* From a report by the inquisitor Sacchoni.12 We know the doctrines and practices of the Cathari only from their enemies; their own literature was lost or destroyed.
* Said a great scholar not usually tender to the faults of the Church: “The vulgar charge frequently made that medieval monks were gluttonous, wasteful, extravagant, and profligate is belied by the hundreds of cartularies, or inventories, which have been preserved, and which show care, intelligence, and honesty in management. The enormous economic betterment of medieval Europe which the monks achieved proves them as a whole to have been intelligent landlords and agriculturalists.”—Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, 630. “The most perfect and efficacious works of Christianity,” said the skeptical Renan, “were those executed by the monastic orders.”—Marc Aurèle, Paris, n.d., 627.
* Not to be confused with the Augustinian or Austin Friars founded by anchorites in Tuscany in 1256.
* The literature on Francis is partly history, partly legend. As the legends are among the masterpieces of medieval literature, some of them are included in the following pages, with a warning in each instance. Most of the Fioretti (“Little Flowers of St. Francis”) and the Speculum perjectionis (“Mirror of Perfection”) are legend; and quotations from these writings are to be so construed.
* It has been suggested that these swellings could have been due to malignant malaria, which, in the absence of modern treatment, has been known to produce purple hemorrhages of blood in the skin.61
* A boys’ bishop, however, is still annually elected at Addlestone, Surrey, England.144
* Cf. the twelfth-century Crucifixion in the Liebfrauenkirche of Halberstadt, or the thirteenth-century statue of James the Less in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
* In the Victoria and Albert Museum.
* Learning that it had been stolen, he returned it to the Italian government, and contented himself with a medal for honesty.7
* The main picture is now in the Opera or Museum of the Siena Cathedral.
* The Campo Santo is being restored.
* The word minster, an abbreviation of monastery, should properly be used only for an abbey church; but custom has congealed the phrase “York Minster,” though that cathedral was never monastic.
† A ninth-century bishop of Winchester. Legend said that rain had delayed for forty days the transference of his body in 971 to the shrine prepared for it; hence the popular adage that rain on St. Swithin’s day (July 15) presages forty days of rain.
* Only five sequences have been admitted by the Church into her liturgy: Victimae paschali laudes, by Wipo; Veni Sancte Spiritus, ascribed to Innocent III; Lauda Sion, by Thomas Aquinas; Stabat Mater, by Iacopone da Todi; and Dies irae, by Thomas of Celano.
* The first three lines will indicate how slowly French and German evolved: “Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, dist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat.”
“In Gedes minna ind in these Christianes folches ind unser bedhero gealtnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, so fram so mir Got gewizci indi madh furgibit.”
English translation: “For the love of God, and for the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forth, as God may give me wisdom and strength.”1
* Many government records continued to be written on rolls; such “pipe rolls” were used in England from 1131 to 1833. The keeper of these archives was “Master of the Rolls.”
* In the sixteenth century the Sorbonne became the theological faculty of the University; in 1792 it was closed by the Revolution; it was restored by Napoleon, and is now the seat of public courses in science and letters at the University of Paris.
* These are the conservative estimates of Rashdall.63 The jurist Odofredus, writing about 1250, reckoned the students in Bologna in 1200 at 10,000. Rabanus Gauma, a Nestorian monk, put the number of students at Paris in 1287 at 30,000. Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, calculated, about 1360, that there had once been 30,000 students at Oxford; about 1380 Wyclif doubled this estimate; in 1450 Bishop Gascoigne, who had been Chancellor of Oxford, returned to 30,000.64 These estimates are evidently guesswork and exaggeration; but we cannot prove them false.
* But cf. Rashdalclass="underline" “There is only too much evidence that de Vitry’s picture of the scholastic life of his age, if exaggerated, is not fundamentally untruthful.”68
* Albert’s major works in philosophy and theology: I. Logic: Philosophia rationalis; De praedicabilibus; De praedicamentis; De sex principiis; Perihermenias (i.e., De interpretatione); Analytica priora; Analytica posteriora; Topica; Libri elenchorum. II. Metaphysics: De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas; Metaphysica; De fato. III. Psychology: De anima, De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia; De intellectu et intelligibili; De potentiis animae. IV. Ethica. V. Politica. VI. Theology: Summa de creaturis; Summa theologiae; Commentarium in Sententias Petri Lombardi; Commentarium de divinis nominibus. The first five treatises here listed fill twenty-one volumes of Albert’s works, which are still incompletely published.
* “If,” says the learned Gilson, “Maimonides had not been moved by Averroës to a special notion of immortality, we might say that Maimonides and Thomas agreed on all important points.”65 It is a slight exaggeration, unless we rank the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement as unimportant elements of the Christian faith.
* The final stanzas are also sung in the Benediction of the Sacrament; and the entire hymn is used as the processional on Holy Thursday.
* The Summa to and including Part III, Question 90, is by Thomas; the remainder may be by Reginald of Piperno, his companion and editor.
* (1), (2), and (5) are from Aristotle through Albert; (3) from Maimonides; (4) from Anselm.
* Thomas, not foreseeing that the Church would decide in favor of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—i.e., her freedom from the taint of original sin—thought that Mary too had been “conceived in sin”; he added, with tardy gallantry, that she was “sanctified before her birth from the womb.”110
* Of this only Book I, and Chapters 1–4 of Book II, are by Thomas; the remainder is by Ptolemy of Lucca.
* The oft-quoted passage about the blessed in heaven enhancing their bliss by observing the sufferings of the damned occurs in the Summa’s Supplement (xcvii, 7), and is to be discredited not to Thomas but to Reginald of Piperno.138
* Giraldus Cambrensis tells of a youth who, at his father’s painful expense, studied philosophy for five years at Paris, and, returning home, proved to his father, by remorseless logic, that the six eggs on the table were twelve; whereupon the father ate the six eggs that he could see, and left the others for his son.148
* In the laws of Visigothic Spain the physician was not entitled to a fee if his patient died.69
* “Equal to you, O Rome! there is nothing, even when you are almost a ruin; how great you were when whole, broken you teach us. Long time has destroyed your pride, and the citadels of Caesar sink in the marshes with the temples of the gods. That work, that mighty work lies low which the dire barbarian trembled to see standing and mourns to see fallen…. But no lapse of years, no fire, no sword can all destroy this glory.”