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When was written the Donation of Constantine known as a typical spurious document in history? A thousands of scholars have exerted themselves to trace the written date of the document since it was first exposed as a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440. As the result of their efforts, there is gradually emerging a consensus that the famous forgery was fabricated between the pontificates of StephenⅡ and PaulⅠ. The purpose of this essay is a little more to narrow the gap of the date alleged by scholars. The pontificate of Stephen was at a serious crisis in the history of papal curia. Aistulf, Lombard king, put pressure on the surrounding areas of the City of Rome with a design to occupy the whole peninsula of Italy after he had finished conquering the Exarchate of Ravenna. Stephen asked for the Byzantine Emperor's aid but the Emperor could not provide him with military assistance because he had to defend himself against the attack of the Arabs and the Bulgars. Nobody would willingly offer to help the pope except the Franks. For the first time as a pope, in 754 Stephen set out on his difficult journey over the Alps to the palace of Pippin for aids of the Franks. This essay analyzed the events which occurred in Frankish Kingdom during the period of Stephanus's visit and dug out meanings implied in a series of events, for example, Pippin's manner as a bridegroom, Stephen's request for mutual alliance and the restitution of the Exarchate, pope's anointing Pippin and his two sons kings, his giving them the title of patricius, so-called donation of Pippin and so on. As the result, this essay confirmed that the events exactly reflected the contents and ideas of the Donation of Constantine. Therefore it can surely be said that the Donation was forged in papal curia right before Stephen's journey to the Frankish Kingdom in 754.

There has been much interest among medievalists in the problem of the origin and development of the French nobility in the High Middle Ages. M. Bloch thought that medieval French nobles were new men stemming from knight and non-nobles who appropriated power during the ninth and tenth centuries. In the last generation or so, however, a number of historians including G. Duby, L. Génicot, and K. F. Werner asserted that those nobles were descendants of the Carolingian nobility. In either case, this question has been treated as a strict "either-or" issue: if nobles were "new", they could not be descended from the Carolingian nobility, or, conversely, if nobles had origins in the Carolingian nobility, then they could not be considered "new" nobles. C. B. Bouchard attempts to resolve this dichotomy by demonstrating the upward mobility of several French families into the ranks of the upper nobility. According to her, the nobility was not a closed caste, and an eleventh-century nobles would have had plenty of non-noble ancestors. There is a rough consensus on the position of knights. Knights emerged as a new group around the year 1000. In many ways these knights of the eleventh century were closer to peasants than to their noble lords. Many seem to have been servile, legally unfree. But in France the social status of knights and nobles drew closer together in the twelfth century, eventually forming a single group in the thirteenth century.

Femina est mas occasionatus－Aristotle's Effect on the Thomas Aquinas' View of Female Sex－Yong-Gu Cha Thomas Aquinas follow Aristotle in his view that male is ordered to the more noble activity, intellectual knowledge, whereas the female, although possessing a rational soul, was created solely with respect to her sexuality, her body, as an aid in reproduction for the preservation of the species. Thomas also follows Aristotelian biology in his assertion that the girl child represents a defective haman being, the result of an accident to the male sperm, which was thought to contaim the complete human being in potentia and to reproduce by nature the likeness of its origin, that is, another male. This finality of the female as a mere instrumentality, an aid to reproduction, is the only explanation Thomas can offer for the existence of a “second sex”, since for any other activity man would have been better served by a male helpmate. On the other hand, Thomas' View of Female Sex has a positive core: he insisted in theory on a societas amicabilis and equivalence of male and female in the order of salvation. In attempting to reconcile Genesis with Aristotle’s physiology, he came to the conclusion, that original sin wa passed from Adam through the male line to the entire huamn race. Just as there ist no point in branding Thomas misogynist, there is no reason to go to the opposite extreme, to single out certain isolated phenomena as harbingers of feminist sympathies. Ahistorical interpretation is also to be avoided.