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[Extract] The twelfth-century account of the Irish knight Owein’s descent into the otherworld through St. Patrick’s Purgatory, the Tractatus de Purgatorio sancti Patricii, distinguishes itself from many other contemporary visions by its insistence upon the embodied experience of its visionary protagonist and the epistemic value of that embodiment. In most contemporary accounts of voyages to the afterlife, visionaries traveled in spirit or saw the sights of the otherworld within their own minds. In contrast, Owein claimed he reached the afterlife differently, literally walking into it through a cave in northern Ireland.1 He then saw the otherworld “with his own bodily eyes” and endured the torments there in his own flesh.

At the rear of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is a small chapel known as the Prison of Christ. The Prison of Christ became a popular pilgrimage site for Latin Christians during the Middle Ages, effectively providing a setting for Christ's captivity during the Passion. This article gives an account of the Prison's origins and its early development. It places the 'invention' of the Prison in the context of the Crusaders' adaptation of pre-existing local traditions at the Palestinian holy spaces. At the same time, the Prison reflected western ideas about punishment, incarceration and the rise of Purgatory and pilgrimage. The Crusaders' understanding of the Prison of Christ should thus be considered within the burgeoning culture of imprisonment and tariffed penance in western Europe. The article then turns to pilgrimage writings and travel literature concerning the Prison of Christ, to demonstrate the knowledge of the Prison amongst western Christians and the uses they made of the site. It shows how the Prison was a canonical locus of the pilgrims' route and was then itself incorporated into 'virtual pilgrimages' and itineraries. This essay discloses how medieval sources consistently describe how Christ was held in a prison. The history and use of the Prison of Christ reveals the interplay of western ideas and eastern space. Pilgrimage writing shows how Latin Christians understood and remade a holy site in Jerusalem, both culturally and materially.

There is an obvious paradox in any attempt to map the topography of Paradise, for Paradise, theologians assure us, is outside of space as well as time. Yet mapping Paradise is what Dante's poem, the Paradiso, attempts to do. For the two preceding realms of the afterlife, hell and purgatory, Dante provides numerous finely articulated descriptions of rigorously ordered regions. And again for Paradise, the variegated states of the souls making up the spiritual order of the realm are expressed very precisely by a topographical scheme, one in this case based on Ptolemy's system of the heavens. The seven planetary spheres are followed by the sphere of the fixed stars and the primum mobile, the whole finally bordering on the completely nonspatial heaven of the Empyrean. But this last “sphere” alone is Paradise in the full and strict sense. As Dante has Beatrice explain in canto 4.28–48, the whole poem attempts to describe this totally nonspatial order in terms of the array of the nine physical heavens as metapho...

In July, 1801, three weeks after returning from his second stay in Lisbon, Southey told William Taylor of Norwich that Coleridge was "miserably ill & must quit England for a warmer climate or perish" (SCL 595; Robberds, 1: 369-70). Even before leaving Lisbon, Southey wrote to Coleridge in March, 1801, commending Portugal for its "blessed winter sun & the summer paradise of Cintra." He adds that, if Coleridge's ill health "should also proceed from English skies, we may perhaps emigrate together at last" (SCL, 572; Cabral, 153; LC SL, 1: 254). The importance of Coleridge's Mediterranean experience from 1804 to 1806, first as what he called "a son of diplomatic Understrapper" to Sir Alexander Ball in Malta (CCL 2: 1146), and then on vacation in Sicily and haft, has long been recognized--in spite of the presumed loss of many of the reports sent back to Daniel Stuart (CCL 2: 1165). Issues of the friend in earl 1810 throw some light on Coleridge's time in Malta, through the four instalments of his eulogistic biographical sketch of Ball, who had died in 1809 (friend nos. 21, 22, 26, 27). But in 1976, Donald Sultana's Coleridge in Malta and Italy drew on the notebooks to illustrate the impact of the months spent in the Mediterranean--notably on Coleridge's attitude to Catholicism, culminating in his denunciation of Rome as "the undoubted Anti-Christ" (Sultana, 261). Interest in Coleridge's Mediterranean months was revived in 2010 by Hough and Davies in Coleridge's Laws: 11 Study (y" Coleridge in Malta, prefaced by Michael John Kooy's critique of Coleridge's attitude to the rule of' law (Hough and Davies, xvi-xxviii). In 2011, at the Malta conference, in a paper called "Coleridge's Light in Malta and Rome," Michael Raiger (see above) spoke of Coleridge's notebook entry for February 12, 1805, when the "awful Truth" of the doctrine of the Trinity "burst" upon him. At the same Malta conference, Tim Fulford offered a shortened and re-worked version of his "Catholicism and Polytheism: Britain's Colonies and Coleridge's Politics" (Romanticism 1999: 232-53). Fulford argued plausibly if somewhat paradoxically, that it was Coleridge's encounter with Mediterranean Catholicism that led to his abandonment of Unitarianism. Coleridge, guilt-ridden about his failure to shake off his opium addiction, needed redemptive Trinitarian theology with its emphasis on the Atonement--a doctrine denied by Unitarians and seemingly obscured by Catholic teaching on the sacrament of Penance and the pains of Purgatory. Coleridge famously claimed to have been "though a Trinitarian in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion" (BL 96-7). Raiger showed the twin impact of "climate and culture" in awakening Coleridge's "sense of the part sunlight plays in the cognition of form." And the encounter in Rome with Washington Allston, whom Coleridge calls "a Painter born to renew the 15th century," enables the poet-philosopher (Raiger claims) to find in Allston's imaginative representation of God-created nature "the perfect image of aesthetic unity in the one and the many." Allston can be seen as providing an aesthetic symbolism through which Coleridge can articulate his philosophical trinitarianism--to create unity out of multiplicity. …

The lateral chapels appended to the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris starting after 1228 are the earliest dated examples of the ubiquitous standard chapel type that flourished throughout Western Europe. Although diminutive in scale and relatively simple architecturally, the chapels had a profound effect on the cathedral, altering it physically and functionally. This study examines conventional art historical sources, such as documents and the building fabric, in conjunction with the sociocultural context to offer a more accurate date than has hitherto been available for the inception of work on the chapels, which influenced buildings in Paris and beyond for generations. This examination posits a connection between the emergence of chapels at the cathedral and the preoccupation with the nascent doctrine of purgatory in Parisian intellectual circles in the early thirteenth century. Built primarily to accommodate chantries (endowments for private masses believed to hasten the soul's release from purgatory), the chapels responded to and helped promote changing conceptions of the afterlife. Work on the chapels began under the leadership of the visionary bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne, who transformed the cathedral into a locus ideally suited to respond to individuals' desires for intercession and commemoration, while simultaneously advancing a doctrine that brought both power and profit to the Church.

Gothic bluebooks and chapbooks have been the stepchild of gothic scholarship, frequently ignored because of their derivative nature and their lack of artistic sophistication, depth, or significance (Varma; Frank; Watt). Montague Summers claims that they were the reading material of "schoolboys, prentices, servant-girls, by the whole of that vast population which longed to be in the fashion, to steep themselves in the Gothic Romance." They are commonly referred to as "the remainder trade" or "the trade Gothic" (84-5). William St. Clair has claimed that the chapbooks were read by "adults in the country areas, and young people in both the town and the country. It would be a mistake, therefore, to regard the ancient popular print as confined to those whose education fitted them for nothing longer or textually more difficult. Many readers, whether adults or children, lived at the boundary between the reading and the non-reading nations. They were the marginal reading constituency whose numbers fell when prices rose and rose when prices fell" (343-44), Whatever the class of their intended readership, I would assert that gothic bluebooks and eventually the importance of the gothic short tale requires an understanding of the ambivalent agenda of secularization they carried within their slim and flimsy covers. Scholars claim that the short gothic tale or chapbook grew out of the earlier tradition of cheap broadside (because printed on one side of the paper) ballads or street literature, and certainly one can see in the short eight-page chapbooks the residue of this direct oral to written tradition (James). Gary Kelly observed that this early street literature is characterized by its "emphasis on destiny, chance, fortune and levelling forces such as death, express [ing] the centuries-old experience of common people. ... with little or no control over the conditions of their lives. ... For these people, life was a lottery" (2002; U. x). According to Kelly, the fact that the lower-classes were the target audience of these early productions is also obvious from their very heavy use of narrative repetition, their emphasis on incident and adventure, and their episodic and anecdotal structures. The other major difference between lower and middle-class reading materials is the absence in the lower-class works of any extended depictions of subjectivity or emotions in the protagonists (II. x; xv). One example of this lower-class ideology appears in Isabella Lewis's Terrific Tales (1804), a series of short vignettes that purport to be true, although the contents are fantastical and reveal an interesting mix of residual supernaturalism combined with rationalizing Christian moral exemplum. For instance, one tale concerns an aristocrat, "of very inordinate passions," who is kidnapped by a spirit who arrived on horseback. Obviously a prose revision and redaction of the Germanic ballad "Lenora," the homily at the conclusion remarks on his abduction as "a punishment for his excessive passions" (7). What is most interesting about these tales, besides their repetitive use of specters, devils, ghosts in chains, warnings from Purgatory, and clouds of sulfur, is their persistent assurance that the afterworld and the realm of the transcendent exists. In one tale, a dead man appears to his friend to exclaim, "Michael, Michael! Nothing is more true than what has been said of the other world" (61), and such a message is the major reason for the popularity of these works. The supernatural was not supposed to he explained away, but instead confirmed as real. Although the elite and the intelligentsia might have been willing to accept the stark lessons of materialism and the finality of death, the lower class was not able to do so, and the gothic chapbook reveals in all its convolutions the persistence and continuing power of the supernatural in the social imaginary (Hoeveler). The earlier "lottery mentality" that was operative in the lower-class chapbooks was eventually replaced during the late 18th century by what Kelly calls a dominant "investment mentality" evidenced in the emerging middle-class chapbooks. …

Study of the Renaissance English elegy can be enhanced by considering both the medieval antecedents of the genre and the shifts in religious thought and practice brought about by the Protestant Reformation and by examining continuities as well as changes. Medieval English elegies, drawing on Catholic traditions, commonly registered a sense that living and dead persons can interact with one another. In later years, Protestant reformers would claim that purgatory and the cult of saints impugned the sovereignty of God and that the Bible offered no evidence for the Roman understanding of works as a means to salvation. Therefore, a fully purified faith could find no place for purgatory, the intercession of saints, or prayers for the dead. These attacks on traditional religion would shape poetic responses to death and mourning, including Henry King's “An Exequy” and Milton's Lycidas. (S.W.)

Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvii + 250 $85.00 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xii + 224 $84.00 "The Catholic Question" was a persistent and usually passionate debate about relieving Roman Catholics of civil disabilities that had been imposed on them by the Penal Laws of the 17th century, a debate that intensified between the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Catholic Emancipation act of 1829--the years of the Romantic period in literature. The public policy issue was complicated by deep-rooted prejudice against "Romish superstition" with a history going back to Mary Tudor's persecution of Protestants and the series of "popish plots," real or imagined, that followed. A more serious complication was the problem of Ireland. Following the rebellions of 1798, an Act of Union dissolved the Dublin parliament, raising the question of how five million Irish Catholics could be admitted to full participation in the political life of a united kingdom. The dispute thus involved a legal and cultural struggle over religious difference, historical grievances, and the very definition of "Britishness." Michael Tomko's British Romanticism and the Catholic Question and Stuart Andrews' Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion, the two books under consideration, make the case that the Catholic Question played a more central role in the culture of the Romantic period than previous literary historians have noticed. Tomko addresses the impact of the controversy on imaginative literature while Andrews provides a vivid clarification of the issues at the heart of the conflict and the passions that drove one writer's lifelong obsession with the threat he thought Roman Catholicism posed to Britain's survival as a Protestant nation. After he became Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey wrote little verse, devoting his creative energies to historical and argumentative prose. He was a conscientious and energetic historian, as his biographies of Wesley and Nelson still demonstrate, but the prose that Andrews examines here mainly concerned the dispute on the Catholic Question, in which he was a committed partisan. In a series of books, articles, and reviews, the debate became the primary concern of his life as an author. He engaged in acrimonious public quarrels with two able and prominent defenders of Catholic rights, John Milner and Charles Butler. In his Book of the Church (1824) Southey's admiration of the Church of England necessitated invidious comparisons with "the errors, corruptions and crimes" of the pernicious "Romish Church" (as he almost always called it). Milner's Strictures on the Poet Laureate's Book of the Church (1824), responded in kind to what he thought was a tissue of vituperation and fanaticism, whose author "raves through the history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating the common source of Christianity, in order to court the heads of the present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it" (121). Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825) similarly argued that Southey's book was "calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord" (119). Southey responded to his critics in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), with still more rancorous attacks on the "idolatrous and superstitious" Church of Rome, and in a later publication wrote, "Throughout papal Christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates the understanding" (184). In various writings he ridiculed transubstantiation, indulgences, belief in purgatory, veneration of Mary and the saints, and the authority of the Pope. He thought that auricular confession by absolving sin encouraged more of it; he found priestly celibacy repugnant; and he entertained gothic visions of innocent girls being shut up convents, forced to practice idolatry, denied meat on Fridays, and encouraged to indulge in self-flagellation. …

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. Stop! cried the groaning old man at last, Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

Diego Rivera, Octavio Paz, and other twentieth-century artists and intellectuals created an image of Mexico as a land where death pervades popular culture. This casual intimacy with death is most famously celebrated in Mexico’s “Days of the Dead,” but lately that connection has been treated with suspicion. As Claudio Lomnitz writes, “The pride of place given to play with death by postrevolutionary intellectuals is today suspected of legitimating an authoritarian political regime that naturalized its own penchant to trample, mangle, and stamp out life and projected its own tendencies onto ‘the Mexican’s disdain of death”’ (pp. 54–55). Lomnitz’s magnificient and profound work is more than a history of Mexico’s Days of the Dead over the past 500 years; it is a critique of anthropology and comparative iconography, and it is a documented history of death, the state, and popular culture in Mexico. Lomnitz recognizes that “Mexico” was not a unified cultural realm when the Spanish arrived; there was more cultural variation among indigenous people than there was among Spaniards. He points out that observations of similarities between the contemporary celebrations and “Aztec” ceremonies is based on a mistaken understanding of their symbolism. Although the Aztec skull rack (tzompantle) and today’s marketplace stacks of sugar skulls (calaveras) on Mexico’s Days of the Dead may bear a superficial resemblance as depictions of human crania, their meanings were quite different. For the Spanish, the calavera symbolized the brevity of life; it was a sign for the criticism of worldly vanity and corrupt corporeal pleasures. For the Aztecs, the skull was a reminder of the cycle of fertility, nutrition, and earthly rebirth as much as it was a symbol of death. With no concept of an afterlife as reward or punishment, death could not be a time of judgment for indigenous people as it was for the Spanish. More significant for us, facile identification of superficial similarities and imagined timeless truths cannot be substitutes for historical investigation. This is a rich, subtle, and complex work that does not seek simple answers or attempt to smooth the rough edges of complications. In Lomnitz’s words, “Rather than try to affix a true meaning or a true origin to the death sign, I explore the history of the densely layered repertoire itself, for, as Nietzsche put it, ‘only something which has no history can be defined”’ (p. 58). A brief review can do no more than outline some of the salient points. The book is divided into three parts arranged in chronological order. “Death and the Origin of the State” begins with the massive mortality, dislocation, and reconfiguration of the sixteenth-century conquest era, the radical transformation of indigenous realms into “New Spain.” Death and destruction were the work of the conquistadors, while the Spanish colonial state developed “largely as an effort to rein in the destruction of the Indies. . . . The colonial state was built on the devastation that had been unleashed in America” (p. 97). The Church was essential in this process. As the colonial state was consolidated, ecclesiastical emphasis shifted from apocalyptic visions of heaven and hell to the more ambiguous proposition of time in purgatory. Indigenous people were forced to give up human sacrifice, cremation, and interment at home for burial of their dead in collective holy space in or near the church. They were also introduced to the doctrine of individual free will and the collective responsibility to pray for the souls in purgatory, especially on All Souls’ Day. Some indigenous communities adopted the Days of the Dead without official promotion of purgatory. Their enthusiasm for providing food, drink, and candles at harvest time increased ecclesiastical suspicion of their motives; nevertheless, the offerings were welcomed by rural priests, for whom these donations became one of the principal sources of their income. Church doctrine promoted marriage, the conjugal family, individual private property, and the reorganization of labor essential to Mexico’s integration into the Atlantic economy. Mexican popular culture “was built at every point on the domestication and popularization of the death cult, with its elaborate and plentiful saints’ feasts, its concern with funerary pomp and charity, its corporations’ savings and efforts geared to funerary expenditures, its village lands identified with village saints, and its vision of justice projected into the afterlife” (pp. 261–62). The Days of the Dead were not a strictly rural festival as might be imagined. Celebration of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day was obligatory for Spaniards, who lived in cities and towns. Not only did Spanish participants not find anything pagan in the festivities but the celebrations became increasingly larger in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest government documentation relating to urban commemoration of the Days of the Dead concerns markets, which could last all month. All segments of the population, elite as well as popular, participated in the Days of the Dead, buying special foods for the occasion as well as new clothes in which to cut a splendid figure during the paseo, with its flirtation and frivolity. Viceregal authorities in the eighteenth century attempted to restrict markets as unsuitable during solemn religious festivals. Nineteenth-century politicians, despite their suspicion of the Church, were unable to limit the urban celebration. Late in the century, though, the Porfirian elite began to segregate itself from the rabble and, eventually, to ignore the festivities in order to undertake more modern leisure activities such as recreational travel on the new railways.

Was there crime among the brethren of the Order of the Teutonic Knights, who in addition to taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were commanded to "behave towards each other so that friendly concord in the name of brotherhood does not turn into hardness of heart, and to take pains to live with each other in brotherly love, harmoniously and amicably, in the spirit of gentleness"?' And if wrongdoing existed, was there also punishment for those who had sinned or committed an offense? The statutes of the order provide an answer to this question: "Since . . . even lay folk must give account at the Day of Judgment for every idle word, so it is much more incumbent upon professed brethren that they atone for their sins . . . and that the order be purgatory for them,"2 for the "aim of all life in religion shall be that the order endure and that sins be punished."3 The founders of the Order of the Teutonic Knights the German ecclesiastical and temporal princes in Palestine meeting in the house of the Templars in Jerusalem in 1195 or 1198, decided that the German hospital, which eventually evolved as the Order of the Teutonic Knights, should be modeled after the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in its program for the poor and sick; but in clerical, knightly, and other activities, after the Knights Templars. This decision was approved by Pope Innocent III on February 19, 1199.4

Traditionally, presidential addresses at CIES annual meetings have attempted to assess the "state of the art" of comparative and international education, typically suggesting that we are still far from God, if not close to the devil, and to offer some suggestions intended to increase our degree of saintliness. I am enough of a student of educational planning and educational reform efforts to realize that there are dangers attendant to breaking with tradition, and enough of an Ontario Tory to believe that some traditions are worth upholding. I do not promise to bring you any closer to God, though I do hope these next few minutes will not be a foretaste of purgatory. In recent years society presidents have told us many times that our theoretical work must be more explicit and rigorous, and less embedded in traditional theoretical constructs, and have offered us a variety of specific problems, or classes of problems, upon which to focus our work.' We have in these last few years largely abandoned our concern with a set of "grand questions" which preoccupied members of the field in its early years. Is comparative education a discipline? With which other social sciences does it, or ought it to, have the closest links? How "quantitative" should comparative studies be? We have in a sense replaced these with a new set of "grand questions." What is the appropriate theoretical base for the field? To which key policy questions can we most fruitfully direct our attention? Debate on those earlier questions dwindled as we became convinced that there neither were, nor had to be, final universal answers to them. The latter set of questions likewise requires no definitive answers for our field to thrive. There is room for a variety of theoretical orientations; what is important is that the theoretical work be explicit and rigorous. There are a host of significant policy-related questions upon which we can usefully concentrate; the success of the enterprise will be

THE struggle between good and evil is salient in Milton, and in Areopagitica his method of setting forth this conflict is to personify books and "truth" and to show them in unceasing warfare against evil forces. Consequently, images from war predominate, aided by body images (health against sickness), by nature images (fruitfulness against aridity), and by images from daily life. Classical and biblical images and allusions are pervasive. Images drawn from animals' and the arts are negligible. Milton's argument is usually more persuasive when it is intuitive rather than discursive. The left hand sometimes needed a transfusion from poetic sources to increase vitality. Thus, after a wary and somewhat labored exordium and exposition, Milton begins his proof with a passage of sustained imagery2 which is fused into a whole by the personification of Books. Books can commit crimes; they are "as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."3 And yet, in a way, a book is more valuable than a man: "Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit." Accordingly, "We should be wary. . how we spill that season'd life of man . . . since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre." This is characteristic of Milton's method. An image (not a very striking one)4 is created and then developed, its ramifications are explored imaginatively until at the end a reader feels that books partake of the divine nature and that the destroyer of books is a Herod. Books are nearly always presented in terms of humankind: the "Catalogues, and expurging Indexes" of the Spanish Inquisition "rake through the entralls of many an old good Author, with a violation wors then any could be offer'd to his tomb." Books are "either condemn'd in a prohibition" or thrown "strait into the new Purgatory of an Index." An apt and ingenious image, supported by a classic allusion, continues the process of personification: "Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifl'd then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the 1 Except "an Eagle muing" (see p. 221 below). S"The first really impassioned bit of the Areopagitica," says E. N. S. Thompson in "Milton's Prose Style," PQ, XIV (1935), 13. a References are to The Works of John Milton, Vol. IV, ed. W. Haller (New York, 1931). 4 "Usually the likenesses between objects... are as obvious as the common tropes identifying an imitative man with an ape and a stupid man with a donkey," says F. E. Ekfelt in "The Graphic Diction of Milton's English Prose," PQ, XXV (1946), 58.

THE Middle English Lament of the Monk or Choristers' Lament, an entertaining and unusual poem found in MS. Arundel 292, deserves more attention from philologists and musicologists than it has yet received. It has been printed only once, without commentary, by a nineteenth-century editor whose usual accuracy in transcription was in this instance marred by his lack of systematic knowledge of the Guidonian nomenclature.' The Lament is written in long alliterative lines bound together in thirteen aaaa stanzas.2 The manuscript, written in the thirteenth century, contains a few pieces of twelfth-century composition, but the Lament is inserted on blank pages by a later hand, dated about 1375-1390 by its most exhaustive student, J. P. Oakden. With some qualification Oakden conjectures that our poem was composed between the years 1350 and 1380;3 and on the basis of his comprehensive study of the corpus of Middle English alliterative verse he decides the original dialect to have been Northeast Midland verging on Northern.4 MS. Arundel 292 is a miscellaneous collection on vellum, which originally contained an English Creed, Lord's Prayer and Bestiary; Latin exempla by Odo of Cheriton; two twelfth-century Anglo-Norman religious poems; a portion of a Latin sermon by Archbishop Stephen Langton which quotes the song 'Bele aliz matin leva'; a Latin version of the romance Apollonius of Tyre; Henry of Saltrey's Latin St Patrick's Purgatory; Latin Prophecies of Merlin; a French and Latin Disticha Catonis; three treatises on the Chilindre, the Quadrant, and Sortilege; and a set

ANY philosophers, sociologists, and M historians have been concerned with changes in the rank order of values in different historical periods. Unfortunately; it has been difficult to obtain definite evidence regarding the way in which men of the past rated values; in consequence, investigators usually have been forced to base comparisons upon their own estimates of the value structure of a given historical period. There are from the past, however, at least two recorded instances of values placed in rank order which can make some claim to being representative of a particular historical time and place, and which therefore may be compared with the way in which men of today rank their values. A ranking of vices may be derived from the structure of Purgatory as portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy (ca. 1314), and a ranking of the moral worth of motives may be found in James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory (1885). As an indication of shifts in values which have taken place, it is possible to compare the rank orderings made by Dante and by Martineau with an evaluation of the same vices and motives by persons in the present. The results of one such comparison are reported in what follows.

THE fame of the Legend of St Patrick's Purgatory is probably the most extensive of any in the vast corpus of mediaeval vision-literature that has come down to us. References to the legend go back as far as the late twelfth century in Jocelyn of Furness and Gerald the XVelshman; in the thirteenth century a portion of it was copied in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais; Dante undoubtedly had an intimate knowledge of it in one of its many literary versions; Froissart alludes to it in the fourteenth century, and in the sixteenth Rabelais and Ariosto knew it. Calderon wrote a play based upon the legend, and Shakespeare relied upon his audience's knowledge of it in Hamlet. As late as the nineteenth century, Southey wrote a poem on the theme. The impressive number of manuscripts in European libraries of the literary version of the legend in both Latin and the vernacular languages is confirmatory of the influence it had upon the imagination of the Middle Ages.' Very early in its history the legend precipitated a pilgrimage to the physical locality of the "Purgatory" on Station Island in Lough Derg in County Donegal, Ireland, and the history of that pilgrimage is well docurmiented from the thirteenth century until the time of the suppression of the site in the fifteenth century.2 It is important from the beginning to distinguish between the "Purgatory" of St Patrick, that physical site in Ireland, alleged to have been indicated to the saint in answer to his prayers to convert the incredulous Celts, and the subsequent literary form which the legend took. If in 1925 Van der Zanden could say of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii of the monk of Saltrey that it was "si peu connu de nos jours,"3 it could, I suppose, be safely said that any direct familiarity with the literary version of the legend is today all but defunct except for the knowledge of it by a handful of mediaevalists. The amount of misinformation which has been circulated about the Tractatus is overwhelming. In spite of the fact that in the manuscript the author is indicated only by a capital H (which was only much later expanded into Henricus),4 one literary historian refers to him as "Henry of Salisbury," confusing Salisberiensis with Salteriensis.5 Among earlier antiquarians he was very arbitrarily assigned the name Hugh (Hugo). But it is in the area of dating the composition of the Tractatus that the most confusion has taken place. Lucien Foulet has summarized the evidence for a terminus ad quem and a quo