start from, it is necessary first to review the attempts of investigation made till now. They may be designated as the non-historic, the synthetic, the secular, the Arabic and the Germanic theses.

The chief purpose of this paper is to discuss the influence which the De habitu virginum of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century, may have exerted upon the De virginitate of Aldhelm, the earliest outstanding writer of seventh-century England. Cyprian himself was strongly influenced by Tertullian, as Sister Angela Elizabeth Keenan thoroughly demonstrated in her doctoral dissertation. Incidentally, Sister Angela Elizabeth refers to Aldhelm's quoting from chapter five of De habitu virginum. This reference led me to find out whether there might be other instances of Cyprian's influence on the De virginitate.

No Irish-born Saint played a role in continental Europe's folklore and literature comparable to that of St. Brendan, the Navigator (484–c. 577). To judge by the frequency and provenance of the earliest manuscripts, the Vita and Navigatio, the two written sources which deal with his life and exploits, the legend was best known in France and Bretagne, Lorraine and Southern Germany. For obvious reasons, the German Low Countries, particularly the shores of the Baltic Sea and the adjacent territories to the north and northwest, were less susceptible to any such distant literary or religious influence. If it is a surprise to find St. Brendan taking so strong a foothold in Southern Germany, far enough removed from his native Kerry, how much more astonishing is it to note traces of his legend evident even in Northern Germany and Prussia proper, an area which only in late medieval centuries began to enter the literary orbit of Western Europe. This area is the one-hundred-mile stretch between the former Hanseatic cities of Lübeck and Stralsund, comprising chiefly Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania, along the shores of the Baltic.

Professor Stephan Kuttner, who proved—basing himself on V. L. Kennedy—the indebtedness of Pierre de Roissy, Chancellor of Chartres and author of a Manuale de mysteriis ecclesiae, to the Poenitentiale of Robert of Flamborough, Canon Penitentiary of St. Victor, shows (Trad. 2, 497 seq.) that Roissy went so far in his procedure (which we would call today ‘literary plagiarism’) of incorporating entire sections from Flamborough's work, that he even borrowed from him, tel quel, certain autobiographical facts which, in the light of historical evidence, could not possibly apply to himself. For example, when we read in Roissy: ‘Ego tamen …a duobus parisiensibus episcopis, Odone et Petro, habui ut ubique eorum auctoritate dispensarem …,’ we must realize that the privilege of dispensation of which he speaks was granted only to Flamborough, just as it was Flamborough alone who transferred to papal authority the case referred to in the words: 'superstitem, ut ordinaretur, ad papam transmisi.’ Thus, Roissy is substituting his own ego to that of his source. Kuttner wonders ‘how he could easily get away with this,’ for ‘the disproportion between Peter's true standing and the air of personal experience he affects is particularly striking in those cases which suggest, as they do, the experience and powers of a spiritual director of clerics'—that is, qualifications certainly not possessed by Roissy. The borrowed character of the passage ‘Ego tamen … a duobus …,’ according to Kuttner, disposes of a chronological difficulty in the Chancellor's biography (for, if genuine, the passage would have proved that Peter was active in Paris as late as 1208—an assumption contradicted by other known facts).

Sometime after November 20, 1483, William Caxton published his English translation of Jacobus de Varagine's Legenda Aurea. This is the famous medieval compilation of saints' lives which Emile Mâle names among the ten books most useful to one seeking a just appreciation of the Middle Ages and which Henry Adams ranks with the Roman breviary as a guide to the stone carvings and stained glass of medieval cathedrals. Caxton's publication, augmenting by about one-third the original treatise, was his most ambitious work as translator, editor, and printer.

In preparing his Golden Legend the English printer asserts that he has used the original Latin and two translations, one French and one English. This last work is extant in nine manuscripts, more or less complete, all copies, and all representing one version. Although several critics have declared that this translation surpasses Caxton's in accuracy and beauty, some of its special peculiarities have not hitherto been considered. Who was its author? Apparently he remembered the warning of the Imitation: ‘For all man's glory, all temporal honor, and all worldly highness, to thine eternal glory compared is but as foolishness and vanity.’ His version of the Legenda is declared to be the work of ‘a synfulle wretche’ by whom it was ‘drawen out of Frensshe into Englisshe, the yere of our lorde a.M.CCCC. and. XXXVIII.’ The motive for this anonymity is revealed by the words which follow his humble self-designation: ‘whos name I beseche Jhesu Criste bi his mentis of his passioune and of alle these holis seintes afore written, that hit mai be written in the boke of everlastinge life.’

Libri impressi cum notis manuscriptis—IV

Under the title ‘A South German “Sammelband” of the Fifteenth Century’ the present writer recently published an analysis of a composite volume of early printed books and manuscript texts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Another volume of the same sort also found in the Morgan Library (PML 22222) presents a similar problem for investigation; the results of such study seem sufficiently important to justify the publication of the pertinent details. Only one other manuscript of but one of the eleven manuscript texts found in the volume is listed as being in America, thus indicating that these works are not of common occurrence. Neither the incipits nor the titles are noted in the standard works of reference, though the literary contents of the volume are varied in scope and interest.