Fourteenth-Century France Research Articles

CREATING MS C: AUTHOR, WORKSHOP, COURT

Machaut's set of complete works manuscripts forms a central pillar of our understanding of musical and generic developments and their courtly reception in fourteenth-century France. By applying the continuing scholarly advances made during the study of courtly practice and the professional Parisian book-trade to the earliest of these artefacts, this contribution reassesses the creation-history of the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1586. The results tap into a number of enduring discussions within Machaut scholarship. These range from questions of patronage, to aspects of Machaut's authorial control and involvement in the production of his books, to the importance of order on the single-work level within a generic grouping, and to the practicalities of manuscript creation and intentionality. Finally, proposed adjustments to the dating of some compositions call for a review of existing notions of generic development and polyphonic composition in the early part of the century, thus resonating beyond Machaut's personal output.

The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut

Reviewed by: The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut Alice V. Clark Guillaume de Machaut. The Motets. Edited by Jacques Boogaart, translated by R. Barton Palmer and Jacques Boogaart, with art historical commentary by Domenic Leo. (Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, vol. 9) (Middle English Text Series.) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; pref., p. xi–xii; introd., p. 1–23; editorial policy, p. 25–32; The Motet Miniature: A Commentary, p. 33–45; score, p. 47–186; crit. commentary, p. 187–246; bibliog., p. 247–260. ISBN 9781580442879 (paperback) ISBN 9781580443029 (hardback) $39.95 (paperback); $99 (hardback).] Guillaume de Machaut is generally considered the most important poet and composer of fourteenth-century France. This assessment rests to a large degree on the fact that we have a large body of work securely attributable to him because he, unlike Philippe de Vitry and their mostly anonymous contemporaries, collected his poetry and music in books devoted entirely to his work. Six of these "Machaut manuscripts" containing both words and music survive, most copied during his lifetime and therefore representing different stages of his output; other sources exist, some only fragmentary and most without notation, and there are references to still others. All of this is clearly laid out in Lawrence Earp's magisterial 1995 study, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland composer resource manuals, v. 36 [New York: Garland Publishing, 1995]), affectionately known as the "Machaut Bible" and still unsurpassed, though it has been supplemented by his more recent work, done in collaboration with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau, on the Ferrell-Vogüé manuscript. Because Machaut's works extend across genres, including both polyphonic and monophonic music as well as narrative and lyric poetry, they were edited in stages. Most of the narrative poems were published by Ernest Hoepffner in the early twentieth century (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, 3 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1908–1921]), following up on earlier editions and excerpts, while the lyric poems (including those set to music) were edited by Vladimir Chichmaref (Poésies lyriques, 2 vols. [Paris: H. Champion, 1909]). While individual narrative poems have been newly edited in recent decades, Lawrence Earp observes that "modern editions of Machaut's poetry are on the whole not as solid philologically as the material now available for, say, Froissart." (Earp 1995, 197) Machaut's music was first edited in full by Friedrich Ludwig. The initial work was done in the first few years of the twentieth century, although the edition was published mostly in the 1920s and the final volume, devoted to the lais and the Mass, only became widely available in 1954, decades after Ludwig's death (Musikalische Werke, 4 vols [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926–1954]). Another edition, by Leo Schrade, appeared only two years later [End Page 491] (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vols. 2–3 [Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956]), but, as Earp has shown, it is "totally dependent on Ludwig" (Earp 1995, 281), though its use of modern clefs and convenient reprinting in 1977 means it is the edition most often encountered by students today. It is to be hoped that will change, starting with this new edition of the motets. The volume is part of a plan to edit anew all of Machaut's literary and musical works, overseen by R. Barton Palmer (a literary scholar at Clemson University) and Yolanda Plumley (a musicologist at the University of Exeter). Though it may seem strange at first to publish Machaut's works under the auspices of the Middle English Text Series (a program of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, associated also with TEAMS, the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), the edition fits well the series's goal of making available editions suitable for classroom use. The two volumes published so far in this series are eminently affordable: the volume under review lists for $39.95 in paper, or $99.00 in hardback. The first volume of the edition, on the debate poetry, appeared in 2016; in addition to the French text and a facing English translation of Machaut...

Material Culture and Queenship in Fourteenth-Century France

Material Culture and Queenship in Fourteenth-Century France

Nicole Oresme's Cultural Translatio in Question

In fourteenth-century France, Charles V's official programs of translations into French have typically been considered the instrument of a royal political agenda and concepts of translatio as a transfer of power from the clerical milieu to the lay court. However, this essay focuses on the works of one of the king's preeminent translators Nicole Oresme, more from the cultural standpoint of the translator than the king's political one. Oresme's scholastic and cultural background helps understanding how translating was an all-encompassing complex intellectual process for him and that any of the political stands that arose from his process reflected personal philosophical beliefs and worldview.

Material Culture and Queenship in Fourteenth-Century France: The Testament of Blanche of Navarre (1331–1398). Marguerite A. Keane. Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xi + 262 pp. $142.

Material Culture and Queenship in Fourteenth-Century France: The Testament of Blanche of Navarre (1331–1398). Marguerite A. Keane. Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xi + 262 pp. $142. - Volume 70 Issue 4

I]ntroitus: Untexted Beginnings and Scribal Confusion in the Machaut and Ivrea Manuscripts

Medieval scribes used decorated letters to mark the beginnings of songs, highlighting the incipits of texted voices and the vocal designations of others (“Tenor”). But some motets from fourteenth-century France begin with sung, untexted fanfares. This study examines several instances in the Machaut and Ivrea manuscripts where shortages of space, missing opening letters, and unorthodox layout decisions point to scribal confusion in the face of such beginnings. This evidence raises the possibility that untexted introductory sections may have traveled independently of their host compositions, and suggests new answers to the problems these “introitus” sections raise for modern editors and performers.

Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti (review)

Reviewed by: Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti Andrew N. Palmer Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Bibliotheca Erik Peterson. Collana di Studi del Centro di Scienze Religiose, 3.] (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso. 2011. Pp. viii, 236. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-6274-307-5.) I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Aculei, 3.] (Rome: Salerno editrice. 2011. Pp. 188. €12,50 paperback. ISBN 978-88-8402-720-7.) The Shroud of Turin, a unique icon presenting itself as Christ’s burial-sheet, is now probably, thanks to the publicity so successfully sought by Ian Wilson, the best-known object of Christian devotion in the West; the icon of the Mandylion of Edessa, Christ’s “image not made by hand,” enjoys comparable fame among the Orthodox and has been identified with other towel-icons venerated in Genoa and Rome; the icon of Veronica’s Veil, a western mutation of the Mandylion, has become one of the Stations of the Cross. Carbon 14 tests have dated the Shroud to the fourteenth century. This is confirmed by the evolution of the loom and by the fact that the Shroud cannot be traced back beyond the second half of that century, when it is first signaled in the church of Lirey in Champagne. Yet the rumor persists that science and scholarship have conspired to discredit a genuine relic that may even be evidence of the Resurrection. Those who make this claim support it with pseudo-science and pseudo-scholarship. Andrea Nicolotti deplores the irresponsibility of the media and the gullibility of the literate public. He argues that serious historians ought not to ignore pseudo-history, but should take the pains to refute it; that they ought to disseminate more widely an understanding of the differences between hypothesis and certainty as well as between evidence, interpretation, conjecture, and speculation. If his books reach the public outside the “ivory tower” of university discourse, they will certainly supply arguments to those who have all along been unconvinced by the self-styled “sindonologists,” without feeling able to refute their supposed proofs. In this way the genre of these two books is somewhat similar to that of the catechisms that flourished among Christian communities in the Islamic Middle East, which taught Christians what to say in reply to the classic Muslim arguments against Christianity. Nicolotti does not, of course, simplify things as much as these question-and-answer tracts do. After all, he is not trying to reach the man in the medieval street, but the modern reader who borrows Wilson’s Shroud of Turin (Garden City, NY, 1978) from the public library and is all the more impressed by this book because it has all the trappings of scholarship. Confronted with the thirteen centuries in which no relic resembling the Shroud was known anywhere in the Christian world, Wilson suggests that it was there all [End Page 319] along but incognito. According to him, the Shroud was folded, leaving only the face visible. The rest, for some reason, was carefully concealed, so that the cloth appeared to be about the size of a towel. This gave rise to the legend that it was in fact a towel used by Jesus to dry his face, leaving the imprint of his features there—the Mandylion of Edessa, as described in the Greek Acts of Thaddaeus. This icon was translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and probably taken in 1204 to Western Europe, where, according to Wilson, it was unfolded and so “emerged” as the Shroud in fourteenth-century France. Wilson’s book, simultaneously published in the United States and France, enjoyed a success and inspired several other sindonologists. A popular refinement of his theory—to which Nicolotti devotes the second book—identifies it with an “idol” allegedly venerated in secret by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century. The hypothesis that the Shroud was folded rests on the use of the Greek word tetrádiplon to describe the towel on...

Charles of Poitiers, Bishop and Count: Ownership of a Psalter-Hours in Late Fourteenth-Century France

Charles of Poitiers, Bishop and Count: Ownership of a Psalter-Hours in Late Fourteenth-Century France

The Gothic screen: space, sculpture, and community in the cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400

At the heart of Gothic cathedrals, the threshold between nave and sanctuary was marked by the choir screen, a partitioning structure of special complexity, grandeur, and beauty. At once a canopy for altars, a stage for performance, a pedestal for crucifixes and reliquaries, and a ground for spectacular arrays of narrative and iconic sculptures, the choir screen profoundly shaped the spaces of liturgy and social interaction for the diverse communities, both clerical and lay, who shared the church interior. For the first time, this book draws together the most important examples - some fully extant, others known through fragments and graphic sources - from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France and Germany. Through analyses of both their architectural and sculptural components, Jacqueline E. Jung reveals how these furnishings, far from being barricades or hindrances, were vital vehicles of communication and shapers of a community centered on Christian rituals and stories.

Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400 by Megan Cassidy-Welch (review)

Reviewed by: Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400 by Megan Cassidy-Welch Ailish McKeown Cassidy-Welch, Megan , Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; hardback; pp. 208; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9780230242487. Megan Cassidy-Welch's study is an investigation of the idea of imprisonment in religious culture during the '"long" thirteenth century' (p. 126) in England, France, and Germany, rather than a book about prison history. The idea of imprisonment, extending to captivity, bondage, and enclosure, is explored in a number of contexts including monasticism, hagiography, heresy trials, and the crusades. Cassidy-Welch argues that imaginings of prison were linked to the attainment of spiritual freedoms, resulting in a positive valuation of imprisonment as a 'site of spiritual opportunity' (p. 124) in the medieval religious imagination. Imprisonment served as a metaphor for monastic enclosure, and in regulatory texts, advice texts, and visitation registers, voluntary confinement in monasteries and anchoritic cells aimed to free the soul from the world, and to protect virginity. Monastic prisons punished malefactors but also offered opportunities for prayer, repentance, and penance. The 'gendered language of enclosure' (p. 12) is also examined in some detail. Chapter 2 explores imprisonment in hagiography, focusing almost exclusively on the cult of St Leonard of Noblac at Inchenhofen, Germany. St Leonard liberated prisoners, and in accounts of Leonard's life and miracles, prison became a place of encounter with divine mercy. Freed by St Leonard's [End Page 321] intercession, wrongdoers were converted and the righteous rewarded for their persevering prayers. Bodily and spiritual freedom was confirmed in the corporeo-spiritual activity of pilgrimage to Leonard's shrine. The third and fifth chapters examine the idea of imprisonment in the combat against enemies of the faith. Inquisitorial prisons in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France functioned as sites of fear and memory to elicit truth and liberate souls from heresy, as well as serving penitential and, in the case of obdurate heretics, punitive purposes. Using chronicle and sermon accounts of the brief imprisonment of Louis IX, the author traces the way in which the idea of captivity in the context of the crusades was transformed from one of shame for the captive crusader to one of virtuous suffering, in order to promote the steadfast piety and sanctity of the imprisoned king. A further chapter covers captivity in didactic texts including exempla, sermons, hagiography, and crusade literature, revealing correlations between physical confinement and the promise of spiritual liberation. Much of the material, however, supports points made, or themes covered, in other chapters. This engaging exploration of the spiritual value of imprisonment in the Middle Ages should be of interest to scholars interested in monasticism, hagiography, miracle accounts and exempla, inquisition, heresy, and the crusades. Ailish McKeown Department of English The University of Sydney Copyright © 2012 by the Author

Memory and the Illuminated Pedagogy of the Propriétés des choses

As academic Latin material began to cross over into the vernacular, in late fourteenth-century France, artists sought to help the new readership adapt to the demanding content. A unique iconography developed for copies of Jean Corbechon’s 1372 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum seems to have drawn on the arts of memory practised by learned readers, in order to entice lay audiences into the text. This programme of illustration alternated a recurring scene of a master teaching students with ever more imaginative, non-realistic pedagogic scenes that can be interpreted as visualizing to the students, and the miniatures’ viewers, the phantasmata stored in the learned master’s mind.

What's in a Name?: Machaut, Deschamps, Peronne, and the Uses of Women for Writers in Fourteenth Century France

Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit (c. 1364) stages a young woman's poetic apprenticeship and quotes poems and letters said to have been written by her. Although works by Machaut's contemporary Deschamps identify this woman as a certain Peronne, her status as an historical figure remains problematic. This essay revisits the passages in which Machaut and Deschamps name Peronne, and shows that such moments of naming provide the male poet with an occasion to define and name himself, establishing his identity in counterpoint to that of the woman he addresses. Although information about Peronne remains elusive, Machaut's and Deschamps' use of her in their texts testifies both to the importance they accorded to women's amateur literary activity, and to the trepidation with which they sometimes regarded it.

Petrarca, Boccaccio e l’Italia nella traduzione francese dei Facta et dicta memorabilia di Valerio Massimo

The first French translation of Valerius Maximus constitutes one of the main unpublished works in the medieval French literary production; it can be considered instrumental for a better comprehension of the development of the French branch of Renaissance humanism in general, and the diffusion of Italian texts in fourteenth-century France in particular. Further expanding the studies of Giuseppe di Stefano, and based on our own new edition of the section of the text translated and glossed by Nicolas de Gonesse, we propose additional analysis on the relationship between this portion of the French translation and Italy, established both by literary sources and geographic references. Moreover, we present new data on the manuscript tradition, raising some of the issues that the editing of this important work implies.

Techniques of seigneurial war in the fourteenth century

Despite the many studies devoted to medieval military history, most work has concentrated on royal wars, neglecting the petty seigneurial wars that made up most of the large-scale, organised violence of the middle ages. This article, based on judicial records for dozens of seigneurial wars waged in fourteenth-century southern France, shows that lords' tactics were not keeping up with those of royal commanders. Although royal wars increasingly involved large numbers of foot soldiers, large siege engines, and artillery, local lords' bureaucratic and financial limitations restricted their adoption of new techniques. As had been the case for centuries, most lords' wars were focused on causing economic damage and affective trauma through raiding. After the first phase of the Hundred Years War, local lords began to employ significant numbers of mercenaries, allowing them to wage war more frequently and perhaps making their wars more violent, a development which partly reflects the economic pressures of the period.

The making of Saint Louis: kingship, sanctity, and crusade in the later Middle Ages

Canonized in 1297 as Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France (r. 1226-1270) was one of the most important kings of medieval history and also one of the foremost saints of the later Middle Ages. As a saint, Louis became the centerpiece of an ideological program that buttressed the ongoing political consolidation of France and underscored Capetian claims of sacred kingship. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reconstructs and analyzes the process that led to the monarch's canonization and the consolidation and spread of his cult. Differing political and religious ideals produced competing images of the sanctity of Louis in late-thirteenth and early fourteenth-century France. Drawing on hagiography, sermons, and liturgical evidence-the latter a rich but little-explored historical source-Gaposchkin shows how various groups (including Dominicans, Cistercians, and Franciscans) and individuals (such as Philip the Fair and Joinville) used commemoration of the saint-king to sanctify their own politics and notions of identity and religious virtue. Louis' cult was disseminated to a wider, nonelite public through sermons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and then revived by the Bourbon kings in the seventeenth century. In deepening our knowledge of this royal saint, this elegantly written book opens the curtain on the religious sensibilities and secular politics of a transitional period in European history.

Murderous Sows in Chaucer’s <i>Knight’s Tale</i> and Late Fourteenth-Century France

In the Knight's Tale Chaucer's narrator describes at length the decorations on the walls of the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana, which Theseus orders to be built as part of the lists in which Palamon and Arcite are to fight for the hand of Emelye. At eighty-three lines, the description of the temple of Mars is nearly twice as long as either of the other two, providing a detailed catalogue of scenes of violence and bloodshed. Among the images is one that calls attention to itself because it takes place within the medieval domestic sphere but is fully as horrifying as the violence caused by wars and tyrants. The Knight, describing the temple almost as if he had visited it, says that among the decorations on the temple wall he saw a representation of a sow gnawing a child in a cradle: Yet saugh II. . ./The sowe freten the child right in the cradel (I 2017, 2019).1 This is an unexpected image in the long series of descriptions that focus on adults both as victims and victimizers: here the victim is an innocent child and the victimizer is merely following its natural animal instincts, horrible though they may be. The scene of natural rather than martial aggression seems a strange image to depict on Mars's temple wall.2

Murderous Sows in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Late Fourteenth-Century France

Murderous Sows in Chaucer's <i>Knight's Tale</i> and Late Fourteenth-Century France

The Real Presence of Mary: Eucharistic Disbelief and the Limits of Orthodoxy in Fourteenth-Century France

On July 15, 1318, a twenty-six-year-old laywoman named Aude Fauré was called before the Inquisition tribunal at the diocesan seat of Pamiers in southern France and immediately confessed to having temporarily doubted both the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood; her doubt, she explained, had been cured by intervention from the Blessed Virgin. Less than a month later, Aude abjured her errors by the usual formula and was sentenced to a series of pilgrimages and fasts stretching over the next three years. Aude's multiple confessions, along with depositions from her family, friends, and neighbors, take up a mere six folio pages in the famously detailedRegisterkept by Bishop Jacques Fournier, head of the Pamiers tribunal, and preserved in the Vatican Library after Fournier became Pope Benedict XII. This relatively quick-moving and insignificant case seems unrelated to the best-known activity of Fournier's tribunal, namely, the extinction of the last vestiges of Occitan Catharism. Yet Aude's case has gleaned several mentions in recent historiographic works, and these mentions are striking for their focus on the protagonist's psyche: she has been variously diagnosed as hypersensitive, neurotic, masochistic, morbid, hysterical, obsessive, afflicted with atheism, prone to fantasy, tormented by guilt, suffering from postpartum depression, and simply deviant.

A King's Lieutenant and the Power of Prince in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century France

A King's Lieutenant and the Power of Prince in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century France

Nicolaus Cusanus and Ramon Lull: A Comparison of Three Texts on Human Knowledge

NICOLAUS CUSANUS AND RAMON LULL: A COMPARISON OF THREE TEXTS ON HUMAN KNOWLEDGE By CHARLES H. LOHR Although the rich collection of Lull's works in the library of Nicholas of Kues1 testifies eloquently to the debt the German cardinal owed to the Catalan polymath, Ramon Lull, the extent of the cardinal's indebtedness was not properly appreciated until the study of Eusebio Colomer in Nikolaus von Kues und Raimund Llull (Berlin, 1961). The depth of Cusanus's engagement with Lull manifests itself especially in the excerpts from Lull's works made by him (now preserved in MS Cus. 83, fol. 93r-102r of the cardinal's library, and edited by Colomer, Nikolaus von Kues, 125-86). These excerpts have recently been reedited by Ulrich Roth2 and the original texts of most of the works of Lull that were excerpted by Cusanus published in the series, Raimundi Lulli opera latina (28 vols., Palma de Mallorca-Turnhout, 1957-2003).3 The original text of one of the most important of the works of Lull excerpted by Cusanus has, however, not yet been published. Here I would like to present the text of Lull's De potentia, obiecto et adu, as it was understood in the tradition leading up to Cusanus's excerpts. Lull's work is preserved complete in a rather late manuscript in Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vitt. Emmanuele II fondi minori 1832 (s. XV/XVI), fol. 519r-609v.4 The work is also found somewhat abbreviated in two manuscripts almost contemporary with Lull himself. J. N. Hillgarth first noted the presence of the work in the famous Electorium, a vast anthology of Lull's works intended for use in the university of Paris (Paris, BNF lat. 15450, fol. 99v-lllr);5 its companion manuscript, the magnificent Brevicu1 Jakob Marx, Verzeichnis der Handschriften-Sammlung des Hospitals zu Cues (Trier, 1905; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1966). Cusanus's collection of Lull's works includes MSS 81-88, 37 (item 2), 118 (item 1). 2 I1IIi Roth, ed., Cusanus Texte: III. Marginalien, 4. Raimundus Lullus. Die Exzerptensammlung aus Schriften des Raimundus Lullus im Codex Cusanus 83 (Heidelberg, 1997), 24-88. 3 Cf. ibid., 12-14. 4 Carmelo Ottaviano, "Il perduto 'Liber de potentia, obiecto et actu' de Lullo in un manuscrito romano," Miscel.ldnea lul.liana (Barcelona, 1935) 97-108 = Estudis franciscans 46 (1934): 257-68. The complete transcription of the text from the Rome manuscript by the regretted Manuel Bauza, formerly member of the Raimundus Lullus Institut, Freiburg, has generally been followed below.° J. N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1971), 354-55. 230TRADITIO lum, meant as a gift for the Queen of France, also contains the work (Karlsruhe , Landesbibliothek St. Peter perg. 92, fol. 18r-22r).fi The versions of De potentia in the Eledorium and Breviculum are virtually the same in both collections ; the principal difference between these versions and the manuscript in Rome consists in a modified order of the sensitive powers (dist. II) (MS: visiva, auditiva, odorativa, gustativa, tactiva; EIjBr. tactiva, gustativa, odorativa , visiva, auditiva) and the omission of the distinction III de quaestionibus in both collections. Cusanus's excerpts (cod. Cusanus, 83 fol. 98v-99v = Colomer 164-72 = Roth 63-71) are not complete and are dependent on a source different from both of these traditions. In the excerpts Nicholas opens with a sentence from the introduction and then copies virtually the entire distinction I (which gives the definitions of potentia, obiedum, and actus), but gives distinction II only in part (de potentia vegetativa and potentiva sensitiva up to de visu, following the order in the Rome manuscript); distinction III de quaestionibus is omitted entirely, as in the other manuscripts . The De potentia, obiecto et actu is certainly an authentic work of Lull; it is listed in the earliest catalogue of his works found in the Eledorium.7 According to the colophon in the Rome manuscript, the work was written in Rome;8 citations of parallel places in the text indicate further that the work was composed about the year 1296.9 The Eledorium and the Breviculum both seek in their own way to bring some clarity into Lull's chaotic...