Two ideas, the Divine and the Other-World, seem to have dominated much of the life of the ancient Greeks and Romans and to have claimed their best energies. To a great extent the culture of classical antiquity is the natural expression of these two predominant religious convictions. When Christianity entered the Graeco-Roman world and gathered its adherents from among both the cultured class and the unlettered masses, it made no violent break with ancient culture but preserved whatever was best in it. On the one hand, the Church sought to suppress whatever militated against its own teaching in these matters; on the other, it readily embraced a number of purely folk customs and practices of virtually spontaneous growth and gave them a new orientation in conformity with Christian principles. In a word, some of the pagan usages and rites were purified and, whenever possible, adapted to Christian worship.

The metropolitans of Seleucia-Ctesiphon for the fourth century comprise Papa, Simeon bar Sabbae, Shahdost, Barbashmin followed by a long vacancy, Tomarsa, Qayuma, and Isaac. The parallel Sassanids were Sapor II (309-379), Ardashir II (379-83), Sapor III (383-88), Bahram IV (388-99) and Yezdegerd I (399-420).

The list of catholici is preserved in a number of different writers: PsEN (c. s. x), ChrS (c. 1036), Mari (c. 1150), PsED (c. 1260), BarH (1286), Amri (c. 1350), Sliba (c. 1350), and others.

The chronology has already been studied by G. Westphal in connection with his investigation of the sources and reliability of Mari, Amri and Sliba. He bases his dates principally on the Syriac acts of the Persian martyrs, but, as the present paper attempts to prove, this cannot be done: we must work the other way around, settle first the succession of the catholici and then turn to the acts. Furthermore, since the publication of his excellent work, the very valuable ChrS has been discovered and a critical edition of PsEN has appeared.

Der Codex Berolinensis 77 (Phillips 1481, xii. Jahrhdt.) enthält fol. 233r-235r und fol. 246v-249v drei unedierte Homilien unter dem viel missbrauchten Namen des hl. Chrysostomus. Schon die erstmalige Lektüre zeigt klar, dass Chrysostomus hier nicht in Frage kommt. Inhalt, Stil und Sprache weisen in andere Richtung. Ein genaueres Studium der Texte zeigt eine ziemlich weitgehende Verwandtschaft mit den Gedanken und Redewendungen der christologischen Diskussionen, die mit Eustathius von Antiochien und Diodor von Tarsus ihren Anfang nahmen, durch Theodor von Mopsuestia eine gewisse Verschärfung erfuhren und mit Nestorius ihren Höhepunkt erreichten. Man wird also zunächst bei diesen Namen, die alle der antiochenischen Schule angehören, stehen bleiben dürfen. Die ausdrückliche und einmütige Bezeugung der Handschriften für Chrysostomus, der ebenfalls Antiochener war, legt den Gedanken nahe, dass man die Homilien schon sehr frühe, wohl nicht ohne bestimmte Absicht, unter die schützende Obhut eines anerkannt gefeierten Namens gestellt hat. So ist z.B. gerade von Nestorius bekannt, dass seine Anhänger früher oder später dessen Schriften unter falschem Namen zu erhalten und zu verbreiten suchten. Bekanntlich hatte Kaiser Theodosius II. im Jahre 435 den Befehl gegeben, sämtliche Schriften des Nestorius zu verbrennen. Dem kaiserlichen Befehl ist ohne Zweifel in weitgehendem Maasse entsprochen worden, denn es hat sich unter des Nestorius eigenem Namen, ausser grösstenteils vorephesinischen Fragmenten und Zitaten, ganz wenig erhalten; anderes nur unter fremdem Namen und zwar hauptsächlich unter dem seines grossen Landsmannes und Vorgängers Chrysostomus. Ähnlich erging es später auch Diodor und Theodor.

Legislative documents from the rulers of Germanic states established in former Roman territories are frequently the work of men of Roman descent. Thus Leo of Narbonne was probably the main helper of the Visigothic King Euric, and the Gallo-Roman Syagrius, of the Burgundian Gundobad. The Ostrogoths had Roman jurists in their service; one of these wrote the Edictum Theoderici. Cassiodorus is the author not only of the Variae, a selection of documents composed by him as chancellor of Theoderic the Great, but also of the Edictum Athalarici. The Merovingians Chlodewig and Childebert I employed Gallo-Roman administrators; the patrician Parthenius was an official of the Austrasian King Theudebert I. The need for Roman officials in Germanic governments disappeared largely with the growth of genuine Germanic political and legal institutions. Charlemagne's leading helpers were therefore no longer descendants of the old senatorial nobility which survived in Gaul and Italy, but mostly men of Germanic origin. On the other hand, of all the brilliant scholars of Saxon, Lombard, Spanish-Gothic, and Italic origin in Charlemagne's cosmopolitan entourage, one man alone achieved great political prominence: Alcuin, the Saxon nobleman from the British kingdom of Northumbria. A little-known phase of his activities in the empire of Charlemagne will be investigated here.

Professor Galbraith has recently dealt with the copy of a Southwestern Geld Roll which is preserved in the volume published by the Record Commission under the title of ‘Exon Domesday,’ on the last folio of which it is referred to as an Inquisitio Gheldi. He has argued — persuasively, though without removing all doubts — that the tax record was not only contemporaneous with, but in part dependent on and derived from, the information obtained by the royal commissioners of the southwestern Domesday circuit. Their main object was to provide the central government with the preliminary digest of the ‘original returns’ of the Domesday survey from which the so-called Exchequer Domesday, or volume I of Domesday Book, was finally compiled. According to Galbraith this digest, which was sent on to Winchester, was a fair copy of the rough draft that still survives in the volume referred to above, the Exon Domesday.

The observation made by the learned Barthélemy Hauréau that Gilbert of Poitiers (Gilbert de la Porrée) was ‘le plus docte et le plus ingénieux de tous les sectateurs du platonisme au XIIe siècle’ has never been challenged as false or exaggerated nor has it been approved without qualification. One of the main reasons why Gilbert's greatness is not yet fully recognized is the fact that the printed editions of his works have done him great harm — more indeed than have the doubts and suspicions cast upon his orthodoxy. The printing errors in these editions are often too obvious to escape an attentive reader, but they are so numerous as to undermine his confidence even in such passages as are accurately transcribed and printed, though difficult to grasp. Only a reliable re-edition of his principal work, the commentaries on the Opuscula Sacra of Boethius, will restore Gilbert to the position he deserves in the history of both theology and philosophy.

The years between 1146 and 1148 were signalized in the annals and chronicles of Medieval Europe by Christian campaigns on all fronts against the surrounding pagans and Moslems. The most important of these was directed towards the Holy Land, against the Moslems, who had recently seized Edessa. It consisted of no less than five expeditions. The two largest armies, commanded by the Emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France, followed the same route overland across the Balkans to Constantinople; both met with crushing defeats in Asia Minor and finally reached the Holy Land, as best they could, by land and sea. A third force, under Amadeus III of Savoy, moved down Italy, crossed from Brindisi to Durazzo, and joined the army of Louis at Constantinople late in 1147. In August of the same year a naval expedition led by Alfonso of Toulouse left the South of France and arrived in Palestine probably in the spring of 1148. At the same time, a joint Anglo-Flemish naval force sailed along the north coast of Europe, assisted the King of Portugal in the capture of Lisbon, proceeded around the peninsula early in 1148, attacked Faro, and presumably reached the Holy Land later that year. Meanwhile, in the northeast, four armies co-operated in a campaign against the pagan Wends across the river Elbe: a Danish army joined the Saxons under Henry the Lion and Archbishop Adalbero of Bremen in an attack on Dubin; another, larger, army led by Albert the Bear of Brandenburg and many other temporal and spiritual lords advanced against Demmin and Stettin; a fourth expedition, finally, under a brother of the Duke of Poland attacked from the southeast. In 1148, on the south shore of the Mediterranean, a powerful fleet under George of Antioch extended the control of Roger II of Sicily over the entire littoral from Tripoli to Tunis. In the West, four campaigns were directed against the crumbling power of the Almoravides. The Genoese in 1146 sacked Minorca and besieged Almeria. During the following year, the Emperor Alfonso VII of Castile advanced south through Andalusia and captured Almeria with the aid of a strong Genoese fleet, which in 1148 sailed north and joined the Count of Barcelona in his campaign against Tortosa. In the previous year, Alfonso Henriques of Portugal had captured Santarem and secured the assistance of the Anglo-Flemish fleet for an attack on Lisbon, which fell late in 1147.

In an excellent article, ‘Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought,’ Ernst H. Kantorowicz has recently called attention to the importance of the concept of patria in the rise of the national monarchy and state in the later Middle Ages. No correction is needed, nor, perhaps, any addition. But since he modestly admits that he did not mean to exhaust the subject and does not examine the two laws, and since I had begun to note occasional remarks in the canonists and legists about the patria in association with theories of public law and the state, I wish to add some illustrations of the legal thought on the subject in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. These illustrations will supplement, moreover, the essay by Halvdan Koht on nationalism in the Middle Ages.

The variety of cultural patterns that marks the Italian scene in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a historical phenomenon as familiar to the general historian as to the student of all the special fields to which Italy made its contributions at that time. Inquiry into the conditions determining the characteristics of some of the cities will point in different directions : to leading artists and scholars and their ‘schools’; to the taste and interest of individual or collective patrons; to outside influences, and so forth. Very often such an inquiry will uncover strands that lead back deep into the medieval past of the city. Yet medievalists, in writing monographs on one or another city, have found themselves mostly involved in the political and economic problems of the Italian scene, and indeed in the diversity that marked each city, but have paid little attention to local culture. Still, as shown by one brilliant example — the analysis by Robert Davidsohn of Florentine culture in the time of Dante — the task is an extremely rewarding one. For not only medieval Florence — thirteenth-century Florence which gave birth to Dante and the art of Giotto and Arnolfo da Cambio—but many other cities of northern and central Italy, great and small, wove the general influences and ideas of the age into their own pattern of culture, each with a design of its own. To be sure, many cities show similarities in their cultural growth just as they do in their political and economic development, but a more thorough analysis will reveal differences in the pace of their development as well as in the ‘selection’ of trends that determine their character. Potentialities and dispositions for leadership were apparent in several centers of Tuscany and northern Italy, and it would have been difficult at that time to predict which among them was to achieve a leadership that would last longer and extend over larger areas than that of one of its rivals.

The following list is a logical sequel to the bibliography of printed catalogues published some years ago (Traditio VI [1948] 227-317), and it serves the same purpose, namely to facilitate the study of Latin manuscript books, which is important to classical and patristic scholars as well as to historians of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. A continuing exploration of the extant collections still leads to the discovery of unpublished writings, brings to light copies of known texts that are of special interest, or at least gives statistical evidence for the diffusion of certain well known works at the time when the manuscript book was the predecessor or rival of the printed book. Information on the general importance and content of the various manuscript collections proved essential both for the project of ‘Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries,’ which has been undertaken by a group of scholars under the auspices of several learned societies, and for a summary list of philosophical and literary manuscripts of the Renaissance which I am preparing for the Warburg Institute in London. The present list is an outgrowth of these two undertakings, and it was first compiled in a less elaborate fashion for the former project and issued in mimeographed form under its auspices in 1951.

Des Klemens von Alexandrien Schrift Quis dives salvetur (QDS) schildert am Schluss (42.16ff : ed. Stählin, GCS 3.190.20-191.10) das Schicksal der guten Menschen: Engel öffnen ihnen freudig und mit Lobgesang die Himmel, allen voran kommt der Heiland ihnen entgegen und führt sie zum Vater. Die Schilderung ist aber nur als Bruchstück überliefert, der erste Satz ist nur teilweise erhalten:

1. The Conspiracy against the Protovestiarios George Muzalon. — In August of 1258 the Emperor of Nicaea, Theodore II Lascaris, died after a reign of less than four years. One of Theodore's final acts had been to draw up his testament naming his boyhood friend, the Protovestiarios George Muzalon, regent of the Empire and guardian of his eight year old son and heir, John IV Lascaris. This disposition of the Empire, in particular the assignment of the regency to a man of low birth, was extremely unpopular with the Nicene nobles. Their attitude, however, had been anticipated by Theodore, who, shortly before his death, had secured confirmation for his testament from those nobles who were at hand.

Treatises de modis significandi are known to have been a favorite genre of scholastic literature. One of them, by Martinus de Dacia, has lately been made the subject of a thorough study by Father Heinrich Roos, S.J., and will be briefly discussed in these pages. The text of this treatise, and commentaries on it, are found in a fairly large number of manuscripts, of which Fr. Roos presents a list, and which he endeavors to determine in their mutual relation in order to lay the groundwork for a future edition, apparently — as much as any one not himself familiar with the manuscripts can judge — with thoroughness and reliablity (chs. I, II). In some of the manuscripts and in certain other sources the treatise is ascribed to one Martinus de Dacia (Denmark). Very convincingly Fr. Roos demonstrates (ch. III) that this bit of information is correct and that the author was identical with a high-ranking Danish cleric of that name, who at one time was the chancellor of King Eric VI Menved. It is likely that Martinus composed his treatise while he was a professor in the Liberal Arts Faculty of the University of Paris, probably around 1250. The treatise seems to have enjoyed a great reputation, which would be accounted for if Fr. Roos is right in assuming that Martinus set the model for the entire type. In the last two chapters (IV, V) Fr. Roos describes the character and basic ideas of the tractate against the background of the development of scholarship and higher education during the Middle Ages. This historical outline is very interesting and instructive indeed. Nevertheless it provokes criticism regarding two interrelated points, namely, the characterization of scholastic grammar and its position in the history of linguistic studies.

It is extremely gratifying to note the completion of the project first organized at Columbia University in 1931 for the purpose of publishing the then almost completely unavailable Loherain cycle of chansons de geste. Only the Hervis de Mez, edited by Edmund Stengel in 1903, could be consulted by scholars without having recourse to the very numerous manuscripts scattered through the libraries of Europe. The first part of the oldest and central portion of the cycle, the Garin le Loherain, could be read in the antequated edition of Paulin Paris (Paris 1833-1835), supplemented by the Mort de Garin le Loherain, edited by Edéléstand du Meril (Paris 1846). The second oldest chanson, Gerbert de Mez, and the last of the cycle, Ansays de Mez, were still unpublished except for a few fragments. Since then, however, Professor Josephine Vallerie, a member of the Loherain Seminar at Columbia, which was under the direction of Professor Pauline Taylor, has published an excellent edition of Garin le Loheren (according to the spelling of her base manuscript) in 1947. The last branch of the cycle had already been published in two different redactions by other members of the Seminar: Yon, or La vengeance Fromondin, edited by Simon R. Mitchneck (New York 1935), and the more satisfactory edition of the longer redaction under the title of Ansays de Mez, by Herman J. Green (Paris 1939). The one remaining unpublished branch of the central and oldest part of the cycle, Gerbert de Mez, which follows immediately upon Garin le Loheren, has now finally been made available in a very careful edition by Professor Taylor, published at Namur in 1952 by the Secrétariat des Publications of the Facultés Universitaires of that city. This terminal publication stemming from the work of the Columbia University Seminar, which included also several interesting studies of various aspects of the cycle, now makes the entire geste des Loherains available to students of the French epic.

The initial date chosen for this survey is the beginning of the publication of the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1940; the final date, 1952, is that of the appearance of A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World. These two events mark the two principal directions in which the method of the historical study of ideas has moved on this continent: first toward the analytical study of ‘unit ideas’ as defined by Arthur O. Lovejoy (especially in The Great Chain of Being, 1936), who is also the intellectual father of the Journal of the History of Ideas; secondly toward the synthetic ‘recording’ of the main currents and aspects of the ideological tradition of the West in its entirety, unity, and continuity, as aimed at by the Great Books program of Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, and their collaborators.