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Aen. 2.624–631; 4.401–407; 6.706–709; Stat. Theb. 5.591–604; 7.435–440; Sil. It. 4.300–310; Petr. 123, 229–237. Vd. A. Setaioli, “La poesia in Petr. Sat. 128, 6 (con una postilla su 132, 15)”, Invigilata Lucernis 21, 1999, 404–406.
A. Martin—O. Primavesi, L'Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–1666). Introd., édit. et comm., with an English Summary, Berlin-New York 1999.
Martin-Primavesi, op. cit. L'Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–1666). Introd., édit. et comm., with an English Summary, Berlin-New York 1999., 135 [a (II) 12–15].
Cf. p. es. A. Schiesaro, Simulacrum et imago. Gli argomenti analogici nel De rerum natura, Pisa 1990, 34 n. 14.
Cf. A. Setaioli, Si tantus amor …: Studi virgiliani, Bologna 1998, 191–202; Id., “Postilla al problema della doppia redazione del quarto libro delle Georgiche”, Prometheus 25, 1999, 177–180.
Vd. i lavori citati alla nota precedente.
Cf. E. McCartney, “Vivid Ways of Indicating Uncountable Numbers,” Classical Philology 55, 1960, 79–89.
Fin da Hom. Il. 2.468 e Od. 9.51 (fiori e foglie). Cf Apoll. Rhod. 4.214–218 (onde e foglie), e vd. McCartney, art. cit., 88–89.
R. O. A. M. Lyne, “Scilicet et tempus veniet …” Virgil, Georgics 1.463–514”, in: Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, ed. by T. Woodman and D. West, Cambridge 1974, 54.
Vd. A. Setaioli, “L'impostazione letteraria del discorso di Pitagora nel XV libro delle Metamorfosi”, in: Ovid. Werk und Wirkung. Festgabe f. M. von Albrecht zum 65. Geburtstag, I, ed. W. Schubert, Studien zur Klassischen Philologie 100, Frankfurt 1999, 493–494; 498–504.
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[Vgl. den Rezensionsartikel von W. Heinz, „Von der Antike zur Renaissance: Zur Frage der Kontinuität römischer Bäder”, in dieser Zeitschrift (IJCT) 6 (1999/2000), 67–75.—W.H.]
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J. de Ghellinck, Le Mouvement Théologique du XIIe siècle: sa préparation lointaine avant et autour de Pierre Lombard, ses rapports avec les initiatives des canonistes. Études, recherches et documents, 2nd ed., Museum Lessianum, Section Historique, no. 10 (Bruges / Brussels / Paris: De Tempel / Universelle / Desclée de Brouwer, 1948; repr. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1969); Id., L'Essor de la Littérature Latine au XIIe Siècle, 2nd ed., Museum Lessianum, Section Historique, nos 4–5 (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1955); M. Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters III=Walter Otto ed., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, Abt. 9, Teil 2, Band 3 (Munich: C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1931).
Godman provides no bibliography of secondary literature, though his notes reveal a wealth of modern scholarship, particularly in German—a circumstance which will be of great interest to English-only readers.
‘Self-censorship, humanism and intellectual change in twelfth-century Europe’ might have been a more faithful title / sub-title, or ‘The origins of the inquisitional mentality’, or ‘From humanism to the universities’.
E.g.: ‘Tolerance implied verification. Hence Robert of Melun's hermeneutics. Related to the decisions of 1148, they elaborate Abelard's thought on the subject” (p. 336) or ‘Philosophy, defined as love of wisdom, offering a rational approach to theology, the unity of culture served as a guarantee of the “physicist-philosopher”'s liberty’ (p. 232).
There are, of course, some real elegancies and striking expressions: for example, Godman describes the tensions in Bernard of Clairvaux's work as ‘From a refusal to write to quotation, from instruction to admonition and command: the movement of thought enacted in Bernard's self-conscious prose is one of successive attraction and repulsion’ (p. 20); ‘a rubble of unanswered questions’ (p. 326); as well as a tendency towards being unable to resist a certain archness of phraseology: p. 96 where Godman describes Abelard as the ‘new Goliath’ and Bernard as ‘the non-David’.
The work of Beth Bennett on the Rhetorimachia of Anselm of Besate, however, is not mentioned in the footnotes (see, for example, her ‘The significance of the Rhetorimachia of Anselm de Besate to the history of rhetoric’, Rhetorica 5∶3 [1987] 31–40 and ‘The rhetoric of Martianus Capella and Anselm de Besate in the tradition of Menippean satire,’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 24∶2 [1991] 128–42).
C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: cathedral schools and social ideals in Medieval Europe 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1994).
‘John of Salisbury, Gerard Pucelle and Amicitia’, in: Julian Haseldine (ed.), Friendship in Medieval Europe (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1999), pp. 153–65.
Silent Masters, middle of p. 10.
Cf. Southern, Scholastic Humanism, II, ch. 7.
Southern Scholastic Humanism, II, pp. 97–98.
Silent Masters, pp. 15–29 and note the treatment by Flahiff, cited Godman p. 11; L. Bianchi, ‘Censure, liberté et progrès intellectuel, à l'Université de Paris au XIIe siècle’, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 63 (1996) 45–93; and Godman's The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 80 (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
For recent work on this topic see Heinrich Fichtenau Ketzer und Professoren: Häresie und Vernunftglaube im Hochmittelater (Munich: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchandlung, 1992), English as: Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages 1000–1200, Trans. Denise A. Kaiser (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1998; and G. R. Evans's Bernard of Clairvaux, Great Medieval Thinkers Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Evans here emphasises the difference between St. Bernard (who reflects the ‘monastic tradition’) and the academic theologians of the day, rather than the similarities evident in the approach of both groups to questions of error and authority. Evans' earlier work on Bernard is: The Mind of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Silent Masters, pp. 77ff. there is a very original view of Abelard's Dialogus involved here—pp. 79, 81—and of Sermo #33—p. 82. ‘Now there was no way back, and this misplaced monk and unsuccessful abbot rewrote, with obsessive care, the work intended to compensate for his failure in the institutional parts he had tried to play. If episcopal magisterium was dubious and abbatial influence suspect, he would prove, in that final product of a thwarted talent in search of recognition, the Theologia “scholarium”, that the philosopher might be sacralised' (p. 86). This is powerful writing.
For example, Abelard's self-identification with Jerome who, as a figure rejecting dogmatism in all its guises and praising the contemplative life above worldly ambition, had a special appeal for Abelard in his new life within the cloister. See The Silent Masters, p. 82.
The discussion of constraints upon Rupert's licentia scribendi/tractandi is not only pertinent to Godman's theme of (self-)censorship, but a tidy indication of the difference between Godman's and Southern's view of Rupert and his world. See Southern, Scholastic Humanism II, ch. 1.
See J. O. Ward and F. Bussey (eds.), Worshipping Women: misogyny and mysticism in the Middle ages, six essays and a note on the Ruthwell Cross, Sydney Studies in History 7 (Sidney: Sydney University History Department, 1997).
Cf. J. O. Ward, ‘Rhetoric, Truth, and Literacy in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,’ in: R. L. Enos (ed.), Oral and Written Communication: historical approaches, Written Communication Annual 4 (Newbury Park, California: Sage, 1990), pp. 126ff., and our comments on R. W. Southern in section II below (pp. 437–46).
Governance of the Church of God; the regulation of Christian life; the conversion of non-Christians and the defence of Christians against non-Christians who could not be converted. We have derived these points from an informative lecture by Amanda Power, entitled ‘Non-Europeans in the work of Roger Bacon’, delivered at a conference organised by the Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies on 22–23rd August, 2001 and with the title: ‘Travel and Cartography from Bede to the Enlightenment’.
For example Rupert of Deutz and the Cistercians, to take two monastic ‘projects’—and we must speak too, here, as Southern does, of the regular canons, the Victorine school, and, later, the mendicants: Southern, Scholastic Humanism II, ch. 1 and pp. 28–31. On the economic aspects of change in the period see R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution c.970–1215 (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000) and Georges Duby, ‘La «Renaissance» du XIIe siècle: Audience et patronage’, in his Mâle Moyen Age. De l'amour et autres essais, ser. Nouvelle bibliothèque scientifique (paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 180–202; english as: ‘The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century: audience and patronage,’ in: Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett Cambridge (Chicago, Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 149–67; also Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, I. Foundations (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 135.
Bianchi, Flahiff, and cf. Godman, p. 344.
Silent Masters, p. 91—William of St. Thierry to St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Cf. Gillian Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: the beginnings of theology as an academic discipline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) preface.
Southern, Scholastic Humanism II.
This is an aspect of Southern's work criticised by Rodney Thomson in his forthcoming review of Scholastic Humanism (for the Journal of Religious History).
Silent Masters, p. 103: cf. also pp. 110 (Berengar), 145, 148.
Hence the title of Godman's book; cf. also pp. 3, 108, 110 etc.
Bernard, ‘brushing aside reason’, evoked, through eloquence, ‘a higher righteousness in the simple act of faith’ (p. 98).
1 Cor 11:19, Silent Masters, p. xv.
Southern, Scholastic Humanism II, p. 132 alleges that ‘Gilbert saved himself by the extreme complexity of his thought’. Constant Mews, in his forthcoming review of Godman's book (in Parergon 18.3 [2001] 190–191), criticizes Godman for sidestepping such issues.
See the review by John Marenbon of I. Ronca's recent edition and Ronca and M. Curr's translation of William's Dragmaticon, IJCT 7 (2000/01) 618–620.
Cf. p. 170 ‘… a certain majesty, derived from the great names of antiquity’.
It is necessary to stress here that Godman is not claiming that humanism valued practical knowledge over ‘learning for the sake of learning’. The notions of concordantia artium and practical, applicable learning are not quite the same thing. The goal of the former was a typically scholastic goal. Godman is arguing, like Southern, that the distinction between humanism and scholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is unhelpful.
Cf. the reference to Hermeticism p. 258, but note p. 282 ‘But neither Bernardus’ style nor his thought is hermetic’ (p. 282). For a slightly different comment on the Mathematicus see J. O. Ward, ‘Magic and Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations’, Rhetorica 6 (1988) 57–118, here 94ff.
D. M. Stone, The Mathematicus of Bernardus Silvestris (doctoral diss, University of Sydney, 1988) [part 2—the discursive chapters of the dissertation] pp. 41–42. For an informative recent discussion of Bernardus' commentary on the Aeneid see David Pike's ‘Bernard Silvestris’ Descent into the Classics: The Commentum super sex libros Aeneidos’, IJCT 4 (1997/98), pp. 343–363.
Metalogikon I.22, trans. D. D. McGarry, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: a twelfth-century defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium (Berkeley, California: University of California Press 1962), p. 63.
And cf. p. 303: Alan's purpose is ‘authoritarian. This policeman of the intellect aspires to promotion as inquisitor’.
See J. O. Ward, ‘Rhetoric, Truth, and Literacy in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’ (above, n. 18). in:.
See G. Constable and R. L. Benson (eds.), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. xxviii.
Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, vol. 1 (Paris: Ex typis fratrum Delalain, 1889; repr. Bruxelles: Culture et Civilisation, 1964), pp. 67–68, (I.8), 1208 A.D. This formula of ‘self-censorship’ provided the key to the conundrum of how to censor without being censored.
Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: the schools of Paris and their critics 1100–1215 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press 1985).
c. 1155–60—Godman p. 295 and cf. p. 300.
M.-Th. D'Alverny, Alain de Lille: textes inédits, avec une introduction sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, Études de Philosophie Médiévale 52 (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1965), pp. 163, 295–7 and ed. on pages following. The sermo forms fols. 269–282 in a volume of little works and fragments of sermons found in the Abbey of St. Martial of Limoges (MS Paris BN lat. 3572). The relevant folios are apparently s.xii and contain some 30 sermons and similar opuscula. G. R. Evans, Alan of Lille. The frontiers of theology in the later twelfth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 59 assumes the sermo is authentic. See Evans pp. 53ff for a discussion of the role of Hermeticism in Alan's thinking.
On Hermeticism in Bernardus Silvestris see Silent Masters, p. 258.
B. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: a study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 126–27.
See Virginia Cox, ‘Ciceronian rhetoric in Italy, 1260–1350’, Rhetorica 17 (1999) 280. See also Silent Masters, p. 117: ‘Less laudable and more dangerous was rhetoric …’.
See Ward, (above, n. 34) ‘.
‘That is why Alan of Lille struggled with the problem of expression and content …. After the Mathematicus and the Cosmographia, there was no going back. But it was unclear how one should go forward …’ (p. 309). ‘God, in the verbose vision of the Anticlaudianus, is portrayed as a rhetorician’ (p. 312). Huizinga, it seems, ‘erred’ in the ‘rhetorical’ direction when assessing Alan's significance (Silent Masters, pp. 311–12). Godman's discussion on pp. 312–13 does, however, suggest that Alan might have been a more experimental figure in terms of ‘integumentum’ (and therefore less distant from Bernardus Silvestris and his generation) than we might otherwise suppose, and at p. 346 he admits that Alan straddled the age of the concordantia artium and that of the new proto-university magistri. After all, why devote so much time to putting his ‘policing message’ in such highly ornate and rhetorical, poetic terms? At least early in life, Alan must have been a professional practitioner of the art of ‘ornatus, of “rhetorical colors”’, and hence as someone who took part in the debate concerning the utility and construction of (poetic) integumentum (p. 309 and cf. reference to his ‘rivals’ p. 310, and his indebtedness to Matthew of Vendôme p. 314). The vitriol of Jean of Hauvilla's debunking of Alan (pp. 318ff) again suggests much rivalry and competitive experiment over the proper mode of delivery of the rhetorico-poetic ‘integumentum’ and even over whether this ‘integumentum’ was in fact a substantive mantle of truth or simply a threadbare excuse for knowledge and learning. Fichtenau (op. cit., above, n. 13, ch. 7) Heinrich Fichtenau Ketzer und Professoren: Häresie und Vernunftglaube im Hochmittelater (Munich: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchandlung, 1992), sees much more in common between Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille, as indeed does Winthrop Wetherbee (Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: the literary influence of the school of Chartres [Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972]). In Fichtenau's reading the ‘school of Chartres’ represented a group of interconnected thinkers studying and teaching at Chartres (and elsewhere), fascinated by the potential of (a) Timaean Platonism, (b) pagan mythological lore (Fichtenau, German: p. 190=English, p. 206) and (c) language as integumentum, to represent the steps between God and created things (Fichtenau, pp. 7–8, 20–22, 164, 178, 192–93, 276–77, 280, 282, 283–85=pp. 2, 17–19, 177, 192, 209, 302, 306, 308, 310–12). The liberal arts played a key role in assisting the understanding and the execution of this project (cf. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon I.24 etc.). As time passed, ‘students’ (i.e. Bernard Silvestris, Alan of Lille but not Thierry of Chartres) found poetic expression a useful mask and medium (Fichtenau, pp. 173–74, 176–77=pp. 187, 191). Here they blended (1) dictamen in the general compositional sense (as distinct from epistolography), (2) the colores and ‘artes poetriae’ as practiced in the eleventh century (cf. Gerald Bond, The Loving Subject: desire, eloquence, and power in Romanesque France [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995]), and (3) the formal trivium study of Graeco-Roman rhetoric (of which the Ad Herennium commentary of ‘Magister Alanus’ was the soon-to-be sidelined high point). Other ‘students’, such as Hermann of Carinthia (Fichtenau, pp. 232–33=pp. 252–53) developed an interest in quadrivial studies. Fichtenau is thus seeking to ‘describe’ what he takes to be the key features of twelfth century intellectual life, orthodox and heterodox, and his compass is thus broader and less pointed than Godman's.
See Beverly M. Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229: preaching in the Lord's Vineyard (York, England: University of York Centre for Medieval Studies, Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 172–73.
Intriguingly, like his great (rhetorical?) predecessor in the arts and propaedeutic knowledge, the eleventh-century Master Menegaldus, the Master Alanus of the upwards of 45 works that have been ascribed to him, might be a number of separate masters.
And note pp. 36–37 of H. Roussel and F. Suard, (eds.), Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jaklemart Giélée et leur temps [Actes du colloque de Lille, Octobre, 1978] Lille: Presses Universitaires [Centre d'Études Médiévales et Dialectales] 1980).
Cf. Fichtenau German p. 145=English p. 155 for a less loaded comment on the same passage.
Eugenius III plays an underrated role in all this: pp. 335–36.
Compare, for example, coincidences between Gillian Evans' remarks on ‘a missionary theology’ (Old Arts, ch. IV) and Godman p. 346, or the arrival p. 324 at exactly the point to which Wetherbee brought us at the end of his Platonism and Poetry, chs. 6 and 7. Wetherbee's view of the Architrenius ‘which seems to have been written at least partly to challenge the view of the relations between man and Nature presented by Alan’ (p. 242) is more serious than Godman's if less sharply drawn.
Southern, Scholastic Humanism I, p. 24.
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: power and deviance in western Europe 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981)
See The Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 123, 143
Heretics and Scholars (above, n. 13). ; Godman touches frequently upon the subject of heresy (pp. 103–08, 113, 138, and cf. the index p. 366 s.v. ‘heresy’). There are even certain themes in common. Fichtenau, for example, is prepared to admit Godman's sense of a movement away from, ‘the rudimentary curriculum of the “liberal arts” ‘towards’ specialized training in the subjects of grammar, logic, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine’ (Fichtenau, German pp. 11 and 217, 228–29=English pp. 6 and 235–48), admits the advent of University-based institutionalisation of learning at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and, like Southern sees the emphasis of the thirteenth century to be based upon but greatly differring from the emphasis of the twelfth century (p. 12–13=p. 8). ‘Catharism, Platonism, and religious spirituality [he argues] were distinct phenomena. They did not define the twelfth century; indeed they are only associated with relatively small groups of individuals. That these modes of thought could coexist side by side, however, testifies to the unique niche occupied by this century in European history. Here are the first rumblings of a sea-change to come … We have yet to treat of the most important of these changes, the shift to a more rigorous rationality’ (p. 195=p.212) and part III of Fichtenau's study delivers this treatment, parallel in many ways to the theme of Godman's book (without the concern with ‘self-censorship’). Such observations, however, are common enough thoughts, and much of Fichtenau's book is a matter of stating, in German, territory already marked out in other languages in regard to the history of ‘heresy’ and intellectual life in the period. Such an emphasis takes him beyond the elite thinkers Godman is dealing with and makes it all the harder to reduce Fichtenau to a few key ‘idées fixes’. Dealing with the inter-twining of heterodoxy and innovative thought to the exclusion of much (the vernacular, mysticism among women, the occult, witchcraft and alchemy, popular culture and religion, medicine, law the artes mechanicae, architecture and art, politics, political theory and the state, the literacy debate, the economic background, to name but a few items), Fichtenau seems to eschew the wider picture or the extravagant theme, and here the contrast between his work and those by Godman, Jaeger, Moore (The First European Revolution [above, n. 20] c.970–1215 (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), Formation of a Persecuting Society, ect) and Southern is most marked.
R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953). Godman's only references in his book proper to Southern are critical; for example p. 169 n. 104.
Silent Masters, p. xii.
Southern, Scholastic Humanism I and II.
Ch. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), ch. IV. For more up-to-date treatments of classicizing humanism in the twelfth century see H. Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London: Warburg Institute 1959, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint 1968 with further material pp. 127ff.); Peter Weimar (ed.), Die Renaissance der Wissenschaften, im 12. Jahrhundert, Zürcher Hochschulforum 2 (Zürich: Artemis, 1981); Peter von Moos, Geschichte als Topik: Das rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die historiae im “Policraticus” Jahanns von Salisbury, Ordo 2 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1988); J. O. Ward, ‘The young Heloise and Latin rhetoric: some preliminary comments on the ‘lost” love-letters and their significance on the Latin rhetoric of Heloise’ (with Neville Chiavaroli), in: Bonnie Wheeler (ed.), Listening to Heloise: the voice of a twelfth-century woman, New Middle Ages Series (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 53–119. Peter Dronke's review of this book, in which he favours chs. 1, 2, 8 and 12, finding little of merit in ch. 4 (my own and Neville Chiavaroli's chapter), has appeared previously in IJCT 8 (2001/02) 134–39. His comments on my own and Neville Chiavaroli's chapter (4) do not really engage with the close (re?)reading we had hoped for from reviewers (natural enough since Dronke long ago decided the ‘Lost Love-Letters' were NOT the work of abelard and Heloise), but what he does say is easily countered. The idea that Heloise gave the ‘Lost Love-Letters’ to Bernarrd of Clairvaux is not ours, but Constant Mews’ (The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: perceptions of dialogue in twelfth-century France [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999; repr. New York and Basing-stoke: Palgrave, 2001], p. 176). In regard to our sample of ‘cursus’ habits in the ‘Lost Love-Letters’, Dronke is belittling, since we oppose his own deductions in this area. Of course the prose rhythms of the ‘Lost Love-Letters’ will differ from those of the later letters, and as for the size of the sample, Dronke himself is satisfied with samples of 200 sentence-endings (Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Storia e letteratura 183 [Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992], p. 297). Is that any more indicative than 38, and do we claim anything other than what we state? Next time, however, we will be more industrious and sample at least 200 sentence-endings. …
Silent Masters, p. xii. For a fresh look at ‘humanism’ see Robert Black, ‘Humanism’, in: Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History VII 1415–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
R. M. Thomson (forthcomming review of Southern's work in the Journal of Religious History) claims that ‘it is my understanding that we will never see the third [volume]’. This is indeed a tragedy for twelfth- and thirteenth-century cultural studies. See also Johl Marenbon's review of Southern Scholastic Humanism I, IJCT 6(1999/2000) 569–77.
I, pp. 177–78 and II, pp. 168–69 etc.
The view of Dante and Thomas Aquinas (I, p. 43), for example seems over-stated: See L. P. Boyle, “The setting of the Summa Theologica, of Saint Thomas’, Etienne Gilson Lecture Series (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982 [30 pp]).
I, pp. 177–78 and II, pp. 168–69 on John at the papal curia.
Southern's treatment of Thierry of Chartres may qualify here: I, pp. 84–87; II, pp. 79–89. Constant Mews (personal communication) would also place Southern's treatment of Abelard's theology in this category.
Southern's dislike of the view of those scholars who posit a ‘school of / at Chartres’ pursuing aims that were qualitatively different from those pursued at Paris, Bologna and else-where is based on his dislike of untidy schemes. The existence of such a ‘school of / at Chartres' sunders the unity of the development Southern is describing and creates ‘a very particular kind of humanism, standing in strong contrast to the supposedly anti-humanistic tendencies of the more successful schools of Paris and of the whole programme designated by the words “scholastic” and “scholasticism”, and this’ Southern believes to be ‘wholly mistaken and to limit our understanding of the development of scholastic thought’ (I, p. 60). In fact, of course, it does not; rather, it enriches our understanding, and Godman would have no problem with the view Southern is opposing so vigorously. Indeed, Southern's view of the ‘uniformity’ of early scholastic thought (cf. I, pp. 79–80, 98 and his Platonism, Scholastic Method and the School of Chartres, Stenton Lecture 1978 [Reading: University of Reading, 1979]), a view that he tends to back away from in vol. II, is an example of his tendency to be striking and assertive, even if, in a duller sense, ‘wrong’.
Compare statement of theme I, p. 1 with vol. II, pp. 3–6, 151–53. See further the criticisms of Southern in the writings of R. M. Thomson (‘England and the Twelfth-century Renaissance’, Past and Present 101 [1983] 3–21—reprinted as item XIX in Thomson's England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance [Aldershot, Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998]; ‘Serlo of Wilton and the schools of Oxford’, Medium Aevum 68 [1999] 1–12). Rodney Thomson in his forthcoming review notes Southern's failure to deal with literary women in his period and his general neglect of German humanism and scholarship. In all fairness, however, one must remember Southern's theme: ‘the first expression of a scientific humanism which went on developing for two hundred years until it was submerged in a sea of doubts and contradictions’ (Scholastic Humanism I, p. 21). Such a phenomenon was the expression of an over-whelmingly patriarchal high culture. Southern's treatment of the role of the formal study of rhetoric in the twelfth century is also inadequate (though note his work on the Peters of Blois in II, ch. 12).
Which is not, for example, discussed anywhere in volume II. For Southern's view of humanism, cf. vol. I, pp. 19, 21, 54 (‘The characteristic strength of medieval scholastic thought was its elaboration of the authoritative statements of the past’), 78: II, pp. 110, 172–73. It is difficult to see Godman disagreeing with much of this.
I, p. 3.
II, pp. 151–53, 172–75, and II, ch. 12.
I, pp. 4–5, 10, 22, 35 (and for the place of the sciences, pp. 37–39); II, p. 92.
II, especially chs. 5, 6, 9 and pp. 207ff.
Cf. also here Gillian Evans, Old Arts.
I, p. 2.
To which vol. III of the trilogy, it seems, was to be devoted.
I, p. 2.
I, p. 12.
I, p. 10.
I, p. 21 and cf. p. 52.
I, p. 13.
On which topics see R. W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1977) and the same author's ‘The social significance of twelfth-century chivalric romance’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 3 (1972) 3ff; Penny Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: image, attitude and experience in twelfth-century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); C. N. L. Brooke, ‘Heresy and Religious Sentiment 1000–1250,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968) 115ff.
Now fashionable with the work of Moore, Fichtenau etc. and cf. Gillian Evans, Old Arts, ch. IV.
I, p. 4. Cf. Gillian Evans' ‘a missionary theology,’ Old Arts, ch. IV.
For example, II, p. 134, ‘… the most important intellectual goal of the schools of northern Europe …’; II, p. 136, ‘… the first aim of all scholarship was to collect from authoritative texts a body of statements on all subjects of both natural and supernatural knowledge, and then to arrange these two bodies of knowledge in a systematic form’.
I, ch. 3 on the bible and II, chs. 2–9 on the task of converting glosses on it into a master-summa.
Paris for theology (I, ch. 6), Bologna for law (I, chs. 8–9).
The roles of Pope and University are mentioned I, p. 161, that of the masters themselves in I, chs. 4 and 5.
Society in general: I, p. 8 and chs 4–5, 7 and II, pp. 5, 27, 42–43.
‘It was he [Anselm of Laon] who first emphatically succeeded in making the text of the Bible a suitable subject for a secular school, and so drew theology out of its earlier monastic environment into the schools for secular clergy attached to—then increasingly detached from—cathedrals’ (II, p. 46).
Hugh's De sacramentis ‘is the first original medieval Summa theologica: elaborate, universal, and the product of a single mind’ (II, p. 57).
‘Peter the Lombard's book [Four Books of Sentences] may therefore be claimed as one of the great formative works of western intellectual history. … It was the immovable textbook of a scholastically unified Christendom’ (II, pp. 143, 145).
I, p. 181. R. M. Thomson in his review of Southern (forthcoming [see n. 64 above] review of Southern's work in the Journal of Religious History) claims that ‘it is my understanding that we will never see the third [volume]’. This is indeed a tragedy for twelfth- and thirteenth-century cultural studies. See also John Marenbon's) wishes Southern had spent more time on the satirists, but this would be to ask of him what he had little interest in supplying.
Scholastic Humanism I, p. 7.
See for example Knowing Ourselves and Others: the humanities in Australia into the 21st Century, prepared by a Reference Group for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 3 vols. (Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 1998).
Jaeger, Envy of Angels. Jaeger's review article, “Decline and Rise in the Culture of the Twelfth Century,” on R.N. Swanson's The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999) has appeared in the previous issue of the present Journal (IJCT 8 [2001–02] 245–253). Against Godman's view of the importance of Alan of Lille, and Southern's view of the focal significance of Peter the Lombard, Jaeger proposes a ‘clash’ between eleventh-century ‘literary/poetic/charismatic culture’ and twelfth-century emphases upon logic and theology, arguing that ‘It is time to scrap [the term] “Renaissance” [when applied to the twelfth century A.D. in Europe]. It is now more trouble than it is worth …’ (p. 253). I have myself reviewed Swanson's book at some length (in the on-line The Medieval Review—<tmr-l@listserv.cc.wmich.edu>) and cannot agree with Jaeger that the term ‘Renaissance’ must now be abandoned. Certainly Jaeger has put the eleventh-century firmly on the map, so to speak (although there is still much key work to be done, for instance on the arts teaching of the shadowy ‘Magister Menegaldus’—Manegold of Lautenbach?), and Southern's view of the thirteenth century as ‘completing and systematising’ the somewhat inchoate work of the twelfth century has much to recommend it. Nevertheless, I do not think it can be seriously denied that the eleventh century was a kind of ‘overture’ to the full symphonic culture of the twelfth century, with the latter's major and mature emphasis upon classicising and innovative latin poetry and prose composition; its wide-ranging and innovative historiography; its polyvalency, or, as Lehmann put it, ‘Die Vielgestalt des zwölften Jahrhunderts’ (P. Lehmann, ‘Die Vielgestalt des zwölften Jahrhunderts’, Historische Zeitschrift 178 [1953] 225–250, and republished in his collected works, Erforschung des Mittelalters: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze III [Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1960], pp.225ff.)—developments in music, architecture, vernacular literature of all sorts; the maturation of scholasticism; great strides in communication theory and practice (dictamen, the artes poetriae, the initiation of the long line of artes predicandi, completion of the commentation project on Graeco-Roman rhetoric); its leading and ever-puzzling figures (Abelard and Hildegard of Bingen, to name but two). Whilst many of these elements and the thought of the important figures of the time were brought to fruition in the thirteenth century, much was lost with the push towards internal self-censorship and external thought and publication control. The alluring and evocative elements in twelfth-century culture are signalled by the use of the term ‘Renaissance’ and it would be a pity to lose this evocation. It is also worth pointing out that recent research is pushing our understanding of the contribution to ‘the Renaissance’ of areas hitherto thought to be ‘back-waters’, for example, Germany: readers have only to check the website <http://www.admont.org> to locate important details regarding ‘Manuscripts and monastic culture: Admont and the twelfth-century Renaissance (7–10 August 2002)’. Here the innovative and richly documented work of scholars such as Alison Beach, Rodney M. Thomson, Constant Mews, Giles Constable, Rachel Fulton, Valerie Flint, Fiona Griffiths, Johann Tomaschek, Adam Cohen, Stefanie Seeberg, Winfried Stelzer, Ralf Stammberger, Regina Schiewer, Morgan Powell, Christina Lutter, Peter Dinzelbacher and others will help illustrate the perspective Lehaann opened up on twelfth-century culture half a century ago. Indeed, works that have subsided into a measure of obscurity these days, such as the wide-ranging and excellent collection of studies edited by Peter Weimar (op. cit., n. 62 above) Peter Weimar (ed.), Die Renaissance der Wissenschaften, im 12. Jahrhundert, Zürcher Hochschulforum 2 (Zürich: Artemis, 1981), where fourteen German-speaking scholars ranged over topics as broadly separated as Jewish scholarship, Peter Abelard's philosophy, legal learning, Arabic-Greek medicine, Roger Bacon's ideas on the concept of natural law, architecture, music, letter-writing and poetic composition, the concept of knowledge and more, need to be looked at again before one closes the book on the term/concept of ‘The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’. Perhaps the organisers of the commemorative conference on the work of Charles Homer Haskins and the subsequent publication of papers delivered there (R.L. Benson and G. Constable [eds.], Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991]) were not overly mistaken in their emphases?
B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: written language and models of interpretation in eleventh and twelfth centuries (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983); M.-D. Chenu, La Théologie au Douzième Siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1957), partially tras. by J. Taylor and L. K. Little as Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: essays on new theological perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); preface by Etienne Gilson.
I, p. 7.
Southern argues that 1148 was ‘a turning point in the position of the schools in western society: the masters…had asserted their corporate authority in the central counsels of the Church. Never again could they be bulldozed into submission by non-academic enemies’ (II p. 131); here lay ‘a vindication of the power and independence of the masters; but at a deeper level, it was also a warning of the danger of withdrawal into the private world of the schools, in which language was spoken that was intelligible only to the initiated’ (II p. 130). Compare Godman, pp. 127–28 etc.
For example, Bianchi (above, n. 12) ‘.
At Orléans in 1022: A. P. Evans and W. L. Wakefield, Heresies of the High Middle Ages: selected sources translated and annotated (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 81.
Cf. Edward Grant, ‘Issues in natural philosophy at Paris in the late thirteenth century,’ Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 13 (1985) 75–94.
Ferruolo, The Origins of the University, p. 3.
Godman, Silent Masters, p. 340.
Silent Masters, p. 340. The so-called 1215 ‘statutes’ of Robert of Courçon were the outcome of a masters-inspired need to establish ground rules affecting dress, attendance at funerals and attitude towards academic tasks among the magistri in Paris at the time. There was no comprehensive attempt to ‘set out rules’ or establish ‘authority and control’. All that Robert did was to allay confusion, disorder and cross-purpose among the magistri with a minimum of working procedures.
II, pp. 123–32.
Cf. his Medieval humanism and other studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), ch.7.
To Godman's extensive and rich publications on Carolingian and pre-Carolingian Latin we may now add his superb From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998). Cf. p. 332 for Godman's range of citation.
Compare Southern on ‘pre-lapsarian knowledge’ (cited above) with Godman, p. 167, or Godman's emphasis upon ‘Utility, relevance, and applicability’ as ‘the criteria of the generation that came to maturity in the middle of the twelfth century’ (p. 165) with Southern's emphasis upon the pragmatic utility of scholastic knowledge (cited above). The point is also made by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the liberal arts in fifteenth—and sixteenth-century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), introduction.
Thus Mews, in his review (forthcoming):‘ … chapters [V and following] do not lend themselves easily to anllysis in terms of censorship, except in a forced, artificial kind of way. This does not weaken their value. It just suggests that the motif of censorship may not have been the best way to structure the book as a whole’.
Godman, Silent Masters, xii.
Aleuin Blamires (ed.), Women Defamed and Wome Defended: an anthology of medieval texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) (with bibliography p. 304); The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
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Fears, J.R., Setaioli, A., Heinz, W. et al. Review articles. Int class trad 8, 394–446 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-002-0004-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-002-0004-7