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.

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?

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.

Part One of this Introduction was concerned with the historical background of Caucasian Society; it dealt, accordingly, in some detail with the genesis and structure of that society, more particularly of its creative minority, the nobility, and in especial the spearhead of the nobility, the group of the dynastic princes. That study investigated also the ethos of this important and restricted group, a caste in fact, and its juridical status: the sovereign rights of the Princes, who were, under the presidency of kings, the real rulers of Caucasia; their internationally recognized position of minor kings; the ethno-political self-sufficiency and self-determination of their States, of which Armenia and to a large extent also the other Caucasian countries were little more than federative unions; the dependence of the Princes on other and greater monarchs; and the superadding of feudalistic features, resulting from this dependence, to the fundamentally dynasticist régime of Caucasia. Here, in the present study, it is proposed to consider this group in the concrete: to examine it, that is, as so many individual historical-genealogical-geographical (and often also ethnic) units. The preponderant role of the Caucasian dynastic aristocracy in the history of the formative centuries made, especially in Armenia, of this history, and of that of the following centuries as well, largely the history of these princely houses. This fully justifies our interest in this particular aspect of the Caucasian social development.

During late antiquity, an interesting doctrinal shift can be observed: Aristotelian logic and its Neoplatonic complements, in particular the teachings of Aristotle's Categories and Porphyry's Isagoge, were progressively accepted as a tool in Christian theology. This acceptance met drawbacks and was never unanimous. Among the authors who used concepts that originated in logic in order to support their theological thinking, we can mention, on very different accounts, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, John Philoponus, Leontius of Byzantium, Maximus the Confessor, Theodore of Raithu, and John of Damascus, the author of an important Dialectica. In the Byzantine context, handbooks of logic were written specifically for Christian theologians, showing that logic was perceived to be an important tool for theological thinking.

On 7 March 1277, étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, issued a decree condemning 219 ”errors“ that were henceforth not to be taught in the university under threat of excommunication. So much has been written about this episode, from the thirteenth century onwards, that it scarcely needs introducing. Indeed, a leading scholar in the field has implied that nothing remains to be said about the events themselves since the standard problems either have been solved or are insoluble owing to the absence of documents. Yet the continuing speculation is a clear sign that the episode is poorly understood. Major studies of the last twenty-five years have offered markedly different interpretations of the intentions of those involved and the effects of their actions. Much effort has gone into condemning or excusing Tempier, but we still have little idea of where, and in what context, the condemned articles originated, rendering such judgments at best premature. The present study will attempt to address this problem by reexamining the text of the condemnation and other related sources to argue that they contain important evidence that has so far been overlooked.

In characteristic fashion, the Iter Italicum of Paul Oskar Kristeller reveals the richness of Renaissance thought on seafaring. The literature on seafaring conserved in manuscripts cataloged in the Iter Italicum ranges from commentary on ancient seafaring to eulogies of contemporary heroes to works on mechanics and engineering with unusual proposals for naval weaponry. Those manuscripts likewise highlight the Renaissance conceptualization of seafaring as an art and a creative tension in Renaissance scholarship between looking back to the past and looking forward to the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.