The problem of St. Patrick the Missionary centers upon two assumptions. One is that both the Letter to Coroticus and the Confession were written by the same person. This assumption would explain why the two have so many points in common but does not explain their differences. The similarities could be caused by the copying of one by the other: the differences by the fact that there were two authors. The other assumption is that the King Lughaid in whose reign the deaths of Patrick and some of his followers occurred was the Lughaid of the fifth century rather than the king of the same name in the third century. The alternative possibilities will be examined in this short study.

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.

When Morton Bloomfield reviewed David Burr's The Persecution of Peter Olivi, he noted that Olivi's reputation, no matter how interpreted, has been too much estimated in terms of his association with the spiritualism of Joachim of Flora. To get a more balanced view, he contended, we need more study dealing with other aspects of Olivi's career. It is as a step in the fulfillment of this need that we present an edition of Olivi's Quaestiones logicales.

It is not without reason that Harnack calls St. Gregory the Great ‘Doctor angelorum et diaboli.’ The misery of Gregory's times, occasioned by the incessant attacks of the Lombards, made him convinced that the end of the world was at hand. Thus it is that his thought has a definitely eschatological stamp. The terrors of death and the fierce onslaughts of the devil were popular themes with St. Gregory the Great.

The peculiar piece of late Byzantine legal literature which is known by the strange name of Tipoukeitos, is concerned with the so-called Basilica. It indicates, in a very succinct form, the topics dealt with in the sixty books of Emperor Leo the Philosopher's voluminous codification. It seems that the author of T. used a copy of B. which differed somewhat, particularly in its enumeration of the single texts, from those MSS on which the brothers Heimbach based their edition of B. but, in general, the order of books and titles in T. is the same as in the Heimbachs' edition.

Robert I of Dreux, third surviving son of Louis VI of France, is a little-known figure. The causes of this obscurity lie in part in the fragmentary and dispersed nature of the sources on Robert but also in the lack of interest which historians have shown regarding both him and the baronial dynasty which he founded. Indeed, no significant work on the counts of Dreux and Braine has appeared since the publication, in 1631, of André Duchesne's antiquarian history of that family. Numerous broader studies of the Capetian monarchy mention Robert in passing, because of the cession of Dreux to him by Louis VII and because of his aborted conspiracy, in 1149, to seize the throne; but it is symptomatic of the state of the scholarship on him that the first event has consistently been misunderstood, while the second is so poorly documented that judgments have ranged from calling it a major crisis for the monarchy to dismissing it as a trivial episode, with inadequate evidence for either view.

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.

The disease of love (amor hereos) proved a topic of longstanding interest at the medical school of Montpellier between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. From Arnald of Villanova and Bernard of Gordon in the late thirteenth century to Valescus of Taranta and Jacques Angeli in the fifteenth, generations of Montpellier masters and students studied, expounded, and debated the lover's malady. Gerard of Solo, who received his master's degree in medicine from Montpellier in 1335, and who remained at the university to become a leading figure of medical scholasticism, compiled a university exercise on lovesickness, the Determinatio de amore hereos. Though best known to students of lovesickness as the author of a commentary on the ninth book of al-Rāzī's Liber ad almansorem, Gerard's Determinatio, which is probably his magisterial version of a disputation on love, treats the subject more systematically than does the commentary on al-Rāzī. The Determinatio, which represents how the topic of lovesickness was taught outside the framework of textual commentary, provides a useful summary of fourteenth-century scholastic medical doctrine on love.

The Bedford Hours (British Library MS Additional 18850) has been called one of “the very finest examples of French art of the earlier half of the fifteenth century….” Its lavish use of gold and bright colors, its beautifully conceived calendar pages and large miniatures, its connection with the marriage of John of Lancaster, the duke of Bedford, to Anne of Burgundy, and its fascinating history as a manuscript have received much attention. Scholars, however, have virtually ignored the almost 1,250 marginal illustrations that decorate the manuscript's 289 folios. These tiny pictures are generally woven into the ivy-leaf border, painted within roundels of approximately one inch in diameter. Thematically related, they are usually placed two to a folio side, one within the left or right border, and one within the lower border. The roundels, furthermore, are accompanied by one-line Old French texts. These are always placed together below the lower border and are arranged so that the first text, written in blue, identifies the roundel within the side border, whereas the second text, written in gold, explains the roundel painted within the lower border.

The development of the pre-Carolingian seigneurie has received little attention, although this neglect is due in large part to a scarcity in source material. This lack may be supplemented by relying on other material, such as that supplied in the Lex Baiuvariorum. The latter, the Bavarian code, was promulgated within the first half of the eighth century and slightly before the appearance of the Carolingian estate organization. The development of manorial obligations in eighth-century Bavaria is illustrated by one major law in the Lex Baiuvariorum, and this law is I, 13. However, the study of the seigneurie in Bavaria is complicated by differing interpretations of the evidence. What follows is an attempt to re-evaluate the evidence as supplied in L. Baiu. I, 13 and to show its relationship with the Carolingian estate organization.

For more than sixty years now Heinrich Hagenmeyer's ‘Chronologie de la première croisade’ has been a standard reference. As a compilation and critique of dates recorded by the crusading historians and their contemporaries, the great German scholar's account is as satisfactory today as when it first appeared. It is in the area, however, of the hypothetical dates which Hagenmeyer assigned to the various occurrences on the expeditions of Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon to the Orient that the ‘Chronologie’ stands in error and needs revision.

Cardinal Comes of Casate, one of six cardinals who died in the papal vacancy-following the death of Honorius IV in 1287, added a codicil to his will in Rome as the summer pestilence was raging. This document, edited below, adds another example to an isolated first cluster of such cardinals' wills, codicils, and death inventories. The inventory of the estate of Cardinal Geoffrey of Alatri, deacon of S. Giorgio in Velabro (died before 31 May 1287), and the wills or codicils of Cardinals Comes, priest of SS. Marcellino e Pietro (died after 19 July 1287), Hugh of Evesham, priest of S. Lorenzo in Lucina (died before 18 August 1287), Bentivenga dei Bentivenghi, bishop of Albano (died after 25 March 1289), Peter Peregrosso of Milan, successor to the cardinal title of Geoffrey of Alatri (died between 15 and 28 July 1295), and Thomas of Ocra, priest of S. Cecilia (died between 23 May and 4 June 1300), are a remarkable group, not only because they cover a span of only fourteen years, but because they either contain an impressive list of books or refer to a substantial, uninventoried private library.

As in previous Bulletins, bibliographical references are limited (1) to the first notice given of a manuscript not recorded in the Repertorium, and (2) to significant corrections or amplifications concerning previously known and new manuscripts (such references being preceded by ‘cf.’). Details of descriptions given in the Repertorium are not repeated, and new manuscripts are marked by the symbol *.

The fact that the question of war guilt has frequently followed in the wake of major wars has contributed little, if anything, to a clarification of the concept. The perplexing difficulties raised by it are amply illustrated by the unsuccessful attempts, made periodically at various ages and on various levels of civilization, to arrive at criteria permitting a differentiation between the bellum justum and the bellum injustum. States, unlike individuals, are not confronted with simple choices between obeying or violating the law. Determination of the initial violation of existing covenants sheds little, if any, light on the responsibility for commencing war. Nor is such responsibility necessarily incurred by launching the first attack. Nothing could be more futile than to equate this act with aggressive and unjust war. The initial attack may be a legitimate response to an existing situation, and a war of aggression, as St. Augustine already pointed out, a just war; nor is there any reason to assume that the party forced into the defensive is invariably innocent. If war guilt is to be more than a specious pretense for inflicting punishment upon the vanquished, it can be measured only in terms of the alternatives available to a state, and the choice has to be viewed in the light of historical, ethical, and political factors. The assessment of such guilt is a problem of extraordinary complexity. To confine it to formal legal considerations would result not only in gross injustice, but would tend to perpetuate international tensions.

The hide was a common form of land tenure in pre-Conquest England. Scanty documentation and ambiguous statements in the sources have made it difficult, however, for economic and social historians to understand the evolving meaning of hide in the period from Bede to 1100. The present study attempts to clarify some of the problems surrounding this word by a re-examination of the sources and by an analysis of terminology in land-tenure institutions related to it. The results of the investigation show that revisions in land tenure during the later Anglo-Saxon era prepared the way for the introduction of Norman methods for governing the English countryside.

Bei den Vorarbeiten für eine Dissertation über die bedingte Eheschliessung im kanonischen Recht, die vor allem die Entwicklung dieses Rechtsinstituts in der Zeit von 1140-1234 aufzeigen wird, hat der Verfasser unter anderem einzelne bisher unbekannte Handschriften verschiedener kanonistischer Werke aufgefunden oder bereits bekannte Handschriften näher identifiziert. Da die Drucklegung der Dissertation wohl noch einige Zeit in Anspruch nehmen wird, möchte der Verfasser die wichtigsten Ergebnisse vorläufig kurz anzeigen. Der Einzelnachweis wird in der genannten Dissertation folgen.

One of the more difficult tasks of a historian who treats Italian communal history in the fourteenth century concerns the problem of delineating the thoughts and actions of those citizens who were not allied with any of the several political factions that inevitably vied for office in the turbulent environment of the towns. With the men who were adherents of rival clans, politics was in the main a struggle for power. Their day-by-day activities are frequently the stuff of dreary, repititious Italian chronicles punctuated with blood feuds, vendettas, street fights, judicial persecutions and petty harassments. The persistent theme of cruelty and counter-cruelty heightens the monotony of this historical requiem which continues over that century during which the overwhelming majority of republican communes suffered their protracted death agonies. The historian feels rather like the spectator at an Italian opera in which the heroine's death has been antitipated since the beginning of the first act. Despite his sympathies, the historian is forced to admit that he is indeed pleased to hear the last republican aria and to see the Visconti come on stage to deliver the commune's oratorio. One is tempted to suggest not only that the death of the republic lacked dignity, but also that the various voices raised for and against her were indeed all bass. After all, what is the difference between the songs sung by the Monaldeschi and the Filippeschi of Orvieto or the tunes hummed by the feuding families of Genoa ? Were they not all in the same key? What convictions or ideologies distinguished the chorus which sang on behalf of the Malatesta of Rimini from the one which chanted for its archrival? In truth, the contending factions appear to have stood for little beyond the struggle for office, the urge to punish their enemies, and the desire to enjoy the fruits of their political victories. One is tempted to paraphrase Butterfield's observation and to say: Their successes, like Namier's researches, washed the ideas out of history.

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.