Giles Of Rome Research Articles

Wizerunek relacji między mężem a żoną w społeczno-filozoficznej refleksji nad wychowaniem okresu pełnego średniowiecza (na przykładzie „De regimine principum” Idziego Rzymianina)

Przedmiotem artykułu jest wizerunek relacji między mężem a żoną, jaki został nakreślonyw XIII-wiecznym traktacie o wychowaniu De regimine principum autorstwa Idziego Rzymianina. Należał on do najbardziej popularnych „zwierciadeł władców” w okresie średniowiecza. Idzi ukazuje, jak powinny układać się właściwe relacje małżeńskie, przede wszystkim poprzez nakreślenie powinności i sposobu postępowania męża wobec żony. W jego gestii pozostaje troska o jej rozwój moralny. Ma prowadzić ją do umiarkowania, milczenia i stałości (ad temperantiam & ad taciturnitatem & ad stabilitatem). W pożyciu małżeńskim ma kierować się zasadami nauki Kościoła, zaopatrywać żonę w odpowiednie dobra materialne, okazywać oznaki miłości oraz udzielać stosownych upomnień w sytuacji jej niewłaściwego zachowania. Pouczenia, jak właściwie postępować z żoną, formułuje Idzi w kontekście przypisanego mężowi zwierzchnictwa nad nią i będącej jej rezultatem powinności kierowania jej osobą. Przypisanamu prerogatywa wynika z naturalnego podporządkowania kobiety mężczyźniez racji jego przewagi nad nią pod względem roztropności i rozumu. Rząd, jaki mąż sprawuje nad żoną, nie ma być rządem rodzica nad dzieckiem ani pana domu nad sługą .Mąż powinien traktować żonę jak towarzyszkę (tamquam socia). Naturalnym elementem relacji małżeńskich jest amicitia (miłość), do której powstania, jak można przyjąć, wiedzie wspólne życie i która przejawia się w tym, jak się do siebie odnoszą. Właściwe wypełnianie przez męża, jak i żonę przypisanych im powinności miało być gwarantem ich harmonijnego współżycia, chociaż zdecydowanie większa odpowiedzialność spadałana męża z racji naturalnej wyższości mężczyzny nad kobietą.

Reading and Writing History in Sixteenth-Century France: The Case of La Legende des Flamens (1522)

A rare copy of a first edition of La Légende des Flamens, now in Trinity College Dublin, reveals a number of facts about its position in that library, probably a mid-nineteenth-century acquisition but acquired in the context of existing similar holdings of medieval and early modern French historical writings. Unlike these writings, however, the text takes an explicitly anti-Flemish and pro-French royalist stance. Criticism levelled at the two most recently deceased popes — or at the English — may explain why the author has decided to remain anonymous, or the text may have been conceived as a compilation of documentary sources without need for an author. This article examines the way that the text deploys sources, including a lost work by Giles of Rome, and draws some conclusions about the situation of the author of the text. Publisher François Regnault is considered as a possible author.

An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (review)

An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum. By Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Vol. 10.] (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press. 2014. Pp. viii, 238. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-916-10179-4.)The Canticum canticorum, a blockbook produced in the Netherlands around 1465-70, is a series (or Suite, as the author calls it) of eight double-page woodcuts comprising four individual pictures each, arranged in two registers per page. The woodcuts depict Christ; a crowned and haloed young woman (Mary); and various bystanders, mostly a group of three virgins (the daughters of Sion). The pictures contain banderoles with (xylographie) texts, taken from the Latin text of the Canticles but arranged in different from the Vulgate. By being inserted in banderoles, the texts are turned into a dialogue between the persons depicted, with the pictures serving as a aid to understand and to meditate on the text. Although the sequence of the pages varies in some of the approximately thirty surviving copies, they are here reproduced in the order accepted by the author as original (p. 222). Each of the eight double-page spreads is presented first in a reproduction from the (uncolored) copy held by the Pierpont Morgan Librar)' in New York; subsequently, each of the four pictures is analyzed individually in minute detail, beginning with a reproduction from a 1949 facsimile, a description, an iconographie study of visual parallels (p. 16), transcriptions and translations of the Latin inscriptions, interpretations of the verses by modern and medieval authors (Marvin Pope, Giles of Rome, Nicholas of Lyra, Denys the Carthusian), and a brief summary (analysis). The book thus allows the reader to immerse her- or himself deeply into the fifteenth-century blockbook. It is very attractively designed, with more than 200 color reproductions of works of art that can in some way be compared with the (highly unusual) iconography of the blockbook. Rather than putting the blockbook solely in the context of medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Canticles, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin draws on copious material from other forms of art-mainly Italian paintings and frescoes. This method, of course, raises questions as to whether direct influences between such different works of art, which originated in different regions, are possible; but instead of studying antecedents, Lavin intends to make the reader familiar with a widespread iconographie repertoire that allowed fifteenth-century users to understand and contextualize the blockbook. …

Les Eschéz d’Amours

Les Eschéz d’Amours Tamsyn Rose-Steel A Critical Edition of the Poem and its Latin Glosses. Ed. Gregory Heyworth and Daniel E. O’Sullivan. Leiden: Brill, 2013. The first volume of a much-needed complete edition of Les Eschéz d’Amours, this constitutes a marriage of deep, careful scholarship and cutting edge digital technologies. A traditional paper edition, its existence is predicated upon both intensive in situ analysis and the use of a custom-made, portable multispectral imaging lab. The text of the most complete witness, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Oc 66, also known as MS D, once thought irreparably damaged by the 1945 bombing of the library, has been recovered through the painstaking work of the human and digital eye. The first 16,000 of a total 30,000 lines of poetry are prefaced by a thorough and enlightening set of essays. Gregory Heyworth’s scholarly prose has a lucidity that belies the complexity of its subject matter, drawing the reader easily into the mosaic history of the text, its influences, and its two extant manuscripts. A number of conundrums surround Les Eschéz and its manuscripts, including its date, author, genre, and even title. Daniel O’Sullivan’s codicological and Heyworth’s historical analyses offer a highly plausible date for MS D as c. 1480, while completion of the text is suggested as 1377—again a very likely date. The Eschéz author as cleric is suggested, but not one who had taken orders, given the secular, humanist proclivities of the text. Heyworth conjectures the author could likely be found in “the faculty of liberal arts at a Parisian university” (33). The suggestion that the poet may have been a physician is called into question, for while there is frequent use of medical language and clinical metaphor, Heyworth notes that the Eschéz author borrows wholesale, with no expansion on the subject matter. This does, however, leave the question of the author’s particular fondness for medical analogy. The suggestion that Evrart de Conty, the text’s famous commentator, was responsible for the poem is also rejected: auto-exegesis, it is convincingly argued, would have been self-defeating, since the commentary often challenges the allegories and furthermore trespasses on the text’s insistence on its own inherent “mystery.” [End Page 298] The discussion of the poem’s title is fascinating since, as is noted, neither of the extant manuscripts contains one. The poem has been known as Les Eschéz amoureux, Raison et sensualité (thanks to a translation by Lydgate), and Les Eschéz d’Amours. The first is problematic, since the use of chess as an allegory for love is not the overarching purpose of the poem. Lydgate’s title is deemed better suited since it relates to the real meat of the subject matter: a turning away from the sensual towards reason. The third title had been rejected by several scholars, but Heyworth argues masterfully for an alternative understanding of it as not “The Chess of Love,” but “The Checkmate of Love,” pointing out that in the second half of the poem Love is vanquished by reason. He further conjectures that the poem circulated in two different forms, with the alternate titles indicating reception: first as Les Eschéz amoureux, which contained only the first, more sensual part of the poem, and later as Les Eschéz d’Amours, the extended version in which Pallas persuades the Acteur to renounce his cupidinous path. The chapter on literary context will prove very helpful for scholars and students alike, providing a full account of the intersection of Les Eschéz with late medieval literary genres and demonstrating how this text traversed boundaries. It partakes of a web of authority that includes Ovid and his medieval moralizers, the speculum regis tradition, the Roman de la Rose, Augustine, Boethius, Jacopus de Cessolis’s chess satire, and Giles of Rome, to name but a few. This chapter is tacit argument for the text to be placed on the curricula of courses on Middle French literature, as indeed is O’Sullivan’s elegant summary of the plot. O’Sullivan provides a clear overview of the editorial policy, and this...

Osservazioni sulla struttura e l’iconografia della tomba di re Roberto d’Angiò in Santa Chiara a Napoli

This article analyses in detail the iconography of the tomb of Robert of Anjou, King of Naples. Partially destroyed in 1943, the elaborated structure and figurative program of the monument is attested by visual and literary sources that are here discussed in order to unveil its symbolical and ideological meaning. The most imposing mausoleum built in Italy during the late Middle Ages, it is modelled on the royal tombs erected in Naples by the Sienese sculptor Tino di Camaino. In the lower part of the monument, the seven virtues reflect the ideals on kingship according to the theories of the De regimine principum by Giles of Rome. The genealogical series depicted on the sarcophagus stresses the legitimacy in the succession of Queen Giovanna, Robert’s niece. The seven liberal arts in the funerary chamber represent the King’s renowned knowledge. In the centre of the monument, his seated figure emphasizes his majesty and the pictures of Angevin saints recall the beata stirps he belonged to. Finally, in the Com...

The Soul’s Misery in the Fire according to Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant

The issue concerning the misery of the soul in fire was one of the most frequently discussed topics during the 13th century and the early decades of the 14th, with authors including Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, Theodoric of Freiberg, Giles of Rome, Matthew of Acquasparta and Dante dealing with this problem in varying degrees. The purpose of my paper is to attempt to identify the reasons underlying the importance of this topic in the writings of Siger, Thomas and Albert. Indeed, behind its theological-exegetical veneer, crucial themes such as the interpretation of Aristotle’s psychology and, more generally, the compatibility between natural/peripatetic philosophy and Christian faith emerge as the underlying issues at stake.

La propiedad según Juan Quidort de París y Egidio Romano / Ownership According to John Quidort and Giles of Rome

John Quidort considers individual work, among other activities, the most suitable form of appropriation. Giles of Rome seems to share this view but, in contrast to John’s opinion, he claims that all possession is legitimate only when the owner is baptized, i.e., when he is part of the Church community. This view depends on Giles’s political thought, that the temporal order should be subordinated to the ecclesiastical order. John, on the other hand, when referring to the independence of the two powers, considers work and other activities independent from the Church, although linked to Christian ethics.

Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas G. Denery, II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (review)

Reviewed by: Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas G. Denery, II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman Lola Sharon Davidson Denery, Dallas G., II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds, Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Disputatio, 14), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. viii, 345; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503547763. This book originated in a research project and workshop examining uncertain knowledge in the Middle Ages. The papers fall broadly into two camps, philosophical and literary. The editors’ Introduction makes clear that this breadth arises from an explicit strategy aimed at exploring both the role played by scepticism in the scholastic production of authorised knowledge and the subversion of that institutional knowledge by vernacular and lay cultural players. The focus is determinedly epistemological and largely ignores the vexed and voluminous subject of religious orthodoxy and heresy. Dallas G. Denery II opens the discussion with John of Salisbury’s meditations on the attitude of the superior man in an environment, namely the court, rendered inherently deceptive by flattery and illusory pleasures. Denery sees in John a continuing humanist tradition masked by the ascendancy of scholasticism until its resurgence in the early modern era. Eileen C. Sweeney looks at the reception of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by Grosseteste and Roger Bacon whose move to privilege scientific knowledge, and thereby implicitly problematise other forms, was resisted by the Summa fratris Alexandri and William of Auvergne’s championing of faith as the only possible certainty. Dominik Perler brings us to medieval considerations of the classical grounds of scepticism through Walter Chatton’s and William Ockham’s responses to Peter Aureol’s attempt to account for sensory illusions by mediated perception. Perler concludes that radical scepticism was impossible within an Aristotelian framework committed to the reliability of our natural capacities. Christophe Grellard continues this theme with John Buridan’s explanation of how it is possible to believe falsely. Buridan sympathetically employed the figure of the ‘little old woman’ to explain how habit, social pressure, and imagination might combine to distort perception and permit false belief. Concluding the more strictly philosophical section, Rita Copeland reveals the difficulty commentators, such as Giles of Rome, Buridan, and even the translator, William of Moerbeke, had in situating Aristotle’s Rhetoric within the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition. Notwithstanding Aristotle’s placing it under logic, the manuscript tradition preferred to group it with ethics and politics. Lesley Smith bridges the shift from the scholastic to the literary by looking at uncertainty in the study of the Bible. Medieval scholars were aware that they were dealing with fallible translations from unreliable texts and not all were content to resolve problems by allegorising. Nicholas of Lyra turned to a rabbi for the cultural background of the Bible. William of Auvergne and Richard and Hugh of St Victor sought rational explanations of biblical stories while accepting that uncertainty would persist. [End Page 232] Karen Sullivan shifts the focus to vernacular literature with Robert de Boron’s Merlin. Rejecting a rationalist denunciation of Merlin as diabolically inspired, Boron draws on a contemplative perspective that employs the prophet’s mysterious nature to valorise intellectual humility and faith. Helen Swift continues this perspective in her chapter on love poetry. The lover’s desire renders him peculiarly incapable of discerning the truth but this inability is itself willed for: the continuance of uncertainty is the precondition for the continuance of desire. Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Lydgate are the subject of Nicolette Zeeman’s contribution. She sees these authors turning the weapons of the scholastic philosophers against them in a systematic problematising of sanctioned epistemological, moral, social, and gender hierarchies. Next, Mishtooni Bose focuses on the role of opinion in the vernacular philosophical and moral works of Christine de Pizan and Bishop Reginald Pecock. Notwithstanding the Introduction’s disclaimer, Kantik Ghosh addresses heresy and the policing of intellectual debate in the trials of Richard Fleming, Jerome of Prague, and Jan Hus, all of whom were accused of following Wyclif. Fleming successfully defended himself on the grounds of academic debate, but Hus and Jerome found arguments for academic freedom powerless against the Inquisition and...

Since Feeling is First: Teaching Royal Ethics through Managing the Emotions in the Late Middle Ages

The appropriation of the works of Aristotle and his commentators on the emotions by scholars like Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century brought about the challenge of accommodating them within the Christian ethical tradition. I explore the transformation of emotions discourse by analysing three specula written for the French royal family by Vincent of Beauvais, Giles of Rome, and Durand of Champagne. I argue that these works create a space in which new and older modes of managing behaviour coexist, even as the gradual privileging of the emotions against the traditional focus on the mores amounts to emotions’ discursive reification.

The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277-1409 by Andrew E. Larsen (review)

The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277-1409. By Andrew E. Larsen. [Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Vol. 40.] (Leiden: Brill. 2011. Pp. xii, 322. $166.00. ISBN 978-90-04-20661-8.)Andrew E. Larsen's study is an excellent historical and doctrinal analysis of accusations of heresy leveled against various academicians related to the University of Oxford during the period in question.The author has carefully designated the parameters of his study so as to limit its scope and purview.Regarding heresy and heretics, there was a prevailing distinction among falsity, error, and heresy alluded to by Henry of Ghent in his Quodlibet X, q. 5 (Leuven, 1981, p. 12). Likewise, suspects were to be given three warnings before being brought to inquisitorial proceedings (p. 151), a rule to be found somewhere in canon law. The author, understandably, struggles a bit with how to translate the Latin fama, deciding on rumor (p. 15); repute, reputation, as-widely-viewed might be alternatives but hardly more satisfying.References to the Lollards occur periodically in Larsen's work. In addition to the individuals considered to be Lollards mentioned in the index, it would have been helpful for those unfamiliar with this period of history to learn what ideas or views earned them the label.With respect to the controversy regarding the plurality/unicity of forms (pp. 27-29, 46), there was a refinement that seems to have escaped the purview of the author-namely, the opinion that there were multiple grades of a single form. Whether this opinion can initially be traced to John Pecham, we may never know, since his treatise De gradibus formarum (once housed in the Merton library) is now lost. Positing grades of a single form responds to St. Thomas Aquinas's argument that a plurality of forms leads to a sort of metaphysical schizoid in any given individual being.The grades theory was subsequently supported by Roger Marston and opposed by Giles of Rome in his Contra gradus formarum (Venice, 1500).Regarding the career of Blessed John Duns Scotus (pp. 64-65), details may be found in William A. Frank and Allan B. Walter's volume on Duns Scotus Metaphysician (West Lafayette, IN, 1995) as well as in Antonie Vos's monumental treatment in The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus (Edinburgh, 2006). Regarding the allusion to Walter Chatton's view that the brouhaha about the various signa originis in the divinity had come to be considered frivo lous on both sides of the channel, this can now be found in the critical edition (Toronto, 2002).Allusion is made to Ockham's treatises on the Eucharist (p. 77). These have been edited in the critical edition by Carl A. …

Suppositum between Logic and MetaphysicsSimon of Faversham and his Contemporaries(1270-1290)

Abstract This article is the result of research on the occurrences of the terms suppositio, supponere and their linguistic derivations in the literature on fallacies (comments on the Sophistical Refutations) of the second half of the thirteenth century. The authors analysed are Albert the Great, Giles of Rome, Simon of Faversham, the so-called Incerti Auctores (Anonymous C and SF), the Anonymous of Prague (P) and John Duns Scotus. The central elements that emerge are the role played by the notion of suppositum and by the linguistic context (adiuncta, determinatio) to determine the denotation of an expression, and the importance of the metaphysical problem of the unity and identity of suppositum in both the theory of predication and the theory of inference. Both subjects, obviously, are closely connected.

Giordano da Pisa e il linguaggio degli angeli

Among the issues about the angels considered by the Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa, this essay studies the problem of their language. The question of the locutio angelica had become quite relevant in the scholastic thought from the XIIIth century and had been widely discussed by Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome; the study of this argument in Giordano da Pisa’s sermons shows the transition in the homiletic texts of a highly speculative theme and we can see how the preacher, who combines rather freely the positions of Thomas and Giles, filters the question for his lay public, simplifying the more difficult passages.

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham by Marilyn McCord Adams, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. viii + 318, £30 hbk

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham by Marilyn McCord Adams, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. viii + 318, £30 hbk

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, by Marilyn McCord Adams.

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, by Marilyn McCord Adams.

Du néoplatonisme au réalisme et retour, parcours latins du Liber de causis aux xiiie - xvie siècles

The article presents the unknown tradition of the Latin commentaries on the Liber de causis from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. On the basis of recent research, a new list of 56 commentaries has been established: 40 of them are unpublished, others are either lost or published in post-incunabula editions; researchers knew and cited most often only 6 commentaries (Roger Bacon Albert the Great, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, ps.-Henry of Ghent and Giles of Rome). The new commentaries allow us to discuss certain historical hypothesis, especially the issue that the medieval authors neglected the metaphysics of Proclus. The manuscripts are held in various libraries of Europe (especially Erfurt, Krakow and Prague, but also Uppsala, Paris and Vienna) which demonstrates a wide distribution of the text. Indeed, the Liber de causis was taught not only at the Faculty of Arts in Paris around 1255, but also in the Dominican convent in the South of France in the first decades of the fourteenth century and at the Faculty of Arts in Krakow at the turn of the sixteenth century. First attributed by Latin authors to Aristotle, the Liber de causis was considered, after Thomas Aquinas’ commentary, an epitome of Proclus’ Elementatio Theologica, and has aroused great interest among the realist authors from the school of Albert the Great.

Vegetius’De re militari: Military Theory in Medieval and Modern Conception

In recent years, the De Re Militari of the Roman writer Vegetius, regarded in the Middle Ages as the authority on war, has increasingly drawn the attention of historians. Study of an important source, the marginalia on the 220 or so surviving medieval manuscripts reflecting the reactions of readers to particular passages in the text, can tell us much as to how it was read and responded to by readers in the Middle Ages, not least by Petrarch, whose annotated copy has survived to this day. Much interest has been shown in the medieval translations of the work by modern philological and textual scholars, while the historical significance of these translations has not been ignored. Through the writings of persons such as John of Salisbury, Alfonso the Wise, Giles of Rome, and Christine de Pisan, Vegetius’ ideas regarding the place and purpose of the army, the exercise of legitimate force, and the role of the soldier in achieving a peaceful society, were advanced. The practical application of what is termed Vegetian influence upon the waging of war is often debatable, and scholars are divided on issues relating to it. The military life, with the concept of it as a career, was slowly coming to be seen as one of service to society, an idea which underpinned the traditional view of chivalry. If historians do not always agree what constituted a Vegetian ‘legacy’, its part in stimulating interest in things classical, and in the military ideas and practices of the Roman world in particular, can scarcely be doubted.

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham by Marilyn McCord Adams

Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham by Marilyn McCord Adams

Monica H Green, Making women’s medicine masculine: the rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. xx, 409, £65.00 (hardback 978-0-19-921149-4).

Monica H Green, Making women’s medicine masculine: the rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. xx, 409, £65.00 (hardback 978-0-19-921149-4).

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (review)

Reviewed by: Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 Rhiannon Purdie Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6273–0. $99.95. The very specific theme of this volume as identified by its title—‘kingship and love’ in Older Scots poetry—belies the great value of this excellent study to all those with any interest at all in Older Scots poetry or medieval advisory literature. The distinctive Scottish situation of a succession of royal minorities through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with all the social anxieties that this engendered, is reflected in the literature of this period by a marked interest in ‘advice to princes’ literature. Martin successfully widens this category to include the ‘strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings’ (1). She argues that these texts use the lens of amatory discourse to explore ideas about ‘the most profound and challenging aspects of the governance of the self, that prerequisite quality for the rule of others’ (p. 2), thus broadening their significance from the personal or abstractly philosophical to the topically political. The focus of the texts discussed in this volume is, as Martin demonstrates convincingly, on ‘the challenges to self-governance (and thence to political governance) posed by the destabilizing advent of a young ruler’s sexual maturity’ and ‘the impact of desire on royal rule’ (pp. 12–13). Chapter one begins, inevitably, with The Kingis Quair (probably by James I) and the Quare of Jelusy, poems uniquely preserved in that important fifteenth-century Scottish anthology, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B.24. Readers of Arthuriana will be particularly interested in the second chapter on Lancelot of the Laik. Four more chapters cover Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (a chapter which provides much incidental insight into the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo via its Scottish cousin King Orphius), The Thre Prestis of Peblis, and King Hart. There is an epilogue on ‘Poetry and the Minority of James V,’ which deals with the much more direct relationship between Sir David Lyndsay and his one-time royal pupil. Underpinning this study is an investigation of the influence of three important works on this body of poetry: the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum; Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and its vernacular descendents, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower, she contends, is an ‘important precursor of the poetic combination of amatory and political discourses, and the focus on the king’s amatory self, in later Scots writing’ (p. 3). Martin’s study is characterized by shrewd and subtle close readings of her primary texts supported by a wealth of contextual evidence drawn from contemporary Scottish writings, antecedent English works (particularly those of Gower and Hoccleve), Continental sources, and the manuscript settings and circulation histories of these poems. This is a deeply scholarly work, elegantly written, highly informative, and an important contribution to the study of late-medieval Scottish literature. [End Page 141] Rhiannon Purdie University of St Andrews Copyright © 2009 Arthuriana

The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus. By Antonie Vos

The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus. By Antonie Vos