The Portable Medieval Reader
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
I. - The Body Social
The Orders of Men
Conflict, Protest, and Catastrophe
II. - THE CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH
The Spiritual Authority
The Temporal Authorities
Renewal and Reform
III. - THE HOUSE OF FAME
Bohemond the Crusader
IV. - THE WORLD PICTURE
The Frontiers of Europe: Conquest and Assimilation of Peoples
The Near East: Pilgrimage and Crusade
The Far East: Missionaries and Merchants
V. - THE NOBLE CASTLE
The Makers
PAINTERS AND BUILDERS
MUSICIANS
The Mirror of History
Acknowledgements
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
Medieval Reader
James Bruce Ross was professor of medieval and Renaissance history at Vassar College for many years. She is the author of studies of medieval Flanders and Renaissance Venice, including a translation of The Murder of Charles the Good by Galbert of Bruges.
Mary Martin McLaughlin is a medievalist and independent scholar, with special interests in the history of medieval women. She has written on various other subjects, including the medieval University of Paris, the history of childhood, and Heloise and Abelard.
James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin also co-edited The Portable Renaissance Reader.
Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.
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Copyright 1949 by Viking Penguin Inc. Copyright @ renewed James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, 1977 All rights reserved
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The portable medieval reader.
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Bibliography: p. 38.
1. Literature, Medieval. I. McLaughlin. Mary
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Introduction
I
ENTERING the lists in the enduring controversy between past and present, between “ancients” and “moderns,” Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer, complained that “the illustrious deeds of modem men of might are little valued, and the castaway odds and ends of antiquity are exalted.” In similar vein, a scientist of the same century, Adelard of Bath, deplored the domination of the present by the past, accusing his own generation of thinking “nothing discovered by modems worthy of acceptance.”
But Adelard’s contemporary, Bernard of Chartres, called “the most copious fount of letters in Gaul in modern times,” said of the relationship of his age with its ancient past, “We are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants; we see more things than the ancients and things more distant, but this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight nor the greatness of our own stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft on that giant mass.”
Yet, whatever their differences of perspective on the past, whether they resisted the authority of the “ancients,” or paid admiring tribute to their greatness, these men of the twelfth century were profoundly aware of living ties with the past. In fact, they, and their predecessors and successors as well, were confronted with the problem of the past in a particularly acute form. For theirs was the task of recovering and assimilating a vast cultural legacy from pagan antiquity and of reconciling it with the Christian revelation and way of life. Although they were by no means deficient in pride in their own achievement, the weight of their debt to the past often lay heavily on them.
In our “modern times,” we seldom have occasion to lament the hold of the past on the present, and we rarely feel dwarfed by its greatness. We are not often inclined to take a humble view of our own stature or to acknowledge a close kinship with the past, especially with the age represented by these men of the twelfth century. As Americans, we are separated by geography from the physical environment and many of the tangible evidences of this phase of the past, and by our truncated national history from the long “middle age” of Western culture which is as truly ours as it is that of European peoples. We are often still further divorced from our remoter history by a grandiose conception of progress in which our own role looms large and that of the future larger still. This orientation is a common one, although the optimistic theory on which it rests has grown somewhat threadbare in an age when human advancement appears more and more as “a slow crablike movement sideways.”
Yet there is much evidence today of a haunting awareness of failure, of dissatisfaction with modern perspectives, of an anxious pursuit of enlightenment in the sources of our culture. We are increasingly conscious of the fact that while in a sense history, as Voltaire cynically put it, is a pack of tricks the living play upon the dead, it is also a pack of tricks that the dead have played on us. We are pathetically eager to consult the past, as we might a psychiatrist, to discover when and where things went wrong, to probe for the roots of modern neuroses. Seeking to comprehend the meaning of our own experience, and to restore a sense of continuity with the past, we read the “great books,” we take courses in contemporary civilization and its background, we pore over complex works of historical interpretation. All this is surely a healthy sign that, whether we regard the past as a burden or as a legacy, we recognize that our ties with it are inseverable, and tha
t we may possibly profit from its experience.
But perhaps, even in these efforts, we view the past too much through the distorting lenses of the present. Great books and lesser ones, too, have great value, but really to be understood they must be read in the context of their own times. Probably no age can fully escape bondage to present-mindedness; when it looks into the mirror of the past, it sees, like Narcissus, its own image. Yet, in order to see ourselves at all clearly in the mirror of a different age, we must try to understand that age in its own terms, we must attempt to relive its experience and to rethink its thoughts. By transcending the limitations of the present, we may extend our experience in time and space, and perhaps come to know ourselves better.
The middle ages of Europe were the spawning ground of the modern Western world. In the teeming life of the medieval centuries many aspects of modern society—its nation-states, its institutions, its class structure, its urban way of life—existed in embryo or in more advanced stages of development. But medieval culture was complete and distinctive in itself. Although this culture and its modem descendant have much in common, they also differ profoundly and often in the most striking ways. Emphasis on the differences, rather than on the similarities, between medieval thought and experience and our own has often encouraged the feeling that this is a dead past, with no significance for the present. Yet no area of the past is dead if we are alive to it. The variety, the complexity, the sheer humanity of the middle ages live most meaningfully in their own authentic voices, for as Walter Map said of the ancients, “their diligent achievement is in our possession; they make their own past present to our times.” Not only in their “great books,” in the works of their extraordinary men, is the medieval achievement still vital, but also in the records of the lives and work, the pleasures, sufferings, and strivings of their ordinary people.
The aim of the Portable Medieval Reader is to provide, by means of selections from these sources, a little mirror of the middle ages in which medieval men and women may appear as they saw themselves and in which we may see the evidences of our kinship with them. Perhaps it may also fulfill the expectations of the medieval writer who said, “I believe that in future times there will be men, like myself, who will eagerly search the pages of historians for the acts of this generation, that they may be able to disclose occurrences which have taken place in past ages for the instruction and amusement of their contemporaries.”
II
If it is true that the middle ages are significant for us both as a distinct culture and as the ancestral form of our own, why does this period often seem dim and alien and in some way sharply cut off from our own? How did the concept of a “middle age” develop, and how has the term medieval acquired its rather vague and derogatory connotations of dark and barbarous? “Medieval” men like Walter Map and Adelard of Bath clearly thought of themselves as “modern” in relation to the “ancients.” Perhaps the arbitrary divisions and conventional characterizations of history do not represent eternal verity, but rather the special interests or the blind spots or the arrogance of different ages. The kind of thinking which tries to confine the unwieldy and intractable past in neat pigeonholes is one of those tricks which the living of one age play on the dead of another. It tends to exalt those periods with which a particular age may identify itself more closely and to pass over those which for one reason or another are less agreeable.
When the later humanists, feeling that they had discovered man and the world anew in the light of pagan antiquity, used the word renascita or renascence to describe their own time, they also characterized as the “middle ages” the period which in their view separated them from their antique models. By stressing the idea of a breach between their own time and that which preceded it, they asserted their independence of their immediate predecessors, and the novelty and originality of their own particular awareness and revival of the ancient heritage. This concept of a breach between the “middle ages” and the succeeding age, and its corollary, an opprobrious view of the earlier period as Gothic, dark, and barbarous, were adopted and developed from their own special viewpoints by the contemporaries and successors of the sixteenth-century humanists.
In breaking with the medieval Church, the Protestant reformers also emphasized the gap which separated them from a period dominated by that Church, rather than the continuity with medieval Christianity which much of their doctrine and practice represented. From another point of view, which made both Catholicism and conservative Protestantism the objects of its mocking assault, the rationalists of the eighteenth century liked to consider themselves infinitely remote, in their enlightenment, from “the thousand years of barbarism and religion,” a phrase with which one of their most eminent representatives, Edward Gibbon, dismissed this long period. It is possible to ask, with Carl Becker, whether the “heavenly city” of these eighteenth-century philosophers was, in the faith on which its basic premises of the perfectibility of man, illimitable human progress, and their corollaries, rested, as unmedieval as its exponents chose to believe. Does the eighteenth-century outlook reflect, as Becker suggests, an age of faith based on reason as contrasted with a medieval age of reason based on faith? At any rate, to the men of the Enlightenment, and in the nineteenth century to many men of science, the middle ages were a period, generally speaking, of religious obscurantism and intellectual darkness, in which the light of progress shone but dimly, if at all.
The more violent phases of the French Revolution, and its aftermath, altered the outlook of many thinkers. In reaction, there was an increasing emphasis on the continuity rather than the breaches of historical development. In the conservative view, such as that expressed by an opponent of revolution like Edmund Burke, the state as it had developed historically appeared as a tree, and society as a contract between the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. In the light of this interest in the continuous thread of historical growth, and reacting against the rationalism and classicism of the eighteenth century, the exponents of romanticism, such as Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, and others, tended to glorify and idealize the middle ages. They saw in this period an age more spirited and glamorous, more romantic, than their own nineteenth century, and sought to restore to life its people and its atmosphere.
From still another source, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with science and the application of scientific method to the study of man, a truer evaluation of the middle ages was fostered. Not only the long perspective of the evolutionary theory, but the scientific urge to see things as they really are, or were, which motivated many historians, has contributed largely in the last hundred years to the fuller and more objective study of the middle ages. As R. H. Tawney has said, “The past reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing and the face which to one age is a blank to another is pregnant with meaning.” The great surge of enthusiasm for St. Francis, the “little poor man” of Assisi, is a striking instance of the modern rediscovery and revaluation of the middle ages, so often inspired by romanticism and then developed by the more critical zeal of scientific history. The Christlike humanity of this saint, his tender love for man and for all the works of nature, made a profound appeal to the romantic idealism of the earlier nineteenth century, which responded ardently also to the poetry, paintings, and architecture of the land and century of St. Francis. His cult, always active among Catholics, spread widely beyond the circles of the Church and led to that scholarly probing into the sources of his life and work which has created a large school of Franciscan studies.
III
Whether the conventional divisions of history are viewed as reflections of the special concerns of successive periods, as conveniences of thought, or as substitutes for it, or perhaps as a legacy from the medieval conception of a series of well-defined ages, the use of these categories can hardly be avoided. Although the term middle ages is quite widely accepted for the period from the “fall of the Roman Empire” to the fifteenth century, few historians will venture to say precisely w
hen the period began or when it ended. In order to define its limits it is necessary to decide what is specifically “medieval,” and ten centuries is a very long time to characterize as a whole. Some historians have preferred to consider as separable phases of development the earlier period, from the fifth to the eleventh century, and the high and later middle ages which are the focus of the Medieval Reader. This conception is supported by the fact that the eleventh century was in many respects a definite turning point in European history.
By this time, the process of fusion of the varied elements, classical, Christian, and barbarian, which went into the making of Europe was well under way. In the breakdown of the ancient order, the Christian Church had emerged as the most direct heir of the organization and functions of the Roman Empire, to assume the task, in the earlier middle ages, of converting the barbarian peoples. After the collapse of the short-lived empire of Charlemagne and the renewed barbarian invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the civilizing influence of the Church and the emergence of feudal bonds had restored some measure of order in society. The energies hitherto absorbed in meeting assaults from without and disorder within were now freed; by the eleventh century, Latin Christendom was moving from the defensive to the offensive.
Feudal society was approaching the fullness of its growth, and the medieval Church was advancing toward the height of its power. The revival of religious enthusiasm found expression in new monastic orders, in the Crusades, in efforts to reform the Church, and in the increasingly articulate assertion of its independence and supremacy in medieval society. That massive achievement, the recovery and assimilation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of a great body of Greek and Arabic philosophy and science, marks the real beginning of European intellectual leadership. In the integration of society in Church and empire, and in lesser forms of corporate organization, these centuries saw the attainment of a unity which, though imperfect, was far more complete than any which the modem world has achieved. Yet an intensified diversity of thought and action was manifested in every sphere. “There have been few periods in the history of the world when the movement of thought and of life was more rapid than in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” This accelerated vitality was expressed in the rise of feudal states and the extension of royal power; in the growth of towns and of the new middle class; in the expansion of economic activity, of geographical and intellectual horizons; in the spirit of revolt expressed in heresy and in communal uprisings. The creative genius of the age produced not only great corporate expressions of its constructive powers, institutions like the universities and works of art like the cathedrals, but smaller and homelier objects of revolutionary significance, such as clocks and spectacles, buttons and forks.