The Portable Medieval Reader

by James Bruce Ross

  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the vigor of medieval civilization, though still great, was more widely diffused. As earlier efforts to coordinate the parts of society within a larger unity weakened, the parts themselves waxed stronger and more independent. The empire, always greater in shadow than in substance, became the victim and the prize of dynastic rivalries, and the authority of the Church, especially of the papal monarchy, was challenged by temporal claims, by schism and heresy, and by movements for reform. The successes of feudal monarchies like France and England strikingly demonstrated the effectiveness of the smaller unit. Political thought, increasingly independent of theological speculation and more acutely aware of political realities, made fresh attempts at the perennial goals of medieval Christendom, unity and peace. While a political theorist like Pierre du Bois in the fourteenth century still sought these ends through the time-honored means of a crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land, he looked for their achievement not to the universal institutions of Church and empire, but to the newer national monarchies. The corporate and hierarchical structure of society was increasingly strained and shaken by the conflicts between the various “orders of men,” by peasants’ revolts and urban struggles. In the spheres of artistic, intellectual, and religious activity, the earlier attempts at coordination and synthesis gave way to a more vigorous individualism, a more independent and secular spirit. The gradual triumph of the parts over the whole may be seen in the growing separation of science and philosophy from theology, of art from the Church, in the increase of mysticism and in the appeal of lay religious movements.

  Yet these later centuries saw the continuance and sometimes the perfection, as well as the transformation and decline, of many earlier ideals and institutions. In most respects the old feudal order was decaying, its basis and its functions undermined by the encroachments of kings and burghers and peasants, by new ways of warfare and of government. But not until late did the courtly ideal and the outward trappings of feudal chivalry attain a formal perfection in the extravagant refinement and splendor of the Burgundian court. And even if the enduring visions of universality and peace as embodied in the weakened Church and empire were dimmed, they had not yet faded. Dante in the fourteenth century, crying in the night for his lost Caesar, and Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth, seeking the Concordantia Catholica, still strove to realize their ideals through the purifying and strengthening of the old institutions. But when in the middle of the fifteenth century, Pope Pius II called for a crusade against that latest threat to Christendom, the Ottoman Turks, the response to the papal plea revealed that Latin Christendom could not revivify by common action the ideals which it still acknowledged.

  In this time of profound change, which has been described both as the “waning of the middle ages” and the “dawn of a new era,” the old foundations had become dilapidated but they had not yet been replaced. Alfred North Whitehead has said that sometimes the period of transition is an age of hope, sometimes it is an age of despair. The later middle ages were both. If this period suffered from upheavals and catastrophes on a larger scale than did the preceding centuries, and from the weakening of the older forms of security, social and spiritual, it also experienced the opening up and broadening of new freedoms and opportunities. At its end, it beheld the discovery of the new world.

  To fix the geographical limits of medieval civilization is as difficult as to determine precisely its temporal span. Yet, as Roger Bacon said in recommending the study of geography to his contemporaries, “The things of the world cannot be known except through a knowledge of the places in which they are contained.” The focus of the Medieval Reader is the culture of Latin Christendom, which was an entity both larger and smaller than the Roman Empire it replaced in the West, just as it was both more and less in theory and in fact than the Europe of modern times. Latin Christendom, “the whole commonwealth of Christians obedient to the Roman Church,” was never a geographical unit, but a spiritual body, always reaching out to embrace new lands and new peoples. From its core in western and central Europe, medieval Christendom, through missionary labors and the work of conversion, through crusades, conquests, and commerce, extended its frontiers to the north, east, and south, and even reached out to farther Asia.

  The Mediterranean unity which was the great achievement of Roman civilization had been profoundly shaken in the last centuries of the empire by the incursion of barbarian peoples in the north, and by the concentration of imperial authority in the east, which both reflected and enhanced the divisions between Greek East and Latin West. This unity was finally shattered in the seventh and eighth centuries by the rise and expansion of Islam. What was formerly one cultural sphere had now become three. To emphasize the medieval culture of the Latin West is not to minimize the roles of Byzantium and of Islam, which were pre-eminent in the early middle ages, or the enrichment of Western culture from these sources. But by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Latin Christendom was clearly in the ascendancy in the Mediterranean world. The Greek and Muslim East are seen in these selections chiefly in terms of the interaction of peoples which was the result of Western expansion. Until the late fourteenth century, Latin Christendom was actively engaged in the early stages of that process by which Western European civilization has extended its influence throughout the world. Its eastward expansion was checked, and its frontiers pushed back, by the westward advance of the Ottoman Turks. Henceforth its expansive energies were directed toward the south and west, and concentrated on the maritime enterprise and exploration which heralded the great age of discovery.

  IV

  In a small book of essays called Velvet Studies, C. V. Wedgwood tells of her electrifying discovery of the direct route to that world of the past with which she was already enchanted. She had found out, at the age of twelve, that men and women long dead had left behind them all manner of records. So dazzling was the revelation that “immediate contact could be made with these dead” that, she says, she breathed for hours on the showcases in the British Museum copying off all the documents on view. For most people to whom the reality of the past is revealed, it is first in some such way as this, in the shock of recognition, a sudden sense of personal contact, a flash of sympathy and comprehension. The act of imagination by which the barriers of time and space are dissolved and the past is endowed with very present reality is the true beginning of understanding.

  The medieval materials for this process exist in bewildering quantity and variety. Men and women of these centuries have left their account of themselves in many forms, in paintings and buildings, monuments and artifacts of all sorts, as well as in the written records to which the Medieval Reader is restricted. They wrote, as Hugh of St. Victor said of the “ancients,” more books than we are able to read. Their public activities and aspirations and their more intimate thoughts and emotions are recorded in biographies, chronicles, histories, in laws, letters, and journals, in little songs and in great prose and poetry. The articulate members of medieval society, though few in number as they are in any age, were men, and sometimes women, of the most varied ranks and conditions; they were churchmen and laymen, famous and obscure, naive and sophisticated. Among them were monks and friars like William of Malmesbury and Salimbene, secular clerics like John of Salisbury, scholars and theologians like Adelard of Bath and Thomas Aquinas, great prelates like Archbishop Becket and Pope Pius II. There were laymen of different classes, such as that “gentlemanly journalist,” Jean Froissart, the Italian bourgeois, Villani, the English surgeon, John Arderne, and women like Christine de Pisan, who took up writing to support her children.

  The motives which inspired their work were as varied as the individuals; some wrote from a desire for private and personal communication, or more formally to amuse or to instruct a contemporary public, or, to use a good medieval phrase, “for the perpetual memory of the matter,” and incidentally, of themselves. The products of this educative ardor are quantities of learned and popular treatises which provide, besid
es edification, insight into the life of different classes, and into medieval theories about that life. And the range is very great, from the “mirrors of princes” and the handbooks of statesmen, such as John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, to advice for the good wife in the care of house and husband and to the rules of love carefully enumerated by Andrew the Chaplain. Fortunately, many medieval writers, although they may have worked for their own gratification and that of their contemporaries, were not unmindful of posterity. Giraldus Cambrensis was moved, as he said, to draw the portrait of King Henry II, “so that those who in future ages shall hear and read of his great achievements, may be able to picture him to themselves as he was.” Whatever the nature or the intention of these records, whether they are casual or formal, inventories of household furnishings or the finished products of intellect and imagination, through them we may make contact not only with the inner life of “nature’s microcosm or little world, which is man,” but thereby with the larger world in which these individuals moved.

  Letters of the past have a special appeal, because though reading the correspondence of one’s contemporaries is frowned on, reading that of the dead is permissible and rewarding. A charming and playful letter like that of Thomas Betson to his young betrothed, urging her to eat her meat like a woman so that she may soon grow up and marry him, makes the writer no longer simply an obscure fifteenth-century merchant, but the friend and contemporary of the reader. In letters like those of Heloise to Abelard, and that of Peter the Venerable telling Heloise of Abelard’s last days and death, there is a direct revelation of the personalities and relationships of three individuals. “Who,” Heloise herself says, “could read or hear these things and not be moved to tears?” And in reading them we are introduced to the tumultuous, creative twelfth century, for the writers and recipients of these letters moved with other great figures at the center of their world, Abelard as the renowned teacher and philosopher, Heloise as a most learned abbess, and Peter the Venerable as abbot of the widespread order of Cluny.

  The abounding vigor of mind and spirit which charged the life of this age, which revitalized the monasteries and filled the schools, was manifest in them, as it was in their contemporaries. It found outlets in every sphere of activity, in the passionate study of the classics and of logic and law, in theological speculation and lyric poetry, in crusades and the building of churches and the government of men, in reforming ardor and even in revolt. The abbot of St. Denis whose “machinations” Heloise deplored was that same Suger who was the counselor of two kings of France and who ordered for his abbey church the construction of a revolutionary new choir which was the beginning of the Gothic style. Heloise’s judgment of Norbert and Bernard as “false apostles” was extreme, as was her provocation. They were moving spirits in the reform of monasticism, and the austere personality of St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, was a most powerful force in his age. He was the formidable adversary of both Abelard and his friend the eloquent and unfortunate Arnold of Brescia, whose zeal for reform, turned against the worldly power of the Church and finally to revolt, hastened him to the “sad noose.”

  John of Salisbury, who wrote a brief account of Arnold’s career, had sat at the feet of Abelard, the Peripatetic of Palais, in the course of long years of study in France. His life span made him a link between the first and second halves of his century, and because of the breadth of his interests as scholar, humanist, and churchman, he was active in both the sphere of the schools and the larger orbit of church and court. For John, who died as bishop of Chartres, was the friend and adviser of popes, the secretary and loyal supporter of Thomas Becket in the long struggle with King Henry II which ended in the archbishop’s murder. His younger contemporary, that lively archdeacon Giraldus Cambrensis, of flourishing ego and busy pen, was another of those men of the twelfth century who went everywhere and knew everyone of importance. His acute observations and wide experience are recorded in many books, one an account of his own deeds in which his vivid personality is but imperfectly concealed by the use of the third person. He wrote with a naive vanity and self-concern which moved him to report that an old abbot, on beholding his physical perfection, had cried, “Can such beauty die?”

  When Giraldus died, the thirteenth century was already well begun, a century, like the twelfth, of vigorous activity but of a different spirit. Its special qualities and interests, its great movements and their centers, like those of the preceding age, are reflected in the lives and relationships of its individuals. The court of Sicily under the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors, Frederick II, whose “misfortunes, follies, and death” are described by the ubiquitous friar Salimbene, was a center of political experiment and sophisticated culture, just as were those Italian cities of the north of which Salimbene himself was a child. Out of this flourishing urban life, enriched by commerce and often torn by strife, came that renewal of the Christian spirit, inspired and personified by St. Francis, and spread by his Friars Minor, of whom Salimbene was one. Among the Italian cities, the Rome of Boniface VIII, whose career marks a turning point in the history of the Western Church, was still the heart and core of medieval Christendom. And in Florence, of which Villani was the chronicler, was born the “sweet new style” in Italian literature and art embodied in the works of Dante and Giotto. Another sphere of the thirteenth-century world was the France of Louis IX, in whom the ideal of feudal and Christian kingship was fulfilled, and of his faithful vassal and biographer, Joinville; its focus was Paris where the schools of the twelfth century had crystallized in that great university where Robert de Sorbonne and Roger Bacon and St. Thomas Aquinas worked and taught.

  Among the men and women of these and other medieval centuries, there are many whose lives and works illuminate not only their age and its experience, but the timeless greatness of the human spirit. In the goodly company of such as these, boredom, which was to the middle ages one of the deadliest sins, is impossible.

  V

  If the Gothic cathedral has become, especially through the influence of Henry Adams’ Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, a familiar and still valid symbol of the medieval spirit, the school, comprising all the forms of education, is an equally valid one. For the culture of the middle ages was essentially architectonic in its ideals and achievements. Its “peculiar genius” for embodying its ideals in institutions constructed not only monasteries, churches, and castles, but schools and universities, encyclopedic works and systems of thought. Out of diverse traditions and intractable materials men of the middle ages were building a civilization, and in both the cathedral and the school are reflected the premises on which this task was based, and many of its problems.

  The corporate activity by which the cathedrals were built is but one aspect of the vast effort to order the diverse and conflicting elements of society in a harmonious whole. The work of individual and recognized artists reflects the role of the more articulate and self-conscious individuals in society. The balance of high tensions in the Gothic cathedral has been called the classic expression of the Western spirit, as final as the temple of the fifth century B.C. was of the Greek spirit. A cathedral like Amiens or Chartres is as dynamic and active an organism as the society which produced it. And its purpose was as functional, in theory, as that of other parts of society. The cathedral was a monument of the arts coordinated in the service of religion, and it was a school of religion, for, as Durandus said, “pictures and ornaments in churches are the lessons and scriptures of the laity.” In these pictures and images the great popular devotion to the saints, and above all to the Queen of Heaven, is mirrored. The cult of the Virgin, the “welle of mercy,” found expression in the innumerable portals, chapels, and cathedrals built in her honor, as it did in the names of flowers, the Lady’s slippers and Mary-buds, and in the little stories of her miracles, and in great poetry.

  In the cathedral, the whole Christian revelation, the drama of medieval religion, is made manifest in tangible forms with those symbolical meanings which Durandus explained
at length. Very little that medieval men built or painted or wrote can be fully comprehended without some understanding of that mode of observation and thought which expressed itself by means of symbolism and allegory. In this way of looking at things and thinking about them, the visible object is clothed with supernatural significance, and the abstract conception given concrete form in an image. The ox is not only a beast of burden, it is the symbol of Luke the Evangelist, because the ox is an animal fitted for sacrifice; it has two horns, moreover, representing the two testaments; it :figures Christ, the sacrifice for man.