The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200

511 Pages·2013·29.479 MB·English

by  C. Stephen Jaeger

Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction I
Part One: The Old Learning
I Two Models of Carolingian Education 21
Ecclesiastical disciplinaeh 21 2I
Court Education: Civiles mores/aulicae disciplinae 27 27
2 Court and School in Ottoman Times 36
A New Model: Disciplina Brunonis 36
The Imperial Church 43
Court and Cathedral 44
Courtier Bishops 44
Cathedral Schools 46
Humanist Learning at the Schools 48
Letters and Manners 49
3 The New Education Institutionalized: Schools of Manners 53
Cologne 53
Liege 54
Rheims 56
Chartres 62
Speyer 62
Bamberg 63
Wurzburg 64
x Contents
4 Cultus Virtutum 76
Part I: Teaching Virtue 76
Charismatic Pedagogy 76
Part 2: Embodying Virtue 83
The Civil Life as Productivity: Disciplina vivendi 83
The Statesman 85
Part 3: Two Views of Bishop Licinius 87
Natural Talent 92
Elegance of Manners 94
Part 4: The Virtues of G's Father 96
Humanitas 97
Lepor and hilaritas 102
Friendship: amicitia 103
Virtue made Visible: decor 106
Gestures, Gait, Bearing, and Carriage 111
5 Ethics Colonizing the Liberal Arts 118
Philosophy and Ethics 118
Logic and Ethics in the Regensburg Letters 120
Ritualized Learning 124
Style and Substance 126
The Trivium 128
Grammar 128
Rhetoric 131
Poetry 139
The Quadrivium 164
Music 165
Cosmology 172
6 Conclusion to Part I: Outbidding the Gods 180
A Ridiculous Mouse? 180
Sigeberfs Passion of the Theban Legion 181
Vivacia, tempora nostre vite 182
Mind over Nature 184
Conquering Fate 186
Founding the Arts 188
Restless, Fervid Hearts 188
"Who Needs Examples? You Are the Example" 189
Contents xi
Charismatic Body—Charismatic Text 190
Peace and Friendship 193
Classicism 193
Part Two: The Decline of the Old Learning
7 Two Crises 199
Henry III 200
First Crisis: Wazo of Liege 202
Second Crisis: Bishop Azelinus Reforms Hildesheim 210
8 Old Learning Against New 217
Teacher Insulting 217
Magisterial Authority and Its Mood Music 219
Early Retirement and the Collapse of Discipline:
The Letter of Goswin of Mainz 221
Guibert of Nogent 226
Peter Abelard 229
Part Three: The Twelfth Century: Seeking New Homes
Introduction to Part 3 239
9 Humanism and Ethics at the School of St. Victor 244
Schola Virtutum: Venustas morum as Curriculum 244
The Liber ordinis Sancti Victoris and Other Rules 247
Hugh of St. Victor 254
De institutione novitiorum and Cathedral School Traditions 262
Discipline as Crisis Control 264
10 Bernard of Clairvaux 269
Beauty of Soul 269
Authority and Human Greatness 272
Charismatic Bodies and Charismatic Texts 275
xii Contents
II Twelfth-Century Humanism 278
Compendia of the Arts 278
The Cult of Friendship 279
The Ideal Man 280
Bernard Silvester's Cosmographia 281
Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus 284
12 Court Society 292
Court and School 292
Court Education 294
Moral Philosophy in the Lives of Thomas Becket 297
Courtly Love 310
Conclusion 325
Appendix A: Moral Discipline and Gothic Sculpture:
The Wise and Foolish Virgins of the Strassburg
Cathedral 331
Appendix B: The Letter of Goswin of Mainz to His
Student Walcher 349
Notes 377
Bibliography 479
Index 507
Introduction
The humanist strain in twelfth-century culture represented by figures like
Bernard Silvester, John of Salisbury, and Alan of Lille has its roots in the late
tenth and eleventh centuries. C. H. Haskins knew very well that the move-
ment he called the "Renaissance of the twelfth century53 grew out of de-
velopments in the preceding age, and he called the eleventh century "that
obscure period of origins which holds the secret of the new movement.5'1
What especially favors that obscurity and guards that secret is the
apparent poverty of intellectual and artistic achievement in the centers of
worldly learning, the cathedral schools. Those schools produced no great
works of philosophy or imaginative fiction, very little poetry worth reading,
no autobiography or personal reminiscences, and no compendia of learning
like those of Hugh of St. Victor and Thierry of Chartres from the twelfth
century.
The scholarship on education in the earlier Middle Ages has drawn a
picture of the arts curriculum based largely on the seven liberal arts2 and
scriptural studies in monastic learning.3 The logic of looking for something
where there is light even when you have lost it in the dark has turned
monasteries and continuing Carolingian traditions into the measure for
cathedral schools in the era of their rise, 950-1100. The scholarship on
education in the period does not distinguish clearly between monastic and
secular learning, or between the learning of the eleventh century and its
Carolingian predecessors, or for that matter between the eleventh and the
twelfth centuries.
In terms of availability of sources, the eleventh-century cathedral
schools are hemmed in on all sides by comparatively well documented
institutions, and in the middle is a blank. There are critics of whatever was
in that blank: Peter Damian and Otloh of St. Emmeram in the eleventh
century, and Peter Abelard in the twelfth. A number of young men at
monastic schools in the late tenth century left them to go off to study in that
blank space, and they emerged again as prominent bishops, as advisors to
kings, as saints.
2 Introduction
The obscurity of the cathedral schools is hard to dispel given the dearth
of sources. Writings from the monasteries are abundant, and writings from
the cathedrals are scarce. From the late tenth to the late eleventh century,
some very vital schools produced remarkably few written documents. We
have letters and letter collections, some lists of auctores^ some library cata-
logues,4 schematizations of studies, and discussions of them. There are
some descriptions of education in history and biography, and a handful of
mediocre commentaries and tracts. There is also a body of learned poetry,
generally in a Latin so obscure as to thwart interest rather than reward it.
That is the best we can do for primary documentation of the cathedral
schools in the period roughly from 950 to 1070. Given the privilege that
modern historians of culture grant to the "monuments" an age creates for
itself, the period appears extremely threadbare. But that privilege directs us
where there is no path and blocks the one that is open.
In odd contrast to the dearth of monuments is the enthusiastic praise by
contemporary observers of whatever was happening in the blank. The
centers of learning are regularly referred to as "a second Athens," "a second
Rome"; the masters are called "our Plato" "our Socrates," "a second Cicero."
There are many expressions of fervent love of student for master and master
for student. We hear about great crowds of students and a flourishing school
life, and we can observe keen competition between schools (see below,
Chapter 3). Something was going on at the early cathedral schools that is not
transmitted clearly by the sources or set in intelligible structures by current
frames of explanation. The result of this unfavorable array of sources is that
the school life of the period often seems like an enclosed garden protected
from exploration, and the would-be-explorer stands before it like an Alice in
Wonderland, who fits through none of the available doors and can only get
oblique looks through undersized and inconveniently placed windows into
a vivid and alluring world. And there are no documents labeled "eat me," or
"digest me," or "include me in the discussion."
"Eat Me": Letters and Manners
For this study the entry into the world of the schools is the phrase "letters
and manners." What essentially happened at cathedral schools has its for-
mula in that phrase. Students acquired mores along with letters. I translate
litterae throughout as "letters," though "literature" would be an appropriate
rendering, a field of meaning still held firm in our phrases "letters and
Introduction 3
sciences" or "humane letters." The meaning of the word mores, and the way
they were taught and studied, are the subject of most of what follows. The
quotations at the beginning of the introduction are good idealizing state-
ments of the conception and goal of this learning. Goswin of Mainz
(Gozechinus) used the image of the teacher as potter, forming students "by
artist's hand from wet and malleable clay into vessels of glory on the wheel
of discipline."5 The discipline of mores turned them into living works of art
by teaching them conduct. The mode of behavior cultivated was based
largely on classical models: on Cicero and Seneca, on the Roman orator and
statesman. This educational model privileged eloquence and "wisdom," the
former the concern of letters, the latter of mores. But as we will see, the two
assimilated so closely to each other that sharp distinctions are not possible.
Essentially a student's and teacher's time was spent in the discipline of
conduct and the study of prose and verse composition based on classical
models. The liberal arts likewise assimilated to mores, which was also called
ethica^ momlis discipline, momlis philosophic or momlitas.6
Given this orientation of studies an inventory of the books read and
the intellectual goals pursued has only a secondary value. We have to put
aside the conception of school learning as primarily the transmission of
knowledge: lecturing, note-taking, book-learning, the generating of under-
standing, the cultivation of critical thought. Studying the "scholarly," "in-
tellectual" side of cathedral school learning is like writing history of the
theater from lists of plays performed and from theoretical treatises by
actors. If in a particular period the repertoire does not change much and
there are no theoretical treatises (and there never are —actors do not
ordinarily theorize), then we might conclude that that period was not
original or productive. And if from the same period that we have just
judged unoriginal and unproductive we have many rave reviews from
critics, then we might say that given the lack of originality and productivity
in the theater, such reviews must be taken as an indication of the low
expectations and bad taste of the period.
Of course, that interpretation is based on a fundamental misunder-
standing of what a theater is and what it does. This is the predicament of
historians of education for the eleventh century. There is a great deal of talk
about flourishing schools and great teachers. But there are no intellectual
achievements, and therefore the schools are judged to "show little vitality
from within."7
The apparent poverty of the age is misleading. The vitality and con-
tinuity in secular learning in the period 950-1100 are not to be found in
4 Introduction
texts and artifacts, but in personalities and in the cultivation of personal
qualities. Its real accomplishment was what came off the "wheel of disci-
pline.35 Its works of art are men whose "manners" are "composed." This
composition, the well-tempered man, was a major contribution of the
eleventh century to "philosophy" (as defined in Chapter 5) and to culture.
It is the best answer to the question how the age could have been glorious
while inhabiting a blank spot in intellectual history.
Our education and intellectual life are based on texts. We do not have a
model of learning and philosophy that is not oriented to the written word.
The result is that written monuments exercise a jealous tyranny in the
writing of intellectual and cultural history, telling us that they are the thing
itself and we shall have no other criteria before them. But the culture of the
cathedral schools was what I will call a charismatic culture. It cannot be
assessed by weighing and measuring its documentation, which by its very
nature it tends not to produce; such texts as are produced are only recorded
by chance, not because documentation and representation are the media of
cultural productivity.
I want to sketch in the following comments an explanatory framework
that will accommodate the available sources on eleventh-century school
culture better than the current model of schools as educators of intellect in a
textualized culture. This model will also help us to see the eleventh century
in its relation to the twelfth.8
The culture of the early cathedral schools was complex and sophisti-
cated. It cultivated the Latin language to the highest degree of complexity it
attained in the Middle Ages. A particular kind of intentionally obscure
Latin poetry was its dominant literary form. It was a poetry that produced
its effect in performance with music, and the written form is a petrified
artifact that can give virtually no clues of its vital social function. The culture
was highly literate but at the same time more or less indifferent to textuality.
To call the cathedral schools "oral" would be misleading, especially in
analogy to oral-formulaic literature. The "sacred simplicity of the illiterate"
has nothing to do with this culture, and to associate it with the "rusticity" of
orality as opposed to the "urbanity" of written Latin is not possible.
Charismatic Culture Versus Intellectual Culture
The transition from the eleventh to the twelfth century plays out a contest
between two stages of culture which is not restricted to one historical
Introduction 5
setting but recurs at various points in western history: in fifth- and fourth-
century Athens, in Rome from the republic to the empire, in the European
Middle Ages from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, and again from the
late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. We can call the two stages charismatic
and intellectual. The shifts from the one to the other are not linear; it is
possible for charismatic culture to supersede intellectual. The new stage
always appears wrapped in the aura of "rebirth,55 "renaissance,55 and renewal,
and the older stage always laments the advent of the new with complaints of
the collapse of culture and civilization.
This model regards the two stages as engaged in a productive, dynamic
contest. It allows us to avoid the blinders of a progressive model of histor-
ical development. It takes seriously the sense of superiority of the old and its
feeling that culture suffers diminution and trivializing from the new, and it
is as much concerned with what is lost as with what is gained in historical
and cultural change. It makes it possible to deal with the "return55 of
charismatic culture, an event that took place, for instance, when Renais-
sance humanism confronted scholasticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Finally, the model is useful, I believe, in part as an answer to a
basic fallacy that hovers around the discussion of the shift from an oral to a
literate culture: the idea that growing literacy represents improvement,
increasing sophistication, a move from an archaic and primitive to an
advanced culture.
"Charismatic versus intellectual culture55 is the embracing category that
contains the problem, oral versus written. We can define and authenticate
this antinomy by starting with Cicero's scheme of the development of
Roman philosophy. He had a clear conception of the poles of culture I have
called charismatic and intellectual, and presented them as distinct but
related contexts of philosophy. He formulated this opposition and gave it a
historical framework in the Tusculan Disputations. He observed that philos-
ophy was a fairly new discipline in the Rome of his time, although the
Greeks had long since developed it to a high level of sophistication. He
explains this "deficiency55 to the advantage of his countrymen: it may be, he
says, that the philosophy of the early Romans was Pythagorean, and the
Pythagoreans were careful to transmit their wisdom secretly, hermetically,
in the form of poems and songs.9 The early Romans also used to sing songs
at banquets in praise of the merits of illustrious men. Therefore it is clear
that they had a culture of poetry, and this may have accommodated some
aspects of philosophy. He can point to some written monuments: laws,
orations, family traditions. But for the most part the early Romans, either
6 Introduction
because of the grand undertakings of state they were caught up in, or
because they sought to guard their knowledge from the ignorant, practiced
"the most bountiful of all arts, the discipline of living well.5510 They pre-
ferred to do this — and here is the main point—in the conduct of life and
public affairs rather than in written words (vita magis quam litteris).
After this period in which philosophy and life were identical came a
period of writings. The first Roman to publish his writings, Cicero says,
found many students, in part because the crowd found him "easy to under-
stand" (cognitu perfacilis). And soon after, many teachers followed his
example and "took Italy by storm," a development of which Cicero disap-
proves (cf. Tusc.Disp. 4.3.6-7).
Cicero's view of Roman intellectual history is based on a scheme in
which a poetic, hermetic, elitist culture, whose "philosophy35 is based on
"virtue," personal merit, and physical presence, gives way to one which
communicates and teaches numbers of people through writings aimed at
generating understanding (cognituperfacilis). This model applies well to the
eleventh century and the transition to the twelfth.
The example of fifth- and fourth-century Athens is also useful to fill out
this model. Socrates is a good representative of a charismatic culture. He
wrote nothing. He taught by dialogue and question. He mistrusted the
written word, and regarded writing as lethal to the mind's highest faculty,
memory. Texts represented the rigidifying of thought, which develops in
the living dialogue through assertion, challenge, and response. Writing
everything down mummifies thought and threatens the death of the
mind.11 The fragmentary nature of pre-Socratic philosophy shows a similar
disregard of the written word as the medium of philosophy. The charis-
matic teaching central to Greek Stoicism is embedded in the same matrix.
Two opposing lines of influence follow from Socrates12: on the one
hand there are Aristotle and the peripatetics; on the other Plato, Xenophon,
Antisthenes, and Aeschines of Sphettus. The first is a rationalist reaction
against the master's doctrine. It speaks a simple language aimed at commu-
nicating, not evoking and creating; employs myth and poetry only as
objects of study, not as bearers of doctrine, and relocates reality in things
and in created nature, not in transcendent ideas. The second commemo-
rates the master and continues his traditions in biography, memoirs, di-
alogues, histories. A variety of new forms develop around the attempt to
reproduce the incomparable presence of Socrates (see n. n above). The
first abolishes charisma by demystifying the process of cognition and deper-
sonalizing the art of teaching (put everything in writing); the second