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This chapter examines the pericope adulterae in the Latin West. Approximately two-thirds of extant Old Latin manuscripts included the story, and mixed texts invariably either included it or show an awareness of its presence elsewhere. Only one-third of the Old Latin copies exclude it altogether. Fourth-century Latin Christian writings and copies of John preserving Old Latin texts therefore confirm the widespread inclusion of the pericope adulterae within John in the Latin West. By the end of the fourth century, however, there was also already great textual diversity in the Old Latin tradition in general, and the pericope adulterae in particular, which is evident from a comparison of these extant Old Latin manuscripts and citations by Latin fathers.

This chapter follows the growth and development of the intellectual culture in the West after a period of decline roughly concurrent to that of the decline of the Roman Empire. It explores the intellectual reawakening of the Western world following the efforts of the clergyman Gerbert of Aurillac, who transmitted classical and Islamic learning and strove—through his innovative use of the abacus, celestial spheres, and armillary spheres of his own fabrication—to raise the level of learning of the mathematical sciences in the Latin West. Among his students was a generation of Catholic scholars who went on themselves to establish or to teach at cathedral schools and to influence educational reforms in royal courts throughout western Europe.

Greek and Latin inscriptions are now fully embraced within the study of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Era. At Constantinople, inscriptions of the Byzantine era were displayed along with ancient texts imported from elsewhere in the Empire, symbolising the welding of Hellenism and Romanitas. While the number and variety of texts do not match those of earlier eras, they can furnish evidence for several aspects of society. Personal names recorded on inscriptions reveal the impact of the Latin West and of Christianity on the Greek East, in the choice of names and the styles of nomenclature. The survival of names of local origin, from Thrace, Anatolia and Syria, areas where Greek was later imposed on an earlier substrate not always written, reveals the vigour of local traditions.

This chapter examines the ways in which classical, Christian, and Jewish practices of public-spirited gifts, justice, and civic charity converged in European cities between late antiquity and the early middle ages, ca. 300–600. More specifically, it looks at changes in the social imagination of populations of the Roman and post-Roman, Latin West throughout these centuries. It shows how the forms and recipients of gift-giving practices were altered: the poor displaced the citizenry; the horizons of charity expanded out beyond the locality; its social terms grew bleaker even as its spirit grew more exalted. The chapter considers how these shifting practices gave rise to new forms of “pastoral” power and an understanding of wealth, poverty, and society that heralded the beginnings of Western modernity and displaced a “classical,” pointedly civic notion of society.

The split between Greek East and Latin West has been contributed by theological and non-theological factors. There was a difference between those who understood the Church of Jesus' disciples to have its centre located in Jerusalem, in observance of the Mosaic law and those who came to think of the Church with St. Paul as a worldwide body consisting of Gentiles. This chapter also discusses the celebration of Easter, pre-Christian roots of East and West divergence, and also social difference between Greeks and some Romans characterized by wearing or having beards.

This chapter examines the connection between the rise of the West and the revival and reform of the Latin Church. At the end of the eleventh century, descendants of the demoralized Latin Christians who in the tenth century had to endure attacks by non-Christian invaders would fight their way through Greek, Turkish, and Arab empires to raise the Latin cross over Jerusalem. The success of the Crusaders was more than a military achievement. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the military, political, and ecclesiastical history of the tenth-century Latin West, with particular emphasis on “encastellation” (the development of extensive internal fortifications) as a form of military security in early medieval Western Europe. It then considers how barbarian invasions and the wreckage they caused reshaped the political order and resulted in the fragmentation of Europe into smaller polities. It also discusses the efforts of the kings and ruling elites of the new order to rebuild the Church and carry out ecclesiastical reform via church building.

This concluding chapter returns to the arguments regarding medieval leprosy as derived from previous chapters, emphasizing in particular the close ties between the Latin culture of Western Europe to the Greek world of Byzantium. Because of this shared Greco-Roman religious and intellectual tradition, it is not surprising that Byzantine and Western leprosariums displayed many similar organizational features. However, not all Byzantine ideas and institutions concerning Elephant Disease had an impact on the West; and subsequent Germanic settlements in the Latin-speaking provinces introduced new ideas, institutions, and attitudes, markedly different from those of Eastern Christianity. In addition, the chapter suggests other venues for further research that can provide a better understanding of medieval attitudes toward leprosy.

This book explores ecclesiastical history and the history of Western civilization more generally by focusing on the tenth-and early eleventh-century Latin Church, or more precisely the millennial Church. It challenges the narrative linking ecclesiastical revival to the Gregorian Reform and argues that the rise of the West began well before the mid-eleventh century. It presents ecclesiastical reform as a central part of the post-Carolingian, postinvasion revival and suggests that the Church embodied and defined a rising Europe. It shows that the achievements associated with Gregorian Reform in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries rested on earlier ones. The book offers insights into the Christendom that was inherited by the mid-eleventh-century Latin reformers and puts the millennial Church as well as the resurgence of the Latin West in their appropriate contexts.

This chapter examines the role of art in the tenth and eleventh centuries in helping lead simple souls to God. According to Bernard of Clairvaux, the “bishops have a duty toward both wise and foolish. They have to make use of material ornamentation to inspire devotion in a carnal people, incapable of spiritual things.” Conscientious churchmen debated about the merits and demerits of ecclesiastical luxury. In the medieval Latin West, however, a consensus gradually emerged that rich and splendid art had a role to play in helping lead simple souls to God. This chapter discusses the proliferation of altars and reliquaries in crypts, side chapels, and shrines from the Carolingian period forward and their influence on ecclesiastical architecture. It also considers the use of crosses and crucifixes on altars and the reappearance of three-dimensional religious statues in the tenth-century Latin West. Finally, it describes the sorts of ecclesiastical paraphernalia such as books, vestments, and liturgical equipment that were crafted to help bring simple souls to God.

This chapter discusses the intellectual and the educational life of the Mediterranean world during the period of late antiquity, as well as during the centuries that ensued in the medieval Latin West. The intellectual atmosphere and educational traditions in this region could be considered tension-ridden. Foremost among these conflicts was the ongoing tension between philosophical reason and biblical revelation. This tension predated the medieval centuries and persisted into the modern era. In addition, there was the tension between rhetoricians and philosophers, which could be traced from Athens of the fourth century BCE. This conflict makes its presence felt down to the present, though of late, it has functioned as a scarcely recognized factor amid the “alarms of struggle and flight.”

The prologue to this book begins by pointing out a change destined to take place within the period of the late eleventh century onward, and which involved a Christianized version of the archaic pattern of sacral kingship during the late antique and early medieval centuries. This sacral kingship had dominated the political scene in the Latin West no less than the Byzantine East. The institution of kingship itself was not called into question; rather, what was in question was its age-old sacral dimension. By this time, a broader and more variegated cross-section of the populace right across Europe had become directly acquainted with the consensual modes of governance characteristic of cathedral chapters, of the newer forms of monastic and religious life, of the almost ubiquitous merchant and crafts guilds, and of the universities that had sprung up at principal centers of learning.

There was no systematic treatment of philosophical issues related to embodiment in the medieval period in the Latin West. But a number of theological and philosophical problems related to the nature of the knowledge of embodied and disembodied human souls and angels forced philosophies such as Scholasticism and thinkers such as Ockham, Suárez, and above all Thomas Aquinas to engage with what it was for a being to have or to assume a body. The one thing that characterized embodied entities when it came to cognition was their having to get that knowledge by themselves through or in conjunction with the corporeal senses. There was no denying that embodiment was the natural state of human beings, and therefore that this was as good as it could get in God’s creation. Still the body was seen as a sort of encumbrance to arriving at a purer kind of intellectual activity.