MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY is richly displayed in "The Lady and the Unicorn," a panel from a six-part 16th Century tapestry presented as a wedding gift. In this fanciful scene, the lion represents the groom, the unicorn his bride.
In the course of every civilization a time comes when converging forces carry it to new heights. For the Middle Ages the time came in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Life itself was safer. The selfsufficiency of the town challenged the serfdom of the manor. Trading and crusading reaped unexpected harvests of sophistication. Increasingly, men found their vistas unshuttered. From a newfound base of physical and economic freedom they now embarked upon adventures of the intellect. In the process, the medieval mind and spirit were transformed, and the way was paved for the Renaissance.
Over this 200-year span, medieval civilization produced great contributions to culture that have survived to enrich each era since. Universities were founded. The beginnings of modern Western literature emerged. A philosophy of ethics ballasted the religion of revelation. Esthetic tastes were articulated in cathedral architecture, in fresco painting, in polyphonic music. Fresh breezes blew through the realms of political and scientific theorizing. Imaginative enterprise and speculative inquiry pervaded every endeavor.
The vital spark of this cultural explosion was the spread of education. In earlier medieval times, learning had been a privilege primarily enjoyed by the clergy. Benedict of Nursia, founding the Western monastic system in the Sixth Century, had bade the monks read and study; in response, Benedictine abbeys had developed a kind of rudimentary schooling in Latin and in the arts of lettering and illumination. Charlemagne, dreaming his ambitious dreams in the Eighth Century, had widened opportunities for scholarship through a decree that every monastery have a school to teach all those "who with God's help are able to learn." The Emperor himself set an example with a Palace School for his own children and those of his courtiers.
Even as the monastery schools taught candidates for the monastic orders, cathedral schools taught candidates for the secular clergy. But there was a crucial distinction between the two. Attached to the cathedrals, which were an integral part of town life, cathedral schools were more readily accessible to laymen. As more towns were established and more cathedrals were built, these schools proliferated throughout Europe, most notably in France—
At Tours, Rheims, Chartres, Paris and elsewhere. Among the students they attracted, a rising number came from the bourgeoisie and talented serfs.
The curriculum of the cathedral school was limited to grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy—the seven liberal arts, so called because in ancient Rome their study had been reserved for liberi, "freemen." Texts were provided by the writings of a few rare scholars of the early Middle Ages. One was Cassio-dorus, a Sixth Century Roman whose two-part treatise. The Handbook of Sacred and Secular Learning, defined the liberal arts and interpreted the Bible. Another was Boethius, a contemporary of Cassiodorus, whose Consolation of Philosophy— written while he was in prison for an alleged plot against the barbarian King Theodoric—attempted to reconcile the misfortunes of man with the concept of a benevolent, omnipotent God. A third was Isidore of Seville, the Seventh Century author of Etymologiae, an encyclopedia on the liberal arts, medicine, law, theology, agriculture, war and many other subjects. A fourth was the Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk of Eighth Century England, who produced a number of Biblical commentaries and treatises on theology and astronomy. These men, along with St. Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great and a few other Church Fathers, were known as auctores, "authorities," whose words the medieval student did not presume to contradict.
Learning was soon to be liberalized, however, with the advent of an era of great schoolmasters. The first of this new breed was Gerbert, master of the cathedral school at Rheims in the latter half of the 10th Century. The son of a serf, Gerbert was destined to end his days as Pope Sylvester 11. But he left his mark upon history through an earlier circumstance. As a young monk, Gerbert had been so brilliant a student that his abbot had taken the unusual step of sending him to Spain to study mathematics. Although Gerbert's mentor there was a Christian bishop, he was also exposed to the broad and tolerant culture of the ruling Moors.
A hundred years or so hence, after the Crusades began and Mediterranean commerce expanded, intellectual contact with Islam would become less and less of a rarity. Christian Europe would be introduced to Arabic medicine, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. At Constantinople, as well as in Sicily and in Spain, Moslem and Jewish scholars would be kept busy turning out Latin translations not only of Arabic lore but also of ancient Hebrew and Greek writings they had preserved. Westerners would travel to the East to study the works of Aristotle in his own language. But this thriving traffic in knowledge was yet to come when Gerbert journeyed across the Pyrenees.
Gerbert brought back more than the news of a system of education so advanced that one center of learning at Cordova alone accommodated thousands of students. Of more lasting significance, he had absorbed the inquisitive, questing spirit of Moorish scholarship. When he began to teach at Rheims, he announced that the compilations of the auctores no longer sufficed; his pupils were henceforth to study Roman classics in the original. To this end Gerbert collected manuscripts wherever he could and built up a sizable library—no mean feat at a time when a manuscript sometimes took a year to copy, and cost at least the equivalent of a churchman's yearly income.
Out of the crop of superior students trained by Gerbert came Europe's next great schoolmaster: Fulbert, who became Bishop of Chartres and the driving force of its cathedral school. Fulbert's genius was as a catalyst, inspiring in his students a zest for dialectic—reasoning by argument. He and his successors at Chartres—Ivo, Bernard and Thierry—did more than fill their pupils' heads with information; they impelled them to express their ideas in their own words. Among them they taught many of the men who revolutionized thinking in 12th Century Europe.
The liveliest figure in this revolution, however, was a man who preferred to make his own rules: the celebrated teacher Abelard. Today Abelard is remembered chiefly for his poignant love affair with his pupil Heloise. In his own time he was equally famous for his nimble wit and fearless tongue. The eldest son of a minor noble of Brittany, Abelard for love of learning had given up his inheritance rights to younger brothers, and roamed France to sit at the feet of the great masters, now listening, now openly challenging them in class. In time he established himself as a lecturer at Mont Ste. Genevieve in Paris, where he attracted a host of students. He also began to write.
In a treatise entitled Sic et Non (Yes and No), he posed 158 questions on dogma and answered them with conflicting quotations from the Scriptures, the Church Fathers and pagan classics. "The first key to wisdom," Abelard asserted, "is assiduous and frequent questioning. . . . For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.” This idea, commonplace to the Greeks, was hardly so to medieval Europeans. Abelard's astounding opus won the applause of some, but alarmed as many others. Another of his books, on the nature of the Trinity, invoked condemnation by a Church council at Soissons in 1121, and its author was sentenced to confinement in a monastery.
Abelard was not a man to be kept down. A year later he secured the monastery's permission to leave and live in the wilderness southeast of Paris. Students flocked to his side. They built him a shelter, tilled his land and begged him to teach once more. Resuming his pursuit of reason, Abelard again and again fell afoul of conservatives in the Church, this time including Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential prelate in Christendom. Ber-
A 13TH CENTURY SEAL of the University of Paris illustrates the relationship between religion and medieval learning. The source of wisdom is divine, represented (at top) by the Virgin and Child, a saint and a bishop (left). At bottom, two professors teach.
Nard pursued Abelard as zealously as he preached the Second Crusade. "The faith of the righteous believes," he declared, "it does not dispute." At Bernard's instigation, a Church council at Sens in 1140 condemned Abelard for heresy. Abelard retired to the abbey of Cluny, where he stayed in seclusion for the remaining two years of his life.
Despite his condemnation, Abelard's method of inquiry persisted and flourished. By the 13th Century all Europe had a thirst for learning which ecclesiastical censure could not quench. Intellectual enterprise as a way of life thrived even in the shadow of that fearsome new institution, the Papal Inquisition. Established in 1233 to stamp out the Albigensian heretics of southern France, the Inquisition's courts of inquiry kept a sharp eye on maverick scholars as well. Nevertheless, the seeds that Abelard had planted in the medieval mind sprouted all around the Continent. Less than 100 years after his death universities thrived at Paris,
Orleans and Montpellier; across the Channel at Oxford and Cambridge; at Bologna and Padua.
The step that signaled the birth of the universities was the grouping of students and masters into guilds. As craftsmen had done before them, they banded together for mutual interest and protection, and called themselves a universitas, the medieval name for any corporate group. In Italy, where the majority of students were mature men pursuing advanced study in law and medicine, their guilds came to exercise great power. Students hired and paid teachers, determined the courses to be given, and fined any lecturer who skipped a chapter in expounding his subject. (Teachers at Bologna were even penalized for saving a difficult paragraph for the end of the lecture "if this is likely to prevent a prompt exit at the sound of the bell.") Each master had to deposit a sum of money in the city bank, from which his fines were deducted.
At French and English universities, where students were younger, masters' guilds had the upper hand. They forbade students to swear or gamble, fined them for breaking curfews and prescribed table manners. "Cleanse not thy teeth," one rule went, "with the steel that is sharpened for those that eat with thee.” Students were nevertheless a force to be reckoned with, as they might en masse desert one master's classes for another's. Freshmen —yellowbeaks, as they were called in allusion to young birds—were sometimes advised by upperclassmen to attend several lectures before paying the teacher his fee.
Universities traditionally call up visions of ivied halls and grassy quadrangles. Medieval universities, however, had not even the semblance of permanent quarters. At first lectures were given in wayside sheds at Oxford and Cambridge, in the cathedral cloisters in Paris and in the squares in Italy. In time teachers rented rooms and the students sat on the floor, which was usually covered with straw against the dampness. Unencumbered with buildings, libraries or other equipment, universities could pick up and move elsewhere at any time if they found themselves at odds with local citizens. Cambridge was founded in this way by secession from Oxford.
Secession was not always peaceful. Students grumbled about the high cost of food and lodging, about garbage left in the streets and about the quality of wine in the taverns. Townsmen reciprocated by scorning the airs of both students and masters. Resentment often boiled over into open warfare. Municipal annals of Paris and Oxford contain many accounts of bloody riots in which the opposing factions used swords, pikes, cudgels, bows and arrows, and pails of boiling water and slops hurled from windows. After one Paris riot in 1229, in which several students were killed, masters and students appealed to the Bishop of Paris and the papal legate of Pope Gregory IX. When no help came, they left the town in a body and scattered all over Europe. At length Gregory stepped in, for most students were clerics and therefore under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He issued a bull granting the university full power to regulate its own affairs, to determine rents and to suspend classes—that is, strike against the town—any time its rights were abrogated. Thereafter the threat of secession was a powerful weapon, for townsmen feared the loss of luster, and of revenue, afforded by a university.
Usually, the university student rose at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning. After hearing Mass from 5 to 6, he attended classes until 10, when he paused for his first meal of the day—a bit of beef and a thick soup made of its gravy mixed with oatmeal. He then attended classes until 5 in the afternoon, when he went to an almost equally scanty supper. Afterward he went over his notes until 9 or 10. At the day's close at Cambridge, according to one report, "half an hour was devoted to walking or
ORIENTAL ARTS
Lit—,
Running about, that [the students] might not go to bed with cold feet."
In Italy and the south of France curricula dealt mainly with Roman law or Greek, Arabic and Jewish medicine; in Paris and England with theology, canon law and the liberal arts. Examinations were given at the end of the course of study, which generally took six years. About midway through, the student was questioned orally by his master or by a committee of masters. If he passed, he became a baccalaurens, entitled to serve a master as an assistant teacher. Upon completion of his studies he became a master and could teach on his own.
In addition to lectures, the method of teaching was the disputation, in which two or more masters, and occasionally the students, debated text readings, employing Abelard's question-and-answer approach. It was in this context that medieval men developed Scholasticism, a process of painstaking arrival at logical conclusions through questioning, postulating, examining and arranging details into a system of logic. The Scholastic disputation stirred heated clashes and bitter enmities. Wars of logic ran for years between master and master, with adherents of each cheering their hero on with tumultuous stomping and whistling. If it had elements of hootenanny, the disputation was nonetheless the essence of medieval teaching. It trained students to think. It did much to overthrow unquestioning acceptance of the auctores. It led to a new ordering of Christianity into a systematic philosophy.
By the 13th Century Christianity was in need of a systematic philosophy. The writings of the ancient Greeks were now pouring into Europe in greater volume, undermining faith and prompting heresies. The whole of Aristotle's Logic was now available, and his Metaphysics and his works on science had been discovered. Aristotle's doctrines on the nature of the universe were leading men to doubt revelation. From Spain, the works of the
The arts of the Orient during the Middle Ages, created largely for royal patrons, were more social and secular than European works, mainly commissioned by the Church. The illustration above comes from a bestiary—a book depicting the real and imagined beasts of the world—made for the Persian ruler Ghazan Khan at the end of the 13th Century. By then, Persia had already produced two of its finest works of literature: the 11th Century Book of Kings, celebrating the Persian past, and the Rubaiyat, epigrams in verse by Omar Khayyam. The fabulous tales that became the Thousand and One Nights were the literature of the lower classes. Handed down by generations of storytellers, the yarns, derived from folklore, changed with the tellers. They were probably first collected in something resembling their present form in the 15th Century in Egypt.
In China, the Ming Dynasty, beginning in 1308, encouraged a remarkable revival of learning and the arts. In Japan, where the best of medieval literature was written by women. Lady Murasaki's exquisite yet powerful novel. The Tale of Genji, was completed about 1010—many centuries before the first novel appeared in Europe.
Moslem philosopher Averroes and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides were spreading skepticism, and most notably at the University of Paris.
The Church could not turn a deaf ear. To quiet the din, Thomas Aquinas was dispatched to Paris from Italy. Thomas was a Dominican monk of noble birth, brilliant mind, tireless industry and gentle disposition. Like Abelard, he honored reason above all other human attributes, but he had distinguished himself for his fidelity to the Church as well as his scholarship. He saw no conflict between faith and knowledge that could not be reconciled by reason. Rather than denounce the tenets of Averroes, Maimonides and Aristotle out of hand, he examined their writings point by point, refuting some and reconciling others with Christianity. The result was his Surnma Jheologica (a summation of theological knowledge), a titanic treatise of 21 volumes dealing with the Christian viewpoint on such matters as logic, metaphysics, theology, psychology, ethics and politics. Accepting Aristotle's principle that every effect has a cause, every cause a prior cause, and so on back to a First Cause, Thomas declared that the existence of God could be proved by tracing all creation back to a divine First Cause, or Prime Mover. Also following Aristotle, he declared that the goal of life is the acquisition of truth.
The mild-mannered Thomas touched off an uproar more acrimonious than the one he was sent to still. First, he was suggesting that knowledge came not solely by divine revelation, but by a deliberate free act of the God-given human mind. He was saying that simple virtue was not enough; man must seek to understand. Second, he had arrived at his conclusions through the logic of Aristotle. Scholars and theologians had for some time now been marveling at the lucidity of Aristotle's reasoning. But few were disposed to have his philosophy incorporated into Christianity. The Bishop
Of Paris branded some of Thomas' propositions as heresy and threatened to excommunicate anyone supporting them. So did two successive Archbishops of Canterbury.
One man rose to counter the charges: Albertus Magnus, a Dominican who had taught Thomas more than 20 years before. At the age of 84 Albertus journeyed from Cologne to Paris, where he entreated the Dominicans to stand by their fellow friar. It took the Dominicans 50 years, but in the end the Church declared that Thomas was a saint and his writings were accepted as completely in accordance with Christian dogma.
Thomism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, now flowed side by side with an older stream of Christian thought. This was the belief propounded eight centuries earlier by St. Augustine, that all necessary knowledge came by divine revelation, not by ratiocination, and that to be pure in heart was more essential to salvation than to be clear of mind. This philosophy was best expressed during the 13th Century by Bonaventura and Duns Scolus. Bona-ventura, who was later to become General of the Franciscan Order, taught at the University of Paris while Thomas Aquinas was there. He was well versed in the works of Aristotle but, unlike Thomas, made no attempt to adapt them to the Christian point of view. Bonaventura favored mysticism over reason. Knowledge, he asserted, was less important than love.
Another Franciscan, Duns Scotus, also asserted the primacy of love over intellect. He searched into the power of human intellect and ended by contradicting not only Aristotle, but Thomas as well, saying it was impossible to arrive at a rational knowledge of God.
The rational theory of Thomas and the intuitive theory of Bonaventura and Scotus would coexist in intellectual circles for years to come. In time universities would treat philosophy and theology separately, the first the product of human reason, the second the result of divine revelation.
Literature, too, emerged from the medieval university, although in less solemn fashion. Then as now, students had streaks of ribaldry and nonsense, and scorned their elders. The later medieval era had its show of impudence from the goliards, freeloading footloose scholars who wrote lusty, impious verse glorifying their drinking bouts and escapades with women, parodying the ritual of the Church and lampooning the conventions of the day. The goliards—whose name may have derived from the Latin gula, "gullet"—flourished chiefly in Germany and France. But their songs, mostly written in Latin, found their way all through Christendom. Among several that have survived, one goes as follows:
Lit the public house to die Is my resolution;
Let wine to my lips be nigh At life's dissolution;
That will make the angels cry.
With glad elocution,
'Grant this toper, God on high,
Grace and absolution.'
Another variety of medieval versifier was the troubadour, who initially flourished in Provence, in the south of France. The troubadours were pioneer literary exponents of the everyday language of the vernacular as opposed to Latin. Like the goliards, the troubadours were wanderers, and irreverent of the Church. But they idealized gallantry instead of debauchery, and they were not professional scholars, but noblemen and courtiers. The first troubadour was William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, an ex-Crusader and bon vivant who not only dabbled in verse himself but gathered a host of poets around him. His granddaughter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, followed suit. Eleanor was feudal woman
At her most flamboyant. When her husband, King Louis VII of France, went off on the Second Crusade in 1147, she fitted herself and her ladies in waiting with breeches and hauberks and set off to join in the fun, trailing an entourage of troubadours behind her. En route, so gossip said, she had affairs with her uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, and with a Saracen slave. Back home again, she secured an ecclesiastical divorce from her royal husband, and married Henry Plantagenet, who two years later became Henry II and made her Queen of England. The troubadours and their art crossed the Channel with her; for all her private peccadilloes, Eleanor's patronage proved a boon to medieval literature.
The troubadours composed their own music and verses and hired minstrels to sing them at court and at tournaments. The earliest lyrics revered woman and celebrated illicit love with pagan abandon. As time went on and feudalism settled into mannered convention, the dalliances of which the knights sang grew more fictitious than real, and their poetry, which began with sensuality in the 12th Century, turned spiritual in the 13th.
In the north of France trouveres, less aristocratic and less delicate of manner than the troubadours, were idealizing heroism and adventure in ballads and lays and chansons de gesfe—tales based on history, embellished with fancy and written in verse. All of the chansons dealt in some way with Charlemagne, his court and his successors. This genre gave the world one of its greatest epics, the Song of Roland, in which Roland, Charlemagne's nephew, lying mortally wounded by the Saracens, refuses to sound his horn to summon Charlemagne's help until he is at the point of death.
After the chanson came the roman, an ancestor of the modern novel, in which love took a place with war in the affairs of men. The tales of King Arthur and his Round Table, as they accumulated.
IMAGINATIVE CREATIONS ofa 12th Century monk's fertile mind, these exotic people illustrate medieval man's fascinated conjectures about the denizens of distant lands. To the right of the dog-headed man in the top row are three oddities supposedly from India. The fifth man is located, with a distinction not clear today, in the "Orient." Another "Oriental," the first man in the second row, has a low er lip that curls back over his head. The crowned centaur and the horned man with the flutelike nose, in the same rout, are "Ethiopians," udiile the flipperfooted person to the right supposedly comes from "Libya," the ancient Creek name for Africa. Another purported Ethiopian in the bottom row uses his huge foot as a sunshade while a hoofed "Scythian" plays a crude viol. To the right, a giant towers over battling pygmies in India.
Became romans. King Arthur was a legendary Sixth Century Briton who defended western England against the Saxons. The account of his prowess was circulated by word of mouth for generations, spreading from Wales through England, France, Germany and down to Italy. By the 12th Century, when the stories of Lancelot's love of Guinevere and the quest for the Holy Grail had been added, Robert of Wace and Chretien de Troyes, trouveres of Jersey and Champagne, put the Arthurian tales into French verse, turning the entire series of narratives into romans.
England in this period was still under Norman influence, and French was the language of conversation and letters alike. English did not become established as a language until the 14th Century, with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a series of stories told by traveling pilgrims in rhymed couplets blending the bawdiness and reverence of the age, and William Langland's Piers Plowman, an allegory satirizing the rich, the law and the Church.
German Minnesingers, like the troubadours, moved from court to court and sang of love (Minne is archaic German for love). They thrived until the town displaced the manor in importance. In their stead came the Meistersingers, who were products of the artisan and trading classes.
The literature most favored by the bourgeoisie was in the form of fabliaux—short metrical tales which satirized feudal conventions, feminine guile, human failings, clerical pomp and Christian ritual. Here was a clear-cut sign of waning respect for authority. By poking barbs at the status quo, satire in any age gives vent to irritation and expresses disenchantment. It pierces such human frailties as sham or avarice and does so in the current idiom; the society it scoffs at is one whose conventions have become stilted and cover a multitude of sins. So it was in 13th Century Europe. Feudalism had become overmannered, courtly love was more affectation than affection, and the clergy cared more for gold than the Golden Rule. The medieval fabliaux carried a hint of trouble ahead for the Age of Faith.
At the beginning of the 13th Century, some of the troubadours dispersed to Italy, where they became trovatori. The trovatori transmitted the northern fashion for ethereal love into the Italian dialects. In less than a century they had molded the language that Dante would call "illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial," and that would produce the Divine Comedy.
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 of impoverished Florentine aristocrats. When he was nine he fell in love with Beatrice, a patrician child, who for the rest of his life would haunt his heart and move his pen. At 30 he was elected to the municipal council but was later banished from the city after a coup d'etat by the opposition party. Embittered and homeless, he wandered in exile for 16 years, writing now in Latin, now in Italian, of politics, love and philosophy. When at last he created his magnum opus, he called it simply Commedia because, he explained, the story passed from despair to happiness and because "it is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak."
Dante's immortal poem is an account of his passage through hell and purgatory, guided by Vergil, and of his entry into heaven with the spirit of Beatrice. Throughout the journey he discourses on good and evil in the manner of the philosophers. He populates hell and purgatory with nefarious popes and men of state in the manner of the satirists. He makes his love for Beatrice ethereal in the manner of the troubadours. He fits the whole into a complex scheme of mysticism in the manner of the theologians. He describes a foul and murky hell in the superstitious idiom of the folk. Yet throughout, by choosing Vergil to guide him toward salvation, Dante venerates dispassionate wisdom and classic grace in the manner of the Renaissance to come. The Divine Comedy is the literary peak of the Middle Ages, for it is at once medieval thought in flower and Renaissance thought aborning.
Two other men, Petrarch and Boccaccio, shared with Dante the founding of Italian letters. At the dawn of the 14th Century, when he wrote, both were adolescents; they would come to maturity with the Renaissance. Petrarch shared Dante's bitterness of temperament but not his penchant for mysticism and allegory; he glorified the sensuous and worldly life. Boccaccio filled his work with good and evil as Dante did, but accepted all sorts and all conditions of men as they were, without Dante's longing for perfection.
The great majority of medieval people comforted themselves, in their short and difficult lives, with hopes of a better life in the world to come. Increasingly, however, there came the humanists, who honored man's temporal aspirations and sought his well-being here and now. With the Renaissance, the humanist point of view would triumph, and its triumph still endures. The emergence of humanism was no accident, but rather a testament to the vision of men like Gerbert and Fulbert, the audacity of men like Abelard and the courage of men like Thomas Aquinas. Dante reaped where all these had sown. Intellectually, he marked the climax of the medieval era.
It was an era that began with the silent scriven-ing of the monks and culminated in the joyous song of the troubadours. It began with humble obedience to the aiictores, went on to sober scrutiny of the Faith, and ended with impious mocking of church and state. Superstition and ignorance would linger, but learning at last had passed into the mainstream of society, and thought was venturing farther afield than it had since the Athenian meridian nearly 2,000 years before.
A RESPLENDENT KNIGHT, the professional soldier of medieval times, is ceremonially armed by his womenfolk with visored helmet and heraldic shield.
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