There is always a problem of thematic unity in these collections. In the case of Medieval Paradigms, the binding theme is perhaps best defined by the wide circle of often distinguished friends and admirers than its dedicatee has generated. As befits a historian who has been particularly concerned with medieval France, Latin culture and identity, most of the papers in this first volume (nine out of thirteen) concern some aspect of French history between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, grouped under sub- themes of Authority, Community, and Morality. As befits a scholar whose early work was on the notion of the populus in the Church Fathers, the volume includes one essay on late antiquity, a characteristically elegant contribution from Peter Brown commenting on attitudes to wealth in the poetry of Paulinus of Nola. He shows how wealth could be justified within a society in which charity towards the poor was increasingly defined as a social duty. Another paper that picks up on this theme of collective identity is that of William Chester Jordan, on the notion of "the people" in the Psalter of Saint Louis. Jordan nicely follows through the theme that the presentation of Moses and the people within this Psalter foreshadows an image of the king and his people. Most papers in the volume do not make any particular effort to respond to any core theme. The paper of Marcia Colish, on Abelard and Theology, engages in a negative argument that Abelard was less radical and less critical than the high claims sometimes made in the nineteenth century about his being "father of scholasticism." Yet her argument that Abelard shares with Bernard notions of interior compunction is not original in itself, and does not tackle subtle differences between them in their attitudes towards grace and free will.
Perhaps the most unusual story told in this volume is presented by Alexander Murray, who comments on the civic disturbances that accompanied the funeral of Charles V in Paris in 1380. He tells how Hugh Aubriot, provost of the city, assaulted the rector of the University of Paris, thus precipitating his being summoned before the Inquisition to face charges of manifold heresy. The essay highlights how easily tensions between civil and university authorities could degenerate into physical as well as verbal violence. Within a different context, that of the court of Charles V in the sixteenth century, David Price reflects on the ambiguous attitude towards of authority on another wayward individual, Janus Secundus (1511-1536), able to submerge eroticism into a defense of the ideology of the Hapsburg Empire.
A number of the papers are concerned with interaction between politics, gender and society. Thus Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch argues that aristocratic widows remained independent agents in Montpellier in much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, although their position would be increasingly eroded in time. Christopher K. Gardner offers a fascinating account of how the city of Toulouse was able to maintain a sense of civic identity even after the bloody campaigns of the Albigensian Crusade. Penelope D. Johnson similarly attends to the discourse of identity within a little explored genre, French royal pardons from the late fourteenth century. They provide an unusually direct insight into the language of insult and verbal assault. Quite separate again is a paper by Annemarie Weyl Carr on Cypriot funerary icons, exploring the diversity and co-existence of domestic Latin and out-door Greek funerary practice within Cyprus in the later medieval period.
The four papers on morality are similarly diverse, all focusing on specific texts. Bruce Brasington documents a letter of Ivo of Chartres against a cross-dressing priest. Howell Chickering offers a detailed study of how the Prick of Conscience, a long and widely circulated didactic poem of the fourteenth century, serves to provoke interior compunction through its vivid account of the terrors of hell. E. Ann Matter considers the ethical teaching of a renaissance treatise, the Ogdoas (1421) of Alberto Alfieri, a Genoese schoolmaster settled in Caffa, in the Black Sea. The volume concludes with an essay by Karl F. Morrison comparing the devotional writing of Thomas More and William Tyndale, with particular reference to their attitude towards art. Even if connecting themes are hard to discern, the essays in both volumes that make up this Festschrift are of a consistently high standard and deserve recognition as such.