The figure of Saint Gallus, ostensibly the eponymous founder of Saint-Gallen, was the subject of much hagiographical treatment in the late Merovingian and early Carolingian periods. No fewer than four hagiographical texts were produced by individuals ensconced in communities that commemorated him. This process, called recently réécriture, permitted authors in iteration to employ the same basic narrative to a variety of ends. The anonymous Vita vetustissima (before 771), Wetti’s Vita Galli (before 824), Wahalfrid’s Vita Galli (833/34), and the anonymous Vita metrica Galli (between 833/34 and 837) each preserved accounts of Gallus’ career and posthumous events attributed to his intercession. Reading in parallel four episodes shared between these four texts allows us to see the various ways authors chose to frame their subject and allows us to imagine the authorial ambition of their composers. This chain of custody for the Gallus materials responded to concerns about institutional integrity, facilities, and ecclesiology by occasioning new compositions at key moments, such as moments of investment, license, and donation. It also reveals the generic conventions used by its authors to achieve their authorial ambition. The Vita vetustissima treats Gallus as a conventional late antique holy man; Wetti’s text was intended for lectionary purposes; Walahfrid’s text was encyclopedic in nature; and the Vita metrica, an ‘institutional Aeneid,’ advances Gallus as a holy hero suited to secular letters. Principally, Abbot Gozbert (r. 816–37) stewarded this process as an exercise in community-building.

Using the poems of John Scottus Eriugena as a case study, the author aims to show that glossaries that preserve the lemmata and glosses of a text in the same order as that of a codex unicus of the work can be used to construct the common exemplar from which the entries of the glossary and the text of the codex unicus derive. Thus, at least for Medieval Latin texts, glosses can be an essential component of the recensio codicum. The author argues further that where a dating order of poems can be established (as in the case under consideration), such constitutes evidence of editorial management on the part of the author or an associate.

La Visio Taionis narra el hallazgo milagroso en Roma, por parte del obispo Tajón (s. VII), de los Moralia in Iob de Gregorio Magno, que, según el relato, no podían encontrarse en el reino visigodo. Este relato procede de un capítulo de la Crónica mozárabe de 754 (s. VIII) y circuló a la cabeza de varios códices de los Moralia. En el siglo XII se realizó una reescritura de la leyenda, publicada en 1705 con el nombre del De inuentione librorum Moralium (PL 75, cols. 507– 10). Sin embargo, el examen de la tradición manuscrita revela que en el siglo XII se realizaron al menos seis redacciones distintas, y que el texto editado en PL es en realidad una contaminación de dos de ellas realizada a finales del siglo XV. En este artículo presento un primer catálogo del más de medio centenar de testimonios existentes, una edición crítica de las seis redacciones y un estudio en el que sitúo el origen más probable de las seis en Claraval o en alguna abadía cisterciense del norte de Francia.

In the late eleventh century, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1040–d. after 1099) composed the most extensive collection of hagiographical writings known to have been assembled for a community of religious women in medieval England. At the behest of Abbess Ælfgifu (ca. 1037–ca. 1114) of Barking Abbey, he definitely wrote the following texts to honor the community’s three principal saints: a uita of its founder and first abbess, Æthelburh (d. after 686); Matins lessons for her immediate successor, Hildelith (d. after 716); a uita and an account of the first translation of their later tenth-century successor Wulfhild (d. after 996); Matins lessons and a longer account of the three abbess-saints’ translation on Laetare Sunday, 7 March 1092; and a report of a vision Ælfgifu received seven years after the event. This article makes the case for Goscelin’s authorship of the Matins lessons for Sts. Æthelburh and Wulfhild as well, and for their preservation in London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho A XII (Part 6). Paleographical analysis of these lessons further indicates that the scribe responsible for copying them also copied the lives of Sts. Æthelburh and Wulfhild in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 176 (E.5.28), a late eleventh-century book of Barking origin. This hand exhibits features peculiar to scribes trained in northeastern France or the Low Countries, raising the possibility that Goscelin made these copies himself. But even if he did not make them, the appearance of the same hand in texts related to Barking’s abbess-saints suggests that this scribe’s work in Otho A XII (Part 6) should be located at Barking, too, thus increasing the total number of books the community once owned to twenty-two and further proving one of the instrumental roles that religious women played during the Middle Ages to orchestrate their communities’ liturgies: commissioning writers and scribes to compose saints’ lives, Matins lessons, and other texts and music to celebrate their principal feast days with due solemnity and distinctiveness.

As self-appointed guardians of light who performed many of their activities between sunset and sunrise, medieval monks and nuns had a special relationship with fire, light, and darkness. While medieval monastic authors wrote copiously about light, however, modern scholars have shown comparatively little interest in this topic. Using the concept of lightscape, this essay recreates the unique Latin monastic culture of light of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, considering how religious communities used natural and artificial light as well as darkness to reinforce spiritual lessons, heighten the sensory experience of liturgical life, and signal distinctions between orders in a reform-minded age. Evidence from material culture as well as several textual genres demonstrates that monastic uses of candles, oil lamps, and lanterns reflected the commitment to a strictly regulated life which foregrounded bonds of community and encouraged constant spiritual and physical vigilance. Contemporary understandings of fire and light as heavenly matter also conditioned religious to see everyday light-sources as ready conduits for the miraculous, as well as technologies by which earthly spaces could be made to approximate heavenly ones.

From its beginnings in the eleventh century through its decline in the early modern period, the movement of Christian holy war known as the crusades was sustained by the enthusiasm and willing participation of the European military aristocracy. Despite this, historians have yet to explain the continuing value of crusading and the maintenance of the crusading frontier for the aristocracy. This article argues for a fundamental re-evaluation of the nature of crusading, as it was perceived and experienced by European elites. Rather than large-scale military expeditions with global geo-political objectives, smaller more frequent tours of the frontier world constituted the normative crusading experience for aristocrats. These noble sojourns allowed for the acquisition of cultural capital through controlled and staged performances and interaction with the elites, landscape, and fauna of the crusading East. The study of these independent crusading expeditions requires engagement with an altogether different body of source material than usually is consulted in crusade historiography and a different set of questions to be asked of these sources, which in turn leads us to consider a different range of behavior, including tournament-going, hunting, and courtly life, as constituting the typical aristocratic crusading experience. It was through these activities that visiting aristocrats acquired the precious cultural capital that defined their social status in a period of hardening class distinctions. While aristocracy maintained crusading, crusading maintained distinction, and hence the entire European regime of lordship itself.

Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon was the most widely read Latin chronicle of late medieval England. It (and its later continuations) influenced the production of several major chronicles that are frequently employed by scholars of the period, such as the Eulogium historiarum, Henry Knighton's Chronicle, John of Reading's Chronicle, John of Tynemouth's Historia aurea, and Thomas Walsingham's Chronica maiora. The continuations to 1377 are particularly valuable for providing contemporary narratives on the latter years of Edward III's reign, a period which saw hardly any independent historical narrative. Despite this, knowledge of the Polychronicon and its continuations has remained rather opaque and spotty. This article provides an assessment of the texts and manuscripts of the Polychronicon and its continuations to 1377 and beyond and serves as a starting point for further study and the production of much-needed critical editions. It lays out clear details on the development of these texts, including dates of composition and textual relationships. It newly identifies three previously unknown continuations, Crowland (for 1339), Suffolk (1340–73), and Abingdon (1380–1400), and offers information on several little-known continuations past 1377. This article also corrects many errors in previously available knowledge on these texts. It concludes with a detailed list of 188 manuscripts, adding to and correcting the 162 manuscripts scattered across previous works in varying degrees of detail.

All’Umanesimo non si deve solo un nuovo interesse filologico verso i classici latini e greci, ma anche una rinnovata attenzione nei confronti della Bibbia. Tra quanti meditarono sul testo biblico e lo posero a fondamento del proprio agire si deve annoverare Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), monaco camaldolese e umanista. Attraverso l’esame di una sua lettera, indirizzata ai religiosi del proprio ordine a nome del pontefice Eugenio IV poco dopo essere stato elevato alla carica di abate generale, si metterà in luce come il Traversari, nell’esortarli alla vita monastica, fondi il suo operare tanto sulla letteratura patristica, quanto soprattutto sul ricorso alla Bibbia, rispetto alla quale tralascia l’allegoria medievale per essere invece attento a trarre dal dettato biblico un esempio morale per i propri confratelli.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) ha raccolto la sua collezione di libri in tempi e con modalità diverse a seconda degli studi, degli obiettivi e delle fonti disponibili. I due inventari superstiti, entrambi compilati dopo la sua prematura morte avvenuta all’età di 31 anni, rivelano notevoli lacune nel corpus aristotelico. Nonostante ciò, i volumi rimasti e quelli che possiamo ipotizzare che gli sono appartenuti dimostrano che nella sua breve vita egli riuscì a riunire la più grande collezione di opere di Aristotele del suo tempo, con testi in greco, in latino, in ebraico e persino in arabo. Alle versioni medievali aggiunse anche quelle umanistiche.

This note presents a previously unedited ninth-century witness of a Carolingian rite of the cold-water ordeal from Septimania and provides an examination of its language and provenance.