The scholarship on the literary genre of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (henceforth Consolatio) proposes a surprising interpretation: the Consolatio is not a consolation in spite of its title and overt goal. Typically, scholars of the consolatory genre simply note that the Consolatio should not be considered together with ancient and medieval consolations. Scholars of the Consolatio, however, offer specific reasons as to why Boethius's text is not a consolation. One is stylistic: some interpreters (Curley, Dronke, Marenbon, Pabst, Payne, Relihan) argue that the prosimetric style in which the Consolatio is written is typical of a “Menippean satire” and does not befit a consolation. The content of the Consolatio is also considered to be at odds with the consolatory genre: Boethius's text is interpreted as promising a consolation that either is not delivered (Payne, Relihan) or is only partially achieved (Marenbon). Finally, some scholars (O'Daly, Gruber, Rand, Reiss, Shanzer) hold that because the Consolatio presents features that are typical of several literary genres (i.e., Menippean satire, philosophical dialogue, exhortation to philosophy, etc.) it is impossible to classify Boethius's last work as belonging exclusively to one genre or another — the text should, thus, be regarded as an “eclectic” work.

Few taxes have been as enduring and as evocative of identity as the Christian ecclesiastical tithe, arguably “the most important tax in the economic development of western Europe.” The secular enforcement in 779 of the tithe's collection by the church clearly marked a decisive moment in its evolution, but its earlier origins as religious law have been much more elusive. Scholarship over the past five decades has made clear that mandatory tithing to the church was not a custom of early Christianity but rather something that developed in late antiquity, with our first unambiguous evidence of a developed theory of the tithe coming from sixth-century Gaul. The key figure providing that evidence was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 469–542).

Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel elaborates on the practice of compilation in his ninth-century Liber comitis, a compendium of biblical exegesis organized around the readings used in the liturgy. In the preface to this work, he makes it quite clear that the ideas expressed are not his own, but instead derive from the works of the church Fathers:

In the first book of De doctrina Christiana, Augustine of Hippo famously teaches that only the Trinity is to be enjoyed; all other things and even people are to be used toward this singular end. The brevity of Augustine's passing remarks on the Trinity gives no hint that he will later devote many pages to the topic. He writes:

The enclosed solitary life, like other forms of (broadly speaking) monastic vocation, can trace its origins to the eastern deserts of the third and fourth centuries. But its development as a distinct and separately regulated form of living belongs to the central Middle Ages. By the twelfth century, the anchoritic vocation was an established part of a spiritual landscape that also included regular cenobites (monks, canons, nuns) and the still comparatively unregulated, freely wandering hermits. Anchorites usually lived alone (or at least without any spiritual companion: the life was impossible without servants or some other way of attending to the practitioner's domestic needs), in a cell attached (in most cases) to a parish church, often in an urban location; if men, they were usually priests, though more often seculars than regulars; in England, female anchorites, of whom very few appear to have been nuns prior to their enclosure, outnumbered males throughout the period.

The Liber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (fl. 762–ca. 815) in the list of Gerard of Cremona's translations, stands out as one of the few identifiable sources for the indirect knowledge of Peripatetic physics and cosmology at the very time Aristotle's works on natural philosophy themselves were translated into Latin, from the 1130s onward. This physics is expounded in an opening series of chapters on the bodily constitution of the universe, while the central section of the treatise covers astronomical subjects, and the remaining parts deal with meteorology and the vegetal realm. Assuming that Gerard of Cremona's translation of the Liber de orbe corresponds to the twenty-seven chapter version that circulated especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was, however, not this version, but a forty-chapter expansion thereof that became influential as early as the 1140s. It may have originated in Spain, as indicated, among others, by a reference to the difference of visibility of a lunar eclipse between Spain and Mecca. Unlike the twenty-seven chapter Liber de orbe, this expanded and also partly modified text remains in manuscript, and none of the three copies known so far gives a title or mentions Māshā'allāh as an author. Instead, the thirteenth-century witness that is now in New York attributes the work to an Alcantarus: Explicit liber Alcantari Caldeorum philosophi. While no Arabic original of the twenty-seven chapter Liber de orbe has come to light yet, Taro Mimura of the University of Manchester recently identified a manuscript that partly corresponds to the forty-chapter Latin text, as well as a shorter version thereof.

With these words John of Wales (d. 1285) launches his late thirteenth-century treatise on the tongue, De lingua, a massive collection of preaching materials extensively copied, even sometimes excerpted, in England for nearly two centuries.

A lo largo de los siglos la risa ha sido objeto de estudio muy variado, abordada por filósofos, teólogos, historiadores, psicólogos, sociólogos, antropólogos, genetistas, médicos, lingüistas o críticos literarios. En cada época ha recibido atención diferente y cada rama del saber la ha interpretado con perspectivas distintas. Aun cuando a menudo se haya destacado su dificultad, su condición inasible y hasta arbitraria, la risa es una cuestión física y material que, según las neurociencias, se produciría en el sistema límbico del cerebro, una parte poco evolucionada que el hombre comparte con otros animales. La risa, por tanto, debe entenderse como un acto puramente mecánico, cuya activación cerebral provoca una liberación de neurotransmisores que incrementan la actividad cerebral, disminuyen la hormona del estrés y activan el sistema inmune. De ahí que la risa se considere una herramienta evolutiva que se instaló en el cerebro para ayudar a sobrevivir y, en última instancia, a vivir mejor.

This brief, popular work on confession, here for convenience abbreviated as QC, is ascribed to Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253), bishop of Lincoln (1235–53), in most of the known manuscripts, and circulated within many copies of collections of his sermons, in association with other texts by him, or on its own. This text enjoyed a very wide readership, as there are presently known to be thirty-six manuscripts of it (see below), all in English hands, of which eleven were copied in the thirteenth century (see MSS C, Cs, G, Gv, Hk, Js, Pt, R7, R9, U, and Z, below). Twenty-seven of these thirty-six copies were reported by S. Harrison Thomson in his catalogue, published in 1940, of Grosseteste's writings. The list below could probably be extended after further searching, especially in codices of theological or pastoral miscellanea, which are often inadequately catalogued.

When Margery Kempe imagines each member of the Trinity sitting within the chamber of her soul on a cushion of an appropriate color, she uses familiar household furnishings to develop a metaphor that helps explain a complex theological concept, while at the same time creating the sense that these ideas are as natural and easy to accept as the objects from which the metaphor is constructed. Similarly, in an Easter sermon preached in 1431, her contemporary Nicholas Philip, a Franciscan friar of the convent in King's Lynn (Margery's hometown), uses household furnishings to prepare his listeners to receive the Eucharist at Easter. The sermon is built on the metaphor of the body as the house to which Christ has been invited for a feast, and, like Kempe's Trinity image, this house has furnishings — a carpet, a tapestry, a cushion, a seat cover — and the feast itself involves a variety of dishes along with music and entertaining guests. The sermon develops a multifaceted image that becomes a complete sensory experience, focusing not on the meaning of transubstantiation but on the communicant's proper disposition. While Nicholas Philip's Easter sermon may be unusual in using this imagery to shape an entire sermon, many late medieval Easter sermons preached in England employ such domestic imagery to elucidate for their audiences the significance of the Eucharist, the reception of which, for most of the laity living in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, took place only on Easter. In a process that can be called the domestication of the divine, such metaphors render this annual reception less distant and abstract, making an event with supernatural implications as natural and familiar as a dinner party. However, the rhetorical purpose of this domestication is not primarily to encourage feelings of comfort and easy familiarity with the theological underpinnings of the sacrament, but to promote virtue and responsibility in the recipient both in preparation for and following this event. Nicholas Philip's Easter sermon thus testifies to a homiletic concern of many late medieval English preachers as well as to the artistic license a preacher might take to effect that concern.