There was a ready appetite for the Hood ballads among the tiny minority of England’s population that was literate and, therefore, influential, and the legend was particularly popular in gentry households. It may well be, therefore, that the medieval literary tradition that invented Robin Hood reflects the governing order’s idealization of the English virtues and of the personal values that will promote a sound and just social order.
Robin has always been a protean figure, and each period has invented the character it wants. Promotion to the aristocracy in the 16th and 17th centuries made him an establishment figure, one whose romantic exile ended with the restoration of a benign ruler. The Victorians were attracted by Robin’s philanthropy, and they turned him into a leader of freedom-loving Saxons who are pitted against feudal Norman barons. Warner Bros’ The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) gave a Hollywood sheen to the English tale, with the hero and his band being presented as cheerful exponents of a “can-do” attitude to life’s challenges.
Robin’s physical beauty is an important feature of the Hood tradition. Recent commentary has speculated on whether there may be a covertly gay dimension to the appeal of the legend. The original corpus of Hood literature, together with its subsequent interpretations, celebrates the intensity of male comradeship and shows how the rejection of convention can lead to the discovery of true identity. Maid Marion’s femininity, and passivity, relegated her to the margins in the world of Hood.
A colored woodcut of c.1600 depicting Robin Hood, the hero of late medieval English ballads.
THE 12TH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
1080–1218
From the late 11th century onward, European culture witnessed a revival of the arts and letters so profound and wide-ranging that it may be compared to the Renaissance that spread from later medieval Italy to the rest of the continent. Romanesque art achieved its fullest development during this period, and Gothic architecture began to evolve. Poetry—both lyric and epic—began to be written in the vernacular, and the Latin language was used innovatively to describe advances in philosophy and theology. Universities were founded across Europe at centers such as Salerno, Paris and Montpellier, Bologna and Salamanca, Oxford and Cambridge. These were the places that pioneered the rediscovery of ancient authors like Euclid, Ptolemy and Aristotle, as well as the revival of Roman law.
The 12th-century revival was a cosmopolitan movement. Italian centers of learning were particularly important for the advances in Roman and canon law, in medical science and in the new translations from ancient Greek. France’s clerical and lay intelligentsia were especially active in philosophical speculation and verse composition. England and Germany followed these French cultural patterns, and Spain linked the European milieu with Islamic culture. The Carolingian period of ninth-century cultural advance had been real enough, but it was centered on the court and on the schools attached to monasteries and cathedrals—and many of these establishments had suffered from the tenth-century anarchy unleashed by Vikings, Saracens and Magyars. A more expansive awakening of the mind and spirit was now being witnessed, and its leading lights sought not just to preserve the legacy of the past but also to revive its content and make that knowledge relevant to their own times.
Universities were not the only centers of this enlightenment. New cathedrals such as Chartres, Rheims, Orléans, Canterbury and Toledo played their part, too. The royal bureaucratic machine was also important: learned clerks employed by rulers like Henry II of England and Frederick II in Sicily worked at courts that rivaled the great monasteries, such as Bec in France and Monte Cassino in Italy, as centers of learning. These were the places where libraries could be found, although collections of manuscripts were still mostly very small. The 340 or so volumes owned by the abbey at Corbie in Picardy and the 546 titles owned by Durham Cathedral marked them out as exceptional places in the year 1200.
RIGHT The rose window of Chartres Cathedral, a building which has become synonymous with the revival of the arts and scholarship in 12th-century Europe.
ABOVE In this detail from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (15th century) a monk is shown working as a copyist in a scriptorium.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WRITTEN WORD
All books were of parchment, since papyrus had passed out of general use in the earlier medieval period and paper had not yet been introduced to the West. Carolingian art excelled in illuminated manuscripts but this tradition had been lost in Europe by the 11th century, and the 12th-century manuscripts whose beautiful initials are painted in red, green and gold represent a sublime recovery. Such books naturally included many copies of the Bible, as well as church service books such as missals and lectionaries. They also included the definitive volumes of Fathers of the early Church such as Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and Gregory the Great. But the libraries also contained more recent works. Commentaries written by Abelard and Anselm mattered greatly, as did those of authors who communicated the learning of the past, such as Boethius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville and Bede. Their textbooks on logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music and etymology became the standard authorities. Archives became more important as administration evolved, and the documentation gathered by the monarchs of England and Sicily rivaled the extensive papal sources in their sophistication.
The 12th-century Church had an ambiguous attitude toward Latin literature. It taught the language—its medium of communication—while condemning the pagan milieu that was the context for the writings of authors such as Cicero, Virgil and Ovid. Nonetheless, the literary style of the past furnished many writers with models of composition. This was especially true of John of Salisbury (c.1120–80) whose wide-ranging powers of quotation and graceful literary style were learned when he was a student at the school of Chartres, the most eminent of the 12th-century cathedral schools. Virgil was read and admired at Chartres as well as at many other such schools, for example, Orléans, and he was almost universally seen as the supreme poet and stylistic model. His themes could be allegorized as anticipations of Christian truths, and as a celebrant of ancient Rome’s empire Virgil was especially pertinent to the Staufer dynasty’s revival of the imperial tradition. But Ovid’s love poetry and his Metamorphoses also inspired many, and his verses were copied even in the Benedictine monastery at Cluny. Among prose writers Cicero was revered as the chief representative of rhetoric, a subject placed on the medieval curriculum as one of the seven “liberal arts,” and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History could be plundered for bizarre tales.
Latin was also a living language for contemporary artists, scholars, priests and lawyers, and the standards of grammar and vocabulary were greatly improved. The standard textbook was the Institutiones of Priscian of Caesarea, composed in the early sixth century and comprising 16 books. It was being copied vigorously, but there were shorter manuals, too, and the age also produced numerous dictionaries and encyclopedias. Adam du Petit-Pont, a master at Paris in the early 12th century, wrote a descriptive vocabulary in which he put words into sentences that explained their meaning. That genre supplies valuable information about the fabric of daily 12th-century lives. While studying grammar could illuminate the imaginative and literary workings of language, rhetoric fared less well as a subject. Forensic oratory had disappeared with the passing of the Roman political and judicial system, and rhetoric only survived as a model for writing letters.
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THE 12TH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
1080s The Italian jurist Irnerius establishes, at Bologna, a new school of law whose scholars will produce commentaries on Roman law.
1088 The University of Bologna is founded.
1109 Death of the Italian philosopher Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury since 1093.
1121 Peter Abelard’s philosophical views are condemned as heretical by Church authorities.
c.1159 John of Salisbury, secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, writes Policraticus, a work of political philosophy describing monarchs’ rights and duties.
1160s The Uni
versity of Paris has an institutional identity.
1209 Official date of the foundation of the University of Cambridge, England—possibly due to scholars deciding to leave the University of Oxford.
1218 Spain’s first university is established at Salamanca.
1289 Montpellier University is founded by amalgamating earlier centers of study, such as the school of law founded in the 1160s.
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THE RESURGENCE OF SATIRE AND DRAMA
There was an appreciative public audience for poetry composed in Latin. In religious verse especially there was a move away from the language’s older forms and toward the new intensity of rhymed verse. The most famous of the period’s Latin poets were the Goliards, a group of mostly clerical students and authors in France, Germany, Italy and England whose texts in praise of wine, women and song often satirized the official Church hierarchy, and especially the Roman curia. Their collective Carmina Burana combine secular impulses with religious inspiration, and the notion of an Order of Goliards, which was a burlesque on the Orders of monks, shows the popularity of parody at this time. Drama had disappeared with the closing of the last Roman theaters, but the Christian liturgy resonated with dramatic power, and it inspired the medieval miracle plays that recreated scenes from the Passion. Other miracle plays described the lives of saints, and these were performed at associated shrines and cult centers. Students at the monastic and cathedral schools played an important role in the development of these plays and their widespread diffusion.
CHANGING LAWS
The 12th century saw the arrival of the lawyer at the heart of government, and that meant the Church no longer enjoyed a monopoly on learning. Rulers everywhere needed this new class of educated laymen as counselors and administrators, and an immense intellectual effort went into the revival of Roman law and the advance of jurisprudence in general. The ancient materials were preserved in the Corpus Juris Civilis as codified in the sixth century by the emperor Justinian. This consisted of the Code or collection of the emperor’s legislation; the Digest that summarized the conclusions of Roman jurists; the Institutes, a textbook used in teaching law; and the Novels, or later legislation of the emperor Justinian. It was jurists teaching at the University of Bologna in the early 12th century, and especially Irnerius (c.1055–c.1130), who set about producing interpretations of these great texts. They and their successors, termed the “glossators,” purified the original texts and brought out their contemporary relevance. The Digest gained a special importance as a model of juristic method which was then applied to the law of the Church and to the feudal customs of Europe.
Economic expansion in the Mediterranean and northern Italy created new patterns of trade and commerce. Urban centers were therefore drawn to the revived Roman law since it could reflect contemporary realities more readily than the established early medieval codes that were, as in the case of the Lombards’ system, rural based. Governments developing a comprehensive territorial bureaucracy were also attracted by a system of laws based on general validity rather than local custom. Roman law also benefited from, and contributed to, the revival of imperialism under successive German emperors who sought to strengthen the Roman tradition and ideology. Frederick Barbarossa was an astute user of its teachings, and he enjoyed the support of the Law School of Bologna when he asserted his rights as a ruler over the towns of Lombardy.
Italian universities diffused the Roman law to France and Spain. Montpellier was well placed to do this since Provence, once a Roman province, retained many features of the classical legal system. The English Crown declared against Roman law, but many of the country’s churchmen used Roman legal principles when arguing canon law (so called because it was based on the collections of rules or canons produced by Church councils). Canon law argued for the legal system of a universal Church, and its universality therefore blended well with Roman jurisprudence. Its sources were various, and so in c.1140 the monk Gratian of Bologna produced the immensely influential collection of canon law known as the Decretum, which systematized and reconciled these authorities. Canon law became a fully independent system and, since it had also absorbed the principles of Roman jurisprudence, it also served as a vehicle for the transmission of the Roman law. Even England therefore observed the influence of this continental system so far as the Church was concerned. Here, however, it was the common law—a system based on custom and precedent—that was the cornerstone of the king’s law.
ARAB INFLUENCES IN SCIENCE AND CULTURE
European learning was stimulated by the arrival in the West of the texts describing ancient Greek philosophy and science. Since there had been so few translations into Latin of these works, the chief conduit here was those scholars of Byzantium who had translated the Greek texts into Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic. Many of these translations traveled east to the Persian court, and they also existed in the Byzantine provinces that fell to seventh- and eighth-century Arab invaders. Those conquests gave a new impetus to translation, since many of the Islamic caliphs were enthusiastic patrons of learning. Arabic translations were therefore made direct from the Greek, as in the case of Ptolemy’s Almagest (The Great Compilation) in 827, as well as from Syriac and Hebrew. The focus was on works in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology and alchemy, with the Arab translators adding their own observations and discoveries to the ancient texts.
ABOVE Georgius Pachymeres, a 13th-century Greek historian and writer. Scholars working in the Byzantine empire translated Greek texts into Arabic, which were then translated into Latin for European scholars.
Until the 12th century there had been little intellectual contact between the Latin West and Arab culture. The multicultural kingdom of Sicily—administered by Arab rulers in the tenth and 11th centuries—saw real cultural synergy, and the Sicilian court employed many Arab doctors and astrologers even after the island’s conquest by the Normans. But it was in Spain, with its long history of Islamic occupation from the eighth century onward, that most of the important work was done. Translation from the Arabic versions of the ancient Greek texts took place in the major cities of the peninsula, and that work became especially active in the 12th century with new attention being paid to astronomy and mathematics. From Spain came Euclid and his algebra, as well as the philosophy and science of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, in forms that changed subsequent European thought. Euclid’s Elements appeared in a Latin translation from the Arabic in the early 12th century, with his Data and Optics following a generation later. The arrival of Aristotle’s Physics, along with his Meteorology and De Caelo (On the Heavens), transformed Europeans’ understanding of the natural world. European medicine was revolutionized by the full recovery of the ancient Greeks’ literature on the subject, especially so in the case of works by Galen and Hippocrates, and translations from the works of Arab doctors also gained a wide currency.
Some Arabic words were left untranslated, which is why the terms algebra, zero and cipher survive in mathematics, along with almanac, zenith and nadir in astronomy. The translations inspired some independent scientific observation in the West, as can be seen in the work of Albertus Magnus. But their more widespread impact was curricular; the arrival of ancient wisdom in accessible form stimulated arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music—the subjects comprising the quadrivium or the mathematical part of the seven liberal arts that were the basis of medieval education.
THE ARISTOTELIAN REVIVAL
Ancient Greek science was abstract and deductive rather than experimental, and as such it was seen as a branch of philosophy. This suited the classification of knowledge in 12th-century Europe, and the veneration of Aristotle as the supreme philosopher was a profound feature of the period’s recovery of classical Greek thought. Plato’s more discursive and literary style had little influence compared with the compact and systematic method of Aristotle, with his many textbooks and manuals fashioned from lecture notes. The universal nature of Aristotle’s genius is the background to the development in the 13th c
entury of the system of Thomas Aquinas. By the end of the 12th century, Aristotelian logic had been absorbed into European thought, and the philosopher’s Metaphysics was translated in c.1200, followed by Ethics and Politics. Aristotle was therefore assimilated within the Christian consensus, though this required a softening of some of his more un-Christian beliefs, such as the teaching that the universe was eternal. With Aristotle, however, there also arrived Averroes (1126–98), his greatest Arab commentator. Averroes highlighted doctrines such as the eternity of matter and the unity of the intellect and, since these teachings denied individual immortality, their impact would stimulate heresy and dissent in medieval Europe.
Anselm and Abelard were the chief philosophers of the age, and both pre-date the real impact of Aristotle in the West. Anselm (1033–1109) sought to prove the necessary existence of God, and his use of dialectic showed how faith should also be inquiring. Abelard (1079–1142) was a teacher of dazzling originality, and one who was not averse to being the center of a Parisian personality cult. The orthodoxy of his day defended universals—or general categories—as necessary before the mind could proceed to grasp particulars. Abelard’s dissent on this subject led to his condemnation for heresy in 1121 and 1141. His pungent treatise Sic et Non (Yes and No) was a pioneering work in the development of the dialectical style, since it took evidence from the past on various topics and arranged them as a series of propositions. Abelard’s emphasis on the contradictions tended to undermine orthodoxy. The method itself though proved immensely influential in the 13th-century development of the scholastic system, and university teaching of the trivium (a division within the seven liberal arts) was therefore slanted toward logic at the expense of its other components: grammar and rhetoric. Theology remained the highest form of knowledge, and when philosophy trespassed on its terrain it was to be condemned—as Abelard had been. Some followers of Averroes in the Latin West tried to advance a doctrine of double truth, with philosophy and theology both being true, but only within their own respective domains. But the Church forbad that escape route out of contradiction. That interdiction is the background to the establishment of a series of inquisitions, or formal investigations into heretical teachings, that began in the 1180s, and whose penalties of death by burning showed that some 12th-century speculation could be dangerous as well as audacious.
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