The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (The Middle Ages Series)

544 Pages·2000·1.66 MB·English

by  C. Stephen Jaeger

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A new genre of fictional narrative becomes a prominent bearer of "ethical"
ideals: the courtly romance. It shows idealized knights and ladies behaving
with sublime courtesy, charm, humanity, restraint, polisheven when shaken
with passion. The Arthurian romance was a charismatic text in the highest
degree. It provoked imitation.
*
This introduction gave a sketchy frame of the education which this book
studies. It is a wholly unintellectual, even anti-intellectual discipline,
transmitted above all by a kind of body-magic that I have called charisma;
it makes the teacher's presence into a seal and the student into wax
receiving his imprint.
GermanyFranceItaly
In defining the sources appropriate to this study, again, "letters and
manners" were my guide. I have followed this formula as extensively as I
could. The result is a large body of evidence that suggests common
foundations of the cathedral schools of Germany and France. There are no
doubt local differences, but those do not become evident until an overview
of the spread of this learning is available and it is possible to compare one
center with another. In any case, my purpose is to define common features,
not local ones.
I was guided by the scholarship on particular centers, and could have gotten
nowhere without it. But research has concentrated on local influences and
has tidily separated Germany from France. The intellectual history of
twelfth-century France and the early history of schools and universities
have been written largely without any reference to German sources.
29 And that seemed to an earlier generation both good methodology and
common sense.
The value of local historical studies is obvious. But an overview of the
larger relationships has oddly not seemed necessary. Some of the most
important figures and works of the period are totally unlocatable, and that
could not be the case if local or national differences were at all sharply
definable. Here are some questions for the advocates of carefullyespecially
nationallynarrowed bases of sources.
(1) Who is the author of the long, learned didactic poem "Quid suum

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mation took place just at the time when the institutions of that learning were
being radically transformed and mores and ethica were being thrown
overboard. When the virtues cultivated in moral training no longer had
formal educational institutions to convey them, they survived as widely
admired social values.
Charismatic Texts
A prominent development in the transition from the eleventh to the
thirteenth century was the gradual fictionalizing and aestheticizing of
ethica. This is the fate of charisma in the transition to an intellectual
culture: it becomes enfabulated, an object for study and reading. The real
presence is no longer the bearer of culture, but rather the symbolic
presence. Moral discipline registers in artifacts, not in human beings. This
development follows the course of the memorializing of Socrates: the
master was bottled and packaged in various kinds of texts. The "heroic age"
when philosophy was inseparable from presence passed away, and was
supplanted by an age of texts, often highly impressive, refined, and
sophisticated, but created out of "envy," lacking the force and vitality of
what had preceded. It is that nostalgic urge to recapture the incomparable
personality and moral heroism of the eleventh century out of which many of
the great artifacts of the twelfth were born. Viewed in this way, the twelfth
century relates to the eleventh as Plato to Socrates.
The evidence for the survival of the old learning is accordingly very
different from that provided by the age in which it was alive. The
documents are not letters and portraits of real people, but rather fiction,
sculpture, and didactic and imaginative literature. Ethica is much more
prominent, but somehow also much less real. As a practiced discipline it is
mainly present in complaints about its absence. The discipline has moved
out of real life and has become thoroughly "textualized."
The "perfect man" occurs as a grand philosophical abstraction in Bernard
Silvester's and Alan of Lille's allegorical poems, and both of them draw on
ideas from "moral" instruction of the previous century.
We also have a variety of manuals of instruction for princes whose content
owes much to the moral discipline of the eleventh-century cathedral
schools: John of Salisbury's Policraticus, Gerald of Wales's De principis
instructione, and a work that is an amalgam of ethica and what comes to be
known as courtly ideals, Thomasin von Zirclaere's Der welsche Gast.

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virtutis"? It is central to the study that follows and comes up in a number of
chapters. The attempts at attribution show an erratic spread. The abbot
Thierry of St. Trond was one of the candidates for authorship, Hildebert of
Lavardin another. The poem was accordingly dated ca. 1100. The most
recent editor dates it reliably to ca. 1043-46.
30 She also suggests the author was possibly a member of the chapel of
emperor Henry III writing for the instruction of the prince.
These conjectures pretty much sweep the social and geographic spectrum of
the learned world north of the Alps: the author was from the lowlands,
France, or Germany; he was a monk, a bishop or a court cleric. Paravicini's
dating also broadens the spectrum of time: from mid-century to the end of
the century. Barthélémy Hauréau found this poem "the most interesting and
admirable work of Hildebert," and E. R. Curtius saw in it "the true, genuine
and consistent statement of Hildebert on the nature of poetry."31 I know of
no better confirmation of the unity of learning in the eleventh century than
the identification by these eminent scholars of a poemwritten probably
before Hildebert's birth and possibly by a Germanwith the core of Hildebert
of Lavardin's poetics.
(2) Who was Master Manegold, teacher of William of Champeaux and
Anselm of Laon and "master of the modern masters"? A Frenchman or a
German? Or a conservative anti-imperial reformer from Alsace?
(3) Who was Honorius Augustodunensis? A German from Augsburg? Or
from Regensburg? Or was he a Frenchman from Autun? Or perhaps an
Englishman or Irishman? What place does Augustodunensis refer to? Did
he study at Chartres, Laon, St. Victor, or Canterbury? Or at all these
schools?
(4) Who was Hugh of St. Victor? Was he from Saxony, the low countries,
or Lorraine?
These personalities are not obscure and mute figures concealing their
identities by their silence. They are prolific and central players in the school
life, and the fact that their large body of writings does not supply the clues
to their backgrounds underscores my point: local background and national
origins played no significant role in their writings. The perspectives of local
history have severe limits for our period. The cathedral schools formed a
cultural unity and need to be studied from that perspective as well as from
that of local and national history.
An important factor in the formation of the northern schools were those
south of the Alps. The Italians Stefan and Gunzo of Novara were important
influences in the early formation of cathedral schools. Adelman

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the character of the mature student. In this way the process of discipline
continues throughout life within the self-contained classroom of the
individual.
The discipline of the body is preparation for the true job of teaching, the
"composing" of the inner man. Like a musical instrument, the inner world
can be "tuned" through adjusting the outer. In the apparently mechanical
procedure of tuning a stringed instrument, highly sophisticated laws of
harmonics and musical proportion are at work, even when the instrument
tuner does not know and master them, and when the instrument sounds in
tune its physical presence becomes a medium of those laws. The "tuning" of
the body works similarly. If the student walks and gestures gracefully,
speaks confidently and persuasively, and holds his head and eyes in a
moderated and controlled way, then the inner world will be held to the laws
of grace, restraint, moderation that are in force in the outer. This musical
metaphor was well known in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it
seems probable that in Rheims, Chartres, and Bamberg, as in fifth-century
Athens, music as an ethical discipline played an important part in the
formation of character (see below, Chapter 5).
From Virtue to Social Ideal
The virgin Sophia described by Bernard has many of the qualities that
"cultivation of virtue" promises. She walks beautifully, and the tilt of her
head and the position of her eyes, her voice, her expression all beam
virginity, or rather domination of desire and impulse. Here the classroom is
self-enclosed, but the first stage is bypassed. She has no teachers of self-
control. She just is an ideal. She comes that way. This attitude of Bernard's
would appear to any remaining representatives of the old discipline (the
letter was written some time prior to 1145) as wishful thinking. Bernard in
turn would appear as a kind of moral Cornifician, who represents virtue as a
thing that comes by nature and grace and is obtainable without discipline.
By 1145 no cathedral school mastersor very few, perhaps in Germany and
far in the provinces of Francewere whipping virtue into their students and
turning vessels of perfection off the wheel of discipline. But virtually all of
aristocratic society recognized, credited, andto an extent that it is now hard
for us to assessactually strove for the qualities that had constituted the
curriculum of mores from the previous century. What had been an
educational goal had transformed itself into a social value, and this transfor-

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of Liège indicates that students of Fulbert of Chartres regularly traveled to
Italy in search of instruction. Anselm of Besate and Benzo of Alba are also
witnesses to a rich culture in Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries, one
which has left few traces, and those mainly when Italians moved to the
north. I have not found access to those schools, and they remain an obscure
factor in the education described here.
32
Most of the following chapters are structured as commentaries on particular
texts. The literature of the cathedral schools is little known, and it has
seemed to me important to include many excerpts in English translation. I
hope this will serve to some extent to encourage a rescue operation for that
rich but neglected culture.

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By her manners in conversation, as
veluti maternis ab eius though by a mother's teachings
colloquio documentis [documentis], she shed lustre on her
venustatis habitum et beauty of posture and the dignity of her
honestatis gravitatem moribus.conduct.
. . exornabat. 23
. . . exemplum et documentum he became an example and a "document"
factus est omnibus . . . . . . for all. . .24
We are not so much stirred to emulation
His vivendi documentis non as trained and disciplined fully by these
tantum initiatus, sed ad documents of the good life [ = the lives of
plenitudinem institutus. the abbots ]25
The word can also mean "example" or "teachings."26 The blurring of the
borders between physical presence of a teacher and the contents of a lesson
is the important point. By the later Middle Ages, the word's predominant
meaning is the one known to us.27
The same movement from physical to textual is also evident in the
rhetorical terms "scheme," "trope," and of course "figure."
From Disciplined Body to Virtue
In the disciplined person the body is the perfect mirror of the soul. That
means that learning to walk and gesture elegantly, to speak persuasively, to
hold the head and the body in dignified, grave, modest postures, and to
compose facial expressions appropriate to any given emotion, are the first
steps in the cultivation of virtue. Hugh of St. Victor spoke for school
practice of the previous century when he claimed:
The members of the body are to be restrained . . . through discipline, so that the condition of
the mind may be firmed up within and strengthened to the point where exterior vigilance is
set against interior flightiness. . . . Little by little, as it becomes habitual, that same image of
virtue is impressed on the mind which is maintained through outward discipline in the
disposition of the body. . . . The perfection of virtue is attained when the members of the