The noted Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth, in a seldom quoted but highly provocative essay, argued some forty years ago that medieval European Christendom conceived of the Jew not as an infidel who had failed to perceive the truth of Christianity but rather as a deliberate unbeliever, one who knew the truth but refused to accept its consequences. Only if the Jews of first-century Palestine had recognized Jesus as their redeemer, Roth claimed, could medieval churchmen have sought proof for Christian beliefs in the Talmud and Midrash; and only a people deemed willfully evil could have been charged with the unnatural atrocities that medieval Europeans attributed to the Jews: host-desecration, well-poisoning, and ritual murder. To be sure, cautioned Roth, not all medieval Christians could have viewed the Jews in precisely this way. Popes and emperors often expended considerable energy to controvert such popular opinion. ‘But it must have been a very widespread conception, particularly among the less educated; and it explains a good deal in the medieval religious mentality which otherwise remains incomprehensible.’

Book five of Avitus' biblical epic De spiritalis historiae gestis (hereafter SHG) is entitled De transitu maris rubri. The book tells the story of the Israelites' release from servitude in Egypt, following in broad outline the narrative of Exodus 1–15.1. The present study will concentrate on the concluding and culminating section of the book, the account of the march out of Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea (5.371–702). Avitus here elaborates the biblical narrative most freely and makes full use of the techniques of rhetorical and poetic amplification.

A comprehensive theory which can reduce massive amounts of detailed evidence to simple and pleasing clarity has the ability to survive long after critics have damaged or destroyed essential portions of its arguments or evidence. A radically new comprehensive thesis may arise to displace it, but even then quibbles with details of the new continue to breathe life into the old. Such is at least partially the case with study of the prophets' episode in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Adam (Ordo representacionis Ade). Perhaps the single most edited piece of twelfth-century literature, the play has an established importance: linguistically, dramatically, theatrically, and theologically, it deserves the close attention it has been given. And not only is it important, it is also an enjoyable and imaginative work that delights the reader as much as it fascinates the scholar. However, it is a victim of being assigned a fundamental role in a comprehensive theory regarding the development of medieval vernacular drama.

The poems of Hugh Primas deserve to be better known, and the announcement by Teubner of an edition in preparation to replace the fundamental but incomplete text of Wilhelm Meyer is welcome news to students of medieval Latin poetry. The studies which appear below discuss certain problems in two of Primas' longest rhythmical productions.

Forbidden language, like forbidden knowledge, has always had its attractions. Of its many varieties, the inordinata locutio of blasphemy, speech which violates fundamental norms in the way it represents God, has held no small appeal for people in times of widespread religious practice. The late Middle Ages offers no exception to these two commonplaces of modern thought, judging from the number of civil statutes designed to extirpate blasphemy and from the stringent measures drawn up by influential clerics like Jean Gerson. This animus against blasphemy among the lettered, both lay and clerical, means that few blasphemous utterances, few of the words judged as blasphemous by someone other than the speaker, have come down to us. Preachers and compilers of catechetical handbooks, like theologians and glossators, are as silent about the actual words of blasphemers as they are eloquent about their temerity. Even the collectors of exempla, whose tales provide so much information about religious life, rarely record so much as a blasphemous phrase in their repertoire of tales about blasphemers. Perhaps these late medieval writers shared the reticence of the author of the Book of Job, who, according to the Priest (ps.- Jerome), wrote benedixerit for maledixerit, inverting the literal sense ‘quod non fuit ausus scriptor historiae ore suo in Deum dicere verbum blasphemiae.’

In der Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid findet sich unter der Signatur 3/40548 ein 1723 in Valladolid gedruckter umfangreicher lateinischer Kommentar zum Hohen Lied. Diese Expositio mirabilis in divina Cantica Canticorum wurde angeblich dreihundert Jahre vorher, nämlich 1424, von einem gewissen Rodrigo de Astorga verfaßt, damals Kanonikus in Astorga und später Mönch im Hieronymitenkloster bei Los Toros de Guisando.

In an article concerning the seven deadly sins, Siegfried Wenzel distinguishes one model for the traditional topic of vices and virtues which he calls ‘ cosmological’ or ‘ symbolic.’ This model develops the idea that ‘ man is a septenary,’ a composite of three powers of the soul and four elements of the body. The association of the three theological virtues with the three powers of the soul and the four cardinal virtues with the four elements of the body was current in the twelfth century. In the first half of the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste developed the analogy in the context of a metaphysics of light, somewhat unexpectedly in a treatise on confession. The ‘connection between virtues and vices on one hand and physiology on the other,’ Wenzel remarks, ‘is an area that needs much further study.’ Perhaps the fullest development of the cosmological or symbolic model of the virtues was made in the last half of the thirteenth century by Bonaventure. Indeed, for him the cardinal virtues (the concern of this study) are the four poles of the created universe.

William of Sherwood (or Shyreswood) was an English logician of the thirteenth century. Little is known of his life. He possibly taught logic at Paris from about 1235 to about 1250. By 1252 he was active as master at Oxford. Between 1254 and 1258 he became treasurer of the Cathedral of Lincoln, an office he seems to have retained until his death. He was rector of Attleborough (Buckinghamshire) from about 1257 and prebendary of Aylesbury (Lincolnshire) by 1266. He died between 1266 and 1272.

‘Non solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli mi sono ingegnato d'andare.’ Boccaccio defends the Decameron from envious critics, in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, by denying ambition. He is writing, he says, in the humblest style, in the vernacular, in prose; his little stories have no titles; his readers are idle women: in short, far from attempting any literary heights, as he writes the Decameron he walks through valleys. Some valleys, though, are gardens. At the end of the Sixth Day, the seven women of the story-telling brigata seem to act out Boccaccio's metaphor for his own project. They slip away from their male companions and walk to a secluded spot which Elissa knows about, the Valle delle Donne. Before returning to the rule of king Dioneo, the ladies amuse themselves in the circular valley, admiring its natural beauty and swimming naked in the pool at its center. The excursion is, like the very different Introduction to the Fourth Day, a brief digression from the sequence of one hundred stories, yet it provides a unique point of entrance into the poetics of the Decameron.

How can a literary critic best approach texts which are living classics of religious literature? This question is being asked with increasing frequency by modern readers of The Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection. My own preference is for an historical-critical approach which, while recognising that these works are for all time, is concerned to relate them to the time in which they were written. It has recently been pointed out that certain studies of the English Mystics are marred by ‘the scholar's lack of adequate theological training to interpret the mystics’ teaching correctly,’ a defect which is particularly marked in the case of discussions of the influence of pseudo-Dionysius. As Colledge rightly says, before we can speak with certainty about the Dionysian elements in the Cloud and the Scale, ‘we need a clearer view of the Western medieval traditions which interpreted, glossed, and it may be distorted and exaggerated what the writer of the Mystical Theology had in truth said.’ When this clearer view is attained, we shall be in a better position to understand more fully not only the theological content of our religious classics but also those facets of scholastic literary theory which crucially influenced their authors' attitudes to language and the way in which they wrote.

Virtually all who have written on Piers Plowman B agree that one's interpretation of the pardon in Passus 7 is central to one's understanding of the entire poem. Unfortunately, no similar agreement prevails concerning the details of the scene or its general significance, a fact we might infer from the widely discrepant interpretations of the entire poem's subject and outlook. Nevertheless, most who have written on the subject of the pardon may be grouped into one of two categories, depending on their assessment of the episode's general rhetorical slant.

Le terme ‘mozarabe’ (musta'rib = arabisé) n'apparaît qu'au xie siècle, dans le Léon. Il désigne un phénomène limité d'influence culturelle — notamment en art — par suite de l'émigration vers le Nord de Chrétiens ayant d'abord vécu dans le Sud de la Péninsule ibérique, sous le pouvoir musulman. C'est improprement que l'on a étendu ce terme à tous les Chrétiens d'Espagne durant la période qui précède les premiers succès décisifs de ce qu'il est convenu de nommer la reconquista. Non seulement ceux des royaumes du Nord, qui n'ont assimilé que quelques thèmes décoratifs, quelques éléments musicaux et quelques symboles culturels arabes, mais une partie de ceux qui sont restés dans les régions islamisées et qui se sont cramponnés durant un certain temps à leur culture latine, n'ont pas à être qualifiés de la sorte.

Unlike today, when he is mostly remembered for his historical work, the Venerable Bede's renown in the Middle Ages was founded on his biblical exegesis. One reason that his comments on the Bible had such prominence was that Bede referred to both the Latin and Greek texts, and in western Europe outside of Italy during the eighth century; the ability to read Greek marked one as practically unique. Two eighth-century lives remark on Bede's Greek. In the Brevis commemoratio de Venerabili Beda, probably written by a disciple named Antonius, we learn that Bede studied both Latin and Greek: ‘Et cum in Latina erudiretur lingua, Graecae quoque peritiam non mediocriter percepit.’ Also, in an anonymous life, we read: ‘Cumque Latinae aeque ut vernaculae linguae in qua natus est percepisset notitiam, Graecae quoque non parva ex parte attigit scientiam.’ This belief, that Bede was able to read Greek, was uncritically accepted for centuries.

The somewhat striking title of Liber Commicus was the usual designation in the Mozarabic Church for the liturgical book known elsewhere in western Christendom as the lectionarium, that is, the collection of passages from the Old Testament, Epistles, and Gospels specified for reading during the Mass throughout the ecclesiastical year. This book, so important for the history of the medieval Church in the Iberian peninsula, and cited in a great many documents, has survived in two complete manuscripts from the 11th century, two significant fragments from the 9th and the 11th centuries, and several smaller fragments. First made available by Morin in 1893, the work has most recently been edited by Pérez de Urbel and González y Ruiz-Zorilla. (Their spelling commicus is related to certain arguments relative to the term's origin; this form of the word will be used in this study up to the point at which I wish to argue otherwise.)

In Traditio 31 (1975), 127–93, Ronald E. Pepin produced a text of this poem based on what is unquestionably the parent of the two other surviving MSS, London Brit. Lib. Royal 13 D IV (= L in Pepin's sigla). On the whole Pepin's text gives an accurate account of what is in L, and on the whole L's text accurately represents what John wrote; but both Pepin and L are from time to time inaccurate; my purpose now is to correct their inaccuracies.

In 1965, John Freccero offered a brilliant and ingenious reading of Inferno 34 which attempted to account for the colors of Lucifer's three faces, described rather precisely by Dante the pilgrim:

L'una dinanzi, e quella era vermiglia;
……………………
e la destra parea tra bianca e gialla;
la sinistra a vedere era tal, quali
vegnon di là onde 'l Nilo s'avvalla. (34.39,43–45)

The anonymous compiler of the fourteenth-century Middle English treatise known as The Pore Caitif made extensive use of three works of Richard Rolle. His borrowings are from Emendatio vitae, The Form of Living, and The Commentary on the Canticles, and appear in eight tracts of a special group of ten pieces he calls ‘summe short sentencis exciting men to heuenli desiir’ (fol. 1v). Passages from Rolle's Form of Living were used in PC, ‘Desiir of Ihesu,’ ‘Of Mekenes,’ and ‘Of Actif Liif and Comtemplatif Liif.’ Sections from Emendatio vitae appear in PC, ‘Of Vertuous Pacience,’ ‘ϸe Councel of Christ,’ ‘Of Temptacioun,’ and ‘Desiir of Ihesu.’ A brief section of Rolle's Commentary on the Canticles is the source of the entire PC tract ‘ϸe Name of Ihesu,’ as Hope Emily Allen suggested in her monumental study of Rolle. A portion of this same source served for the first half of PC, ‘Of Mannes Wille,’ as Michael G. Sargent recently pointed out. The purpose of the present article is to suggest that the compiler of The Pore Caitif was indebted to Rolle not only for specific passages, but for the very schema and arrangement of his ten tracts of short sentences. It is my belief that Rolle's Emendatio vitae and The Form of Living, the two works of which the PC compiler made the most substantive use, were the governing influence on the order and arrangement of the ten short sentences.

Wie in zwei früheren, kurzen Abhandlungen bereits angedeutet wurde, verdient das Centheologicon betitelte Werk des Heymericus de Campo (van de Velde) in mehrfacher Hinsicht Beachtung. Die folgenden Mitteilungen, in denen vor allem einige Materialien vorgelegt werden, möchten dazu beitragen, dieses Werk angemessener zu würdigen. Sie beanspruchen keine Vollständigkeit und verzichten auf eine umfassende philosophische Deutung der Schrift. Nach einigen allgemeinen Bemerkungen wird im zweiten Teil der Arbeit nur ein besonderer Aspekt dieses Werkes hervorgehoben, nämlich seine Beziehung zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Nikolaus von Kues, zu deren vollständigeren Kenntnis die hier erstmals veröffentlichten Textpassagen einen bescheidenen Beitrag leisten möchten.