Concurrently with success abroad in the First Crusade, western cultural ideals and practices began to undergo a long period of renewal and creativity in Europe. The roots of these developments were classical, although like almost everything else connected to intellectual developments in the twelfth century, they owed much to the stimulus provided by the great and more recent conflict over investiture between the popes and the German emperors.
Familiarity and critical engagement with classical Roman and, to a far lesser extent, ancient Greek learning in Latin translation was characteristic of the entire Middle Ages, even the early Middle Ages, despite the disruptive social and political changes in the period before the eleventh century. Yet many thinkers’ respect for the natural and moral philosophy of pagan antiquity was partial at best. Any number of ethical principles, such as suicide as an honourable response to shame, defended by classical thinkers and recorded in the texts that were their legacy to the early and central Middle Ages were at variance with Christian doctrine. Moreover, a great many texts that would have demonstrated the diversity of classical thought and revealed strands in it more compatible with Christian belief were simply not available in the monastic libraries of the early medieval West.
There were, for example, many references in available treatises, commentaries and anthologies to a large number of Plato’s Dialogues, and something was known of their content from what Neoplatonists and the Church fathers, like Augustine, had written. But only the Timaeus was available (and then not fully) in a Latin translation before the High Middle Ages. Now, the Timaeus, as even the modern casual reader of Plato’s works quickly realizes, is very odd if only because of Socrates’s extremely muted role and its almost lyric quality. The Timaeus’s myth of creation offers a stark contrast to traditional medieval Christians’ understanding of creation; after all, it describes the creation of the Olympian pantheon and a cosmos in which man’s place is tiny. Yet, partly because passages of the Dialogue’s story stress the creator’s goodness and the goodness and beauty of his creation (no matter what he created), and partly because of a general sense expressed by the Church fathers that Plato anticipated fundamental Christian beliefs (‘If these men [Plato is mentioned by name] could live their lives again,’ Augustine wrote in Of True Religion, ‘they would become Christians’), the Timaeus became popular among monastic readers and its dialogue form among writers.
Christian thinkers also domesticated the available content of Plato’s works, made it palatable by allegorizing it, as ancient authors themselves often did; questions of its literal truth as a description of the world were thus put to one side. Nous, a favourite Greek philosophical term for the creative intellect, could be glossed or interpreted allegorically, as it was by the twelfth-century philosopher, Bernard Silvester, as the Christian God in the act of creation. In his words, Nous is ‘the consummate and profound reason of God,… [and] the knowledge and judgement of that divine will in the disposition of things’ (Bernardus Silvestris, 1973, p. 69).
In biography and Latin poetry, there had been a recovery of classical styles, even in Charlemagne’s time. Neither in the Carolingian Renaissance nor in the more widespread and profounder recovery in the Renaissance of the twelfth century was the imitation of Roman stylistic and rhetorical practices slavish. Although Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars of the second century provided a model for royal biography and also influenced hagiography, there were radical departures from the classical model in both of these genres, particularly the admission of the miraculous and a deliberate emphasis on conversion experiences, from the evil to the good life or the good to the better life.
In Latin poetry, classical conceits had also been eagerly assimilated in the Carolingian Renaissance. The whole range of these, like the most complex metrical phrasing, continued to be taught as academic exercises and even employed on occasion in the verse of the twelfth century. But new ways of poetical writing or new emphases on conceits less favoured in antiquity often displaced classical practices. These included the use of assonance or vocalic, non-consonantal rhymes; rana (frog) and papa (pope) are assonantally rhymed. Poets delighted in fuller rhymes, too, such as accipis (you take) with precipis (you order) or meus fundus/totus mundus (my money/the whole world), and complex end-of-line rhyme schemes and extravagant alliteration virtually unknown or shunned in Ovid’s and Virgil’s world.
The twelfth century saw major achievements in the development and redaction of law, medicine, history writing, and more. All owed something to the classical past or to the Carolingian interpretation of that past. But no intellectual endeavour survived the Renaissance of the twelfth century unchanged manifestly by its creative impulses.
Traditional Benedictine monks who had preserved, adapted and critiqued classical texts in their monasteries for hundreds of years continued to make a major contribution to intellectual life in the twelfth century. Their efforts were supplemented by those of monks in the newer orders. As these new orders expressly stressed poverty in monastic life, simplicity in worship, manual work, and devotion to the Virgin, the works of scholarship, meditation and devotion that emerged from them tended to have distinct emphases, somewhat different from those of their Benedictine counterparts. But too much can be made of the contrast. Worse still, some scholars make it seem as if everything interesting and creative was emerging from Cistercians and other reformers, like the friars of the early thirteenth century (see chapter 14), or even that learning in the Benedictine monasteries – these institutions having fulfilled their task of preserving the classical heritage – was withering away. This is an unfair assertion, as any list of major Benedictine authors of the twelfth century would confirm. In the genre of history alone, the Benedictines reigned supreme. The Benedictine monks of Saint-Denis wrote the official histories of the kings of France; the Benedictine monks of St Albans did more or less the same thing for the kings of England, starting in the middle of the period under discussion.
One thing the expansion of new orders did do, however, was to encourage the proliferation of knowledge. Each new monastery, canonry and nunnery needed books: a bible or bibles; the statutes of the order; workbooks that recorded estates, rents and contractual obligations; liturgical and devotional books, such as the breviary with the canon of the mass, hymnals and saints’ lives; and, naturally, some of the standard interpretative manuals, especially books that explained Christian doctrine. Everywhere a Carthusian or Cistercian house was established books had to be bought or borrowed in order to be copied; the establishment of libraries was mandated in the statutes of the orders.
As time passed, even the tiniest libraries of the smallest houses expanded in size, for new standard reference works emerged, and the monks tried to get them for their collections. Not every monastic librarian or scribe could purchase or copy every important book. But some books seemed absolutely essential. To defend one’s house in court cases, an abbot employed a lawyer or procurator, but some familiarity with ecclesiastical law was important for at least some of the monks themselves. When Gratian’s Concordance of Discordant Canons began to displace a wide variety of competing legal texts during and after the 1140s and became the fundamental legal code of the Church, librarian after librarian saw the wisdom of securing a copy. Soon after Peter Lombard finished his Sentences, a summa or comprehensive summation of Christian doctrine in four books in the mid-twelfth century, it became the standard account in schools. It behoved ecclesiastical librarians to secure a copy or epitome for their collections.
Some libraries were already or soon became real research centres. Fulda, in Germany, set the standard by being able to put 2,000 volumes at the service of scholars. Cluny in the twelfth century was in the process of building up a library of almost 1,000 books, including a Latin translation of the Qur’an (the Muslim holy book), important letter collections, and philosophical and theological tracts. And equally to the point, a number of newer monasteries were becoming research centres. The Cistercians, confronted by inconsistencies in the various manuscripts of the Vulgate, organized a team to establish the biblical text with certainty. From this effort emerged an improved text, known as the Cistercian Bible. Although the rate of proliferation of Cistercian monasteries exceeded the ability of scribes in the early twelfth century to make copies of this bible, the actual work of creation required the amassing of a large number of Latin Vulgate manuscripts and other works in the library of Cîteaux.
Perhaps even more impressive than the growth of monastic libraries, however, was the establishment of libraries and a book production system in the major European cities and towns. In some cases the libraries were associated with houses of canons, like the Augustinian abbey of St-Victor of Paris, but each cathedral was also supposed to have a school and, thus, books.
Occasionally these schools achieved great renown because of the eminence of their teachers or students. The cathedral school of Chartres will forever be associated with the bishop, John of Salisbury, the author of a great treatise on political theory, the Policraticus, an attempt to understand the relation of ecclesiastical and secular authority. The abbey of St-Victor of Paris brought a host of great scholars to prominence, mostly theologians, including Hugh, Andrew and Richard, all known as ‘of St-Victor’, although by birth probably a German, an Englishman and a Scot respectively. It may have been from among their circle that the standard interpretation of the Bible, its Glossa Ordinaria, arose. It was certainly they, in particular Andrew of St-Victor, who spearheaded the effort to understand the Old Testament by consulting Jewish sages, although the enterprise came in for virulent criticism from some of the canons. The Victorines also wrote massive tomes on the sacraments, education, devotion, mystical union and the liturgy.
The schools of Paris, of course, achieved renown and notoriety in part through the career of Peter Abelard, who came to the city around the year 1100, made a reputation as a brilliant and arrogant scholar, and was hired by an influential cathedral canon, Fulbert, to tutor the canon’s niece, Heloise. Abelard publicly and imprudently disparaged other teachers by referring to what he regarded as their intellectual inferiority to himself, and he also seduced and impregnated his youthful pupil, Heloise. Provoking criticism for these actions, he trod a very difficult path. Heloise’s uncle thought he had an agreement with Abelard to live in a conventional marriage with his niece. But it was she who objected. Suspecting betrayal by Abelard, Fulbert and his friends revenged themselves by castrating him. All Paris was saddened – if we accept the victim’s own description of the reaction to the attack in his History of My Calamities – but Abelard went on to acknowledge, ‘how just a judgement of God had struck me in the parts of the body with which I had sinned, and how just a reprisal had been taken by the very man I had myself betrayed’ (Abelard, 1974, p. 75).
Abelard’s career was not over. He kept in touch with Heloise in a series of letters and gave her all sorts of advice, even as she slowly and painfully reconciled herself to the failure of their romance. She seems to have given their baby, baptized Astrolabe after a new navigation instrument of the period, to other family members to be raised while she became a nun at a little monastery in Champagne, known as the Paraclete or Comforter, a name for the Holy Spirit. It had been refurbished as a convent after having once served as Abelard’s own refuge from strife and as a venue for his continued teaching. Although Abelard himself was never a very able administrator in the monastic institutions in which, thanks to his fame, he soon won offices, he continued to write poetry and philosophical and theological treatises.
A century earlier, Abelard’s works and those of other masters might have had a very restricted distribution. They would have been copied occasionally and lent from one monastery or cathedral library to another. Word of mouth would also have propagated and distorted their views. Of course, to some extent, this situation remained in place, but there were a great many more monasteries and canonries in Abelard’s time than there were a century before, which allowed the views of some of these thinkers wider dissemination. The fame of the schools in which they taught also stimulated distribution of their works. But perhaps most important, a specialized commercial book trade was emerging in the major urban centres of learning in order to service the hordes of students who needed to buy or borrow cheap books. With the rise of this trade, it is possible for the first time to speak formally of ‘publication’; book learning came to displace the emulation of charismatic figures as the central process of education, although the adulation of Abelard in some circles shows the persistence of the older style in the newer environment. Yet it was acknowledged among his opponents that the real danger of Abelard’s allegedly indiscreet, if not heretical, teachings (‘they replace light with darkness’) was that they now spread so rapidly. ‘[T]hey pass from one race to another, and from one kingdom to another’; they ‘cross oceans, they leap over the Alps…; they spread through the provinces and the kingdoms’ (Jaeger, 1994, p. 239). Ultimately Abelard would be forced to give up writing and witness many of his ideas and books spurned by the authorities, but the promulgation of his ideas could not be suppressed.
Leavening the world of learning in several late twelfth-century towns were universities, emerging often, if not always, from an existing school or schools and under some degree of ecclesiastical control. Even though students started young, often as young teenagers, and had a reputation for rowdiness, they usually enjoyed special jurisdictional immunities, in part because they were considered members of or potential members of the clergy. One of the first universities was founded in Bologna in Italy. There the corporation (the meaning of the word universitas) comprised the students, not the magistri (masters, teachers), who existed sometimes in an uneasy relationship with the institution. Universities were not only corporations; they were academies of general study (studia generalia). Masters taught the entire seven liberal arts – the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the more advanced quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy) – as well as even more advanced professional subjects.
Although a very wide curriculum was always available, some universities were best known for particular subjects. Bologna was most famous for its law school. The situation was similar for the University of Mont-pellier, also a comprehensive academic institution, but most famous for its law school and school of medicine. Rivalling both these institutions in importance, except in legal education, from which it was officially restricted, was the University of Paris. Chartered by the French king only in the year 1200, it had functioned de facto as a corporation of masters for several decades before this. It had several faculties but was renowned for the study of theology. Oxford and then Cambridge emerged as studia generalia in the early thirteenth century, and became major centres of natural philosophy and theology.
Several other universities came into existence and flourished, sometimes only briefly, in the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century, but it is remarkable that no university took root in Germany or in Spain, one false start in the latter notwithstanding, until much later, indeed towards the end of the Middle Ages. This did not prevent Spain and Germany from contributing significantly to the intellectual revolution of the twelfth century through the other institutions that, as we have seen, were centres of learning: monasteries (old, reformed and new), friaries (the German ones nurtured some of the most distinguished scholars, like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas), cathedral schools, and, perhaps especially in Castile and Aragon, aristocratic courts. What the absence of universities in Spain and Germany did mean was that relatively substantial numbers of Spaniards and Germans who wanted to attend university went to places like Bologna and Paris, thereby giving the institutions an enhanced international flavour and contributing to the cosmopolitanism of elite clerical culture.
The institutions discussed, from university to local school, were primarily male and always Christian. It is reasonable to ask, then, whether women or Jews had a ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’. Heloise’s education already suggests that some of the currents of twelfth-century intellectual developments could have an effect on elite women’s lives. Traditional learning in the nunneries also seems to have taken on a lustre in the twelfth century, although perhaps historians have inferred lustre from the mere existence of texts, small in quantity compared to the number coming from male institutions but a real plethora when measured against the legacy of women’s writing from earlier centuries. However that may be, we shall encounter outstanding contributions from women in medicine, story-writing and poetry, even if the institutional settings in which they were educated continued to be limited, by and large, to households for personal tutoring or to convent schools.
As for Jews, traditional schools of an elementary nature and for higher education were hoary with age. Students usually met in private houses under the discipleship of a master or in a building specifically dedicated to instruction. Famous masters attracted students from great distances, a pattern that was analogous to the charismatic attraction of disciples to Christian masters like Abelard. It was possible to cross linguistic lines, because the language of instruction at the highest level was Hebrew, and every adult Jewish male, unless he was mentally deficient, had at least some Hebrew. Many had a great deal.
Again, whether it is possible to speak of a Renaissance of the twelfth century, as opposed to simply an exceptional series of towering figures, is debatable. There were extraordinary intellectual giants, such as Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) of Troyes in Champagne at the very opening of the period. One of the greatest biblical exegetes who ever lived, his interpretations, mediated to be sure, were to have an important influence on Andrew of St-Victor. Another such figure is Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Rambam or Maimonides), who, although his entire career was spent in countries under Islamic rule, had a profound influence on the Christian theological tradition in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To be sure, some of the methodological approaches of Jewish writers show fairly strong resemblances to those in use among Christians, but both groups, directly, indirectly or remotely, were often borrowing from the same Aristotelian, Platonic and Neoplatonic sources. Nonetheless, in some areas the contact between Christians and Jewish thinkers was immediate and stimulating on both sides. Discussions of biblical exegesis led to polemics of a high level on both sides, and the translations of philosophical texts, to which repeated reference will be made, heralded an intellectual revolution.
It is not surprising that the intellectual ferment in the academies, urban centres, some nunneries and Jewish schools had its counterpart in the princely and aristocratic courts, like those in Spain. They, too, amassed libraries and attracted scholars, who sometimes doubled as advisers, administrators and publicists for the princes. The libraries were perhaps more likely to have a substantial component of secular and vernacular literature than that found in the libraries of monasteries, canonries or cathedrals. And considerable amounts of history-writing were undertaken, among which were family histories commissioned by local lords, redacted in the vernacular and intended to celebrate their lineages.
The Christian schools developed a distinctive style of study which takes its name – scholasticism – from the Latin word for school, schola. Early scholasticism entailed a rigorous approach to moral, theological and philosophical issues based on the rules of logic enunciated in Aristotle’s works, known either through the medium of his sixth-century epitomizer and interpreter Boethius or, increasingly in the period under discussion, directly from new translations of the philosopher’s treatises. These new translations largely came about through the collaborative efforts of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars in Spain and Sicily. Consequently, Aristotle’s works sometimes came into the schools garbled. It did not help that the original Greek manuscripts were usually no more than late copies of Aristotle’s students’ notes of his philosophical discourses; students’ notes often leave much to be desired. Distortions crept in thereafter through faulty Hebrew or Arabic translations of this Greek material. Whatever Aristotle really taught, his doctrines ran a final risk of distortion in their retranslation from Arabic and Hebrew into Latin.
And yet, despite the occasional inane passage, the body of material that Latin scholars came into contact with was enormously impressive. Aristotle seemed to have spoken with authority about nearly everything. As St Paul was ‘The Apostle’, St Augustine ‘The Theologian’, Emperor Justinian ‘The Jurist’ (see below), so Aristotle became ‘The Philosopher’. Unhappily, however, the philosopher was a pagan – a very, very smart pagan, to be sure, a pagan platonized by some early interpreters, but a pagan nonetheless. It behoved Christian scholars to make Aristotle their own, just as they had made Plato theirs. This meant incorporating as much as possible of Aristotelian thinking into their own understanding of the world, and, when rejecting some of his teaching, like the eternity of the world (how could the world, created at a moment in time by the Christian God, be eternal?), explaining how and why the philosopher went wrong and doing so with the very tools that he had provided in his logical works.
They employed dialectical reasoning in their discussions, another distinctive aspect of the scholastic method. For each problem a thesis might be stated, some contention whose truth had to be tested, and authorities were often marshalled in favour of the thesis. Its opposite or antithesis would then be stated, with the available authorities marshalled in its favour. The scholar’s job was to arrive at the truth, a synthesis that either harmonized the evident contradiction between thesis and antithesis or led to the rejection or modification of one or the other.
The methods by which this resolution was achieved were multiple. Most famously, of course, resolution was accomplished through the rigorous use of the tools of Aristotelian logic, especially deductive logic. At other times, a scholar might show that an apparent contradiction was illusory because the plain meaning of words in the thesis or antithesis did not correspond to the philosophical or theological meanings of the words: there are three persons in the Trinity, but the Trinity is a unity, one God. The statements, perhaps baffling on the surface, become less so – or so medieval theologians insisted – if one realized that in specialized theological language ‘person’ translated Greek hypostasis, often rendered as ‘manifestation’, although to even venture this suggestion would have provoked other theologians to continue the discussion, querying ‘manifestation’ and making other suggestions (was it ‘substance’ or ‘essence’?), and so forth.
Or, to cite another example, one might consider the word ‘man’. Man is a categorical term. We recognize certain individuals as fitting into the category (Socrates, for example). But what was the ontological status of ‘man’, a universal in medieval philosophical language? Were universals real? Or were they simply names (Latin nomina, hence the name of the philosophical position, nominalism)? There is no value in oversimplifying: there were many different types of realisms (that is, arguments in favour of the view that universals were real), and there were many kinds of nominalists (those who denied the reality of universals, but tried nonetheless to describe the precise character of their status). But imagine a debate on the ontological status of universals in relation to God and the three persons of the Trinity. One of Abelard’s most vehement and controversial arguments revolved around just this issue.
This philosophizing could be a dangerous business. Failure to resolve matters in doctrinally and morally acceptable ways provoked acerbic criticism. Abelard felt the sting again when in the Sic et Non (‘Yes and No’) he refused to resolve apparently contradictory assertions from sacred authorities. Moreover, applying scholastic methods to the dissection of theological truths, even to defend them, angered some churchmen. The Trinity was one of the central mysteries of the Catholic faith; it neither needed explanation nor could be explained. Clarification of the language of Trinitarian theology was certainly permissible, even encouraged. But even moderate clerics denied that the goal of clarification was a licence for vain curiosity about, say, the relations of power among the three persons of the Trinity. This was one part of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s denunciation of Abelard.
Catholic Christianity, nevertheless, was a doctrinally complex religion that seemed to demand high-powered philosophical defence, as the entirely orthodox Richard of St Victor eloquently pointed out in the introduction to his brilliant treatise on the Trinity. The equally orthodox St Anselm, an Italian who became prior of a Norman abbey and then archbishop of Canterbury in England, valued faith above all things, but faith sought understanding. One believes in God on faith, but reason may stimulate or reinforce belief. A reformer opposed to lay investiture, an ascetic who denounced the vices of his age, twice in exile from his archbishopric because of arguments with his king, Anselm could have used the example of his holy life, his long suffering and dedication to principle, as a kind of evidence of the reality of the Christian God (why would he suffer, except that he had faith, the highest form of knowledge, that his Redeemer lived?). But Anselm was also a philosopher involved, like Abelard and Richard of St-Victor, in the feverish debate on the nature of the Trinity. He did not shy away from other subjects that we might now regard as perilous minefields.
Perhaps Anselm is most famous for a formulation to be found in a work of his entitled Proslogion. After defining God as a being than which no greater can exist, he insists that even those who deny God’s existence know the meaning of the word God when they deny His existence. Otherwise their denial would be incoherent. Therefore, God exists in the mind of the one who denies His existence. But it is possible for the denier to think of God existing apart from the mind in the real world. Of course, this is a contradiction, since real existence is greater than mental existence, and the real God would be greater than the denied (idea of) God, who has already been imagined as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. The contradiction can only be resolved if the real God and the God denied are the same. If one exists, the other must. Even the ‘fool [who] hath said in his heart, There is no God’ (Psalms 14:1), therefore, has a concept of Him, than which nothing greater can exist, and having this concept demonstrates the existence of God.
One sometimes calls this the ‘Ontological proof’ of the existence of God. It seems to be a seventeenth-century name for it. Others have been less kind. ‘Slippery’ is a word that comes to mind. Why is having a concept of God in the mind equivalent to God existing in the mind? Why must real, that is, extra-mental, existence be superior to ‘mere’ mental existence, even if this was a belief common to medieval thinkers? Why – logically – must it be so? And how can arguing from a definition of an entity prove the existence of the entity anyway? Finally, even if one grants the logic of Anselm’s argument, does it not lead to absurdities? An opponent pointed out that the perfect sea isle must exist or else one could imagine one more perfect, which would be a contradiction, since there are no degrees of perfection. Anselm brusquely responded that God’s existence is necessarily included in the definition of His perfection – which is not the case with a sea isle. But neither Anselm’s nor his supporters’ efforts succeeded in silencing objections; the ontological proof, sometimes modified, to be sure, would be the subject of violent controversy, passionate support and equally passionate ridicule, down through the philosophical revolution of the early modern period.
Like philosophy and theology, another very advanced discipline which was to find a niche in the universities was academic medicine. In a world so heavily influenced by the intellectual paradigm of the Timaeus, where the little world (microcosm) of the individual organism mirrored the greater (macrocosm), understanding the body – medical knowledge – was deemed crucial to understanding the universe. Many important medical treatises that came out of the monastic tradition reflect this overarching philosophical concern, admixed, of course, with rather more straightforward therapeutic concerns. This is the tradition within which the work of the nun, Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote on nearly everything, would have to be placed.
The most famous medical centre, at Salerno in Italy, was neither a monastery nor a university, but an anomalous kind of institution where medicine was always touted as a practical not merely discursive art. The penetration of medicine into the university curriculum occurred because of the existence of texts, scrupulously glossed at Salerno, that could also be subjected to technical scholastic analysis. The texts were rich and difficult, partly because of the same problems of transmission through multiple translation and interpretation that we have seen before. But the texts, flawed as they were, incorporated a long southern European tradition of learning. The central ancient works were the Aphorisms and the Prognostics, attributed to Hippocrates, and another body of texts which went under various names and were attributed to Galen. These were supplemented by translations of Arabic works.
A wide variety of other influences also helped produce more distinctively Salernitan texts, like the gynaecological works attributed to the woman physician Trotula which would spread across the map of Europe in translation. She (or the man or men writing under her name) advised practitioners, in one passage, to help a pregnant woman carrying a dead foetus to deliver quickly by the application of pepper powder under and into her nose. The sneezing generated would help contract the muscles, forcing the would-be mother to deliver. (Medieval Woman’s Guide, 1981, p. 139). Advice like this, which seemed to come from a person whose expertise on the female body was rooted in her being a female herself, was widely sought after. Male practitioners could ground their authority over the female body in their knowledge of Trotula’s works.
The central concepts in medicine revolved around diagnostic signs. Disease was seen in part as a divergence from a normalcy, varying from person to person but defined by essential characteristics and balances. Each healthy person enjoyed a different balance of hot and cold, wet and dry temperaments or, in the technical language of the texts, complexions. Balance should also extend to the four fluids that served the organism, blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Imbalances could be identified by fevers, runny noses, coughs, spitting up of blood, dark urine, white urine, swelling, skin discoloration, lesions, stench, putrefaction, and the like, in other words, by what common sense still regards as signs of illness. Balance might be restored, where it was possible to be restored, by environmental change, drugs, stones (lithotherapy) or surgery.
This concept of balance helped make medicine, outside of its therapeutic application, an attractive analytical subject. It was possible to bring to bear a large part of the conceptual baggage of scholastic discourse in dealing with questions of balance. To this extent, academic doctors could draw upon the kinds of arguments that other scholastics were making in their moral analysis of, say, justice. Notions of retributive justice implied some theory of comparability and equilibrium. And both philosophers and academic specialists in the law subjected the problem of retributive justice to intense scholastic analysis.
In the history of medieval legal learning, where some of this discourse on justice was developing, the formative events were, first, the reacquaintance of scholars in the eleventh century with the original texts of the Roman law as put together at Emperor Justinian’s order in the sixth century; second, as one might expect, the Investiture Controversy; and, third, the founding of the law school at Bologna. It has been argued recently, with passion, that both the pre-history of the recovery of the Justinianic corpus and the existence of other Italian institutions besides Bologna were more important in the development of academic law than scholars have given them credit for. Be that as it may, the traditional picture is one of new texts stimulating the narrow world of legal scholarship at what was a momentous time of political and religious change. The texts included the Digest, a collection of ancient legal opinions, often of a very pithy nature. There were also the Code (the standing laws of the Empire at the time of compilation), the Novels (new laws subsequent to the Code), and the Institutes (the textbook which students in late antiquity were to use to study the law).
The Bolognese and masters at other institutions glossed these texts, the laws of the civitas and imperium of Rome. The texts seemed particularly seductive in their comprehensiveness, their engrossing picture of ancient imperial authority, and the elegance of their maxims, each of which was usually referred to by its opening or key words. For example, Digna vox or Lex digna (‘Worthy voice’ or ‘Worthy law’) referred to a passage in the Code (1.14.4), ‘It is the worthy voice of the majesty of the ruler that the prince professes himself bound to the law, inasmuch as our authority [that of the fourth-century co-emperors, Theodosius and Valentinian, who issued the decree] depends upon the authority of the law. And truly, greater than the imperium is the submission of the principate to the laws’ (Kantorowicz, 1957, p. 104).
A statement like the one quoted, if regarded as normative, could have played into the hands of contemporary anti-imperial jurists, men who supported the church and who argued that the emperor, in their case the German emperor, had transgressed the law by investing bishops and therefore abrogated his right to authority. But other maxims, especially if they were found in the Digest, which came to be regarded as a repository of almost inspired wisdom, appeared to trump this view. The Digest (1.4.1) insists, in the so-called Lex regia (‘Royal law’), for example, that ‘what pleases the prince has the force of law’. Since Emperor Justinian himself, ‘The Jurist’ in the reverential speech of medieval interpreters, declared that his compilers had tried to eliminate all inconsistencies in the body of legal knowledge and opinions they brought together, medieval masters were stimulated to try to harmonize apparently divergent sentiments, like the Lex digna and Lex regia, when they encountered them.
The masters of Roman law, or civilians, as they are also known, expounded their various views principally in lectures, that is, in academic readings of their interpretations to their students. The environment was one of the most erudite, productive and provocative in western history. Those who glossed or harmonized what seemed to be pro-imperial positions, like the famous Master Irnerius (probably a latinization of the German name, Werner), sometimes incurred papal wrath. Irnerius was excommunicated in 1119. Those who teased out rather less exalted pictures of imperial authority suffered the hostility of the other side.
Nonetheless, the dialogue, however freighted with political consequences, went on among the professors and students. Glosses accumulated and eventually masters came along who tried to produce summas of these interpretations. One such summa, that written by Master Accursius, would become standard: his Glossa Ordinaria to the Roman law was published in the early thirteenth century. But even such a comprehensive work as Accursius’s only stimulated more dialogue, more glosses, more summas and more controversy.
At Bologna and elsewhere in northern Italy, and eventually elsewhere in Europe, parallel studies were going on. The counterparts to the civilians – those who studied Roman law – were the canonists, those who developed and glossed the law of the Church. In part stimulated by the dissension arising out of the Investiture Controversy, churchmen had ransacked available texts for relevant discussions of clerical and secular authority. What did the Bible say about authority? What had the church fathers said? Early papal letters and the decrees of councils? Even ancient imperial and royal edicts?
The need to put all this together comprehensibly and comprehensively inspired Gratian’s work, the Concordance of Discordant Canons, also known as the Decretum, and the method the author chose to do so, a dialectical engagement, would have long-lasting influence. For like Justinian of six centuries before, this monk, of whom we know almost nothing, wanted to resolve the discordances or contradictions in the canons or laws that he assembled. The papacy found the result to its liking and approved the book. On its framework a greater and greater legal structure was created. Many of Gratian’s declarations were challenged over time. New and perhaps profounder masters, like Huguccio at the end of the twelfth century, emerged and redacted their opinions, but always at the core of the Corpus of the Canon Law, as it came to be known, was Gratian’s Decretum.
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The description offered in this chapter hardly exhausts, even in the sketchiest way, the achievements of twelfth-century scholars or the environments within which they accomplished these achievements. But it should give something of the flavour of intellectual life – its creativity, excitement, even dangers – in the most elite circles and at the most elite institutions. The Renaissance of the twelfth century had still wider ramifications, however, and it is to these, in the domain of the arts, that we shall now turn.