Post-classical history

Chapter 7

The ‘Middle Ages’ in our daily lives

As we reach the end of our journey, let us consider some of the legacies of the ‘Middle Ages’, ones we take for granted.

Universities

As we have seen, learning was wide-ranging and diverse—in cathedrals and courts, in monasteries and urban schools—and it owed a great deal to the Roman curriculum of the liberal arts. The integrated study of rhetoric, logic and grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, provided the basis for understanding the world and its affairs, and for describing it. Cathedral schools attracted students, individual teachers did too, and the 12th century saw a further specialization in centres of learning under the auspices of emperors, kings, and popes.

All Italian cities of that period had some schools which trained notaries. Schools at Padua, Salerno, and Bologna offered professional training in medicine and law from at least the 11th century. Great schools attracted students from afar and their needs inspired the development of the format of the university. The schools of Bologna were granted a set of privileges by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1155, by which they became a universitas. This allowed students—mostly foreign students, who sought to ensure their safety and value for money during the years of study—to form a guild of sorts. This chartered organization supervised the terms and quality of teaching and decided the level of payment for teaching.

The University of Paris emerged in a different way. Since the early 12th century, the cathedral of Notre Dame, in the capital city of the kingdom of France, had become a famous school for the liberal arts. Not far from it, on the left bank of the River Seine, a number of important schools also attracted famous teachers and throngs of students from all over Europe. The most famous was Peter Abelard, who perfected the method we call dialectic: an analytical probing of philosophical propositions through formally discussed oppositions. The intellectual environment was fruitful, and so was the ambition of the French crown: to enhance its capital city with schools just as it did with trade. Philip II (1165–1223) of France authorized the creation of a universitas, an association of teachers licensed to regulate the lives of students too. Papal endorsement for Paris in 1231 established it as ‘parent of all knowledge’ (parens scientiarum), and a preacher described it later in the century as ‘the mill in which all God’s wheat is ground for the nourishment of the entire world’. It was famed above all for its arts degree, which imparted the fundamental texts through lectures followed by dialectical disputations, and for its preeminence in theology. And so Paris attracted students from all over Europe whose differences in lifestyle and rivalries led to the organization into four nations: French (central and southern France as well as Iberia), Picard (northern France and Flanders), English (England, Germany, and Scandinavia), and Norman (including Brittany).

Schools existed in many English cities from the 11th century, but for the best higher education, English students flocked in the 12th century to Paris. After King Henry II banned English students from studying in Paris in 1167, many English, Scottish, and other northern students settled in the Oxford schools, and from 1209 in Cambridge. Papal bulls made each a universitas a few decades later.

The university enjoyed recognition of its degrees as providing a licence to teach anywhere in Europe. Universities offered the highest training—to doctoral level—in medicine, church (canon) law, and civil (Roman) law. They trained those who became the officials of states and cities: diplomats, judges, tax collectors, and prelates of the church—bishops and even popes. Here again we witness an institution which depended a great deal on long-standing traditions of city life and education, and whose basic curriculum depended on study of the classics.

The arrival of thousands of students animated university towns, with the demand for accommodation, food, and books. Students lived in halls run by private individuals or, in the case of monks or friars, maintained by religious orders. In the late 13th century, a variation on a Parisian invention was introduced: the university college. Colleges began as charitable institutions to support poor students through higher degrees. Endowed by the founder, each college had a library, dining hall, dormitory, and chapel. The community of scholars studied, ate, prayed—and often misbehaved—together. The most famous of these colleges is King’s College in Cambridge, founded by Henry VI in 1441 for the training of clerks for the royal chapel. Its world-famous choir still inhabits the chapel, a vast edifice where grateful scholars prayed for the welfare of their benefactor’s soul.

From the mid-14th century the link between the demand for trained personnel by state administrations and the location and shape of universities became more explicit. Demand combined with the prestige associated with the patronage of learning. And so, Emperor Charles IV (1316–78) founded Prague University in 1348, and Casimir III (1310–70), king of Poland, founded the University of Krakow in 1364. Princes followed suit, with universities to serve their regions: Galeazzo II Visconti (c.1320–78), ruler of Milan, founded the University of Pavia, in 1361, and the move of the University of Florence to Pisa was organized by Lorenzo de Medici in 1472.

In southern Europe, universities were civic and professional bodies with a mixed clerical and lay membership, in contrast to northern Europe where they were ecclesiastical institutions. In northern universities, whose students and teachers were in clerical orders, the papacy attempted to control the content of teaching and occasionally intervened as censor. Even ancient works could be affected: in 1210 some of Aristotle’s scientific writings were condemned, and in the 1270s attempts were made to prohibit certain propositions from debate—like ‘That God does not know things other than himself’—under the pain of inquisitorial investigation for heresy. But, like most assaults on academic freedom, these efforts were ultimately unenforceable. It was, indeed, from the new university of Wittenberg in Saxony, founded in 1502, that Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) new interpretation of Christianity was spread, initiating the momentous Reformation of European religious life.

University teaching was delivered in lectures, where professors commented on a core text: in geometry, rhetoric, philosophy, or theology. Illuminations to manuscripts show the classroom with its ranks—very much like a modern lecture hall—with the familiar array of avid note-takers alongside bored students, or those deep in conversation. Graduates with a Bachelor of Arts (BA)—today still known by the same name—from the University of Paris or Oxford could expect appointment to a parish living, a teaching or tutoring job, a post in royal administration, or in the service of a city council. Theirs were the skills of communication and recording: drafting letters, keeping official archives, or composing sermons. A few continued to the higher degrees of law, theology, or medicine, which held the promise of high ecclesiastical office, private practice, or membership in a royal or princely entourage. Access to posts depended on patronage, and some graduates waited years for permanent placements. Old boys’ networks operated, creating pathways into professions already trodden by friends or relatives. Then as now university years were a time for hard work and hard play. Music and violence, sexual experimentation and satire, all arise intermingled from our sources. Students appear perennially poor, and developed a knack for writing heart-rending letters to friends and patrons in search of support. They drank a great deal and sang a lot too.

In universities the culture of scholarship and the culture of youth met. Friendships made at that formative stage served men in later life. The uniformity of the basic Latin training for the BA meant that educated men all over Europe shared a professional language as well as intellectual habits and tools. These could be very practical: a familiar style in composing letters, favourite moral fables from antiquity known to all, or the manner of approaching problems and seeking solutions to them. This uniformity characterized educated men well into the 19th century. Once women and other less privileged people entered higher education, once the democratic politics of the 20th century questioned the structure of university curricula, and the demands of scientific teaching transformed the teacher/student relationship, the legacy was bound to be transformed, as it has been in most modern universities—transformed, but not out of all recognition.

Universities led some young men to leave their homes and regions, to live in penury and make do with odd jobs—as scribes, secretaries, chaplains for hire. Students benefited from skills and connections which were highly transferable and useful in a wide variety of careers. To become a student they required some support from a patron—a local bishop, landlord of the estate on which they were born, or a well-to-do relative—but many students were poor and unsure of their future prospects. The most distinguished people in society did not send their sons to universities, yet universities were full of bright and lively young people. Even those who dropped out after a year or two had sufficient training to allow them to earn a living. What has not changed is the culture of young adulthood fostered in these institutions of learning, and the possibilities for social mobility these afforded.

Printed books

Even though so much of our reading is now done on screens we still love books, and will no doubt continue to do so. The book format is one of the most remarkable inventions of our period. The ancient world used inscribed surfaces: clay tablets and the easily erasable wax tablets. Greeks and Romans also used scrolls made of durable soft materials, like papyrus in the dry Mediterranean regions. But the codex, or book—with pages that can be leaved—was an invention associated in particular with the spread of Christianity.

The book came to represent Christianity, a religion based on scripture, old and new. Some of the central figures in the Christian tradition are habitually represented by them holding a book: the evangelists—Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—or Augustine, a father of the Church. Books came increasingly to be used for the preservation and use of scripture, in liturgy and in private devotion. Gospels were some of the prestigious gifts offered to rulers at the moment of conversion—like the glorious St Augustine Gospels—associated with the mission sent from Rome to England.

Books were useful and laden with symbolic meaning. Before the year 1000 most books were to be found in the libraries of monasteries and cathedrals, and in the treasuries of courts. Such courts were often itinerant, and moved between sites according to the season of year, and so important books were transported in chests, and cared for by chaplains. They were protected and respected by the use of expensive bindings, made of ivory, precious metal, or fine leather, and often encrusted with gems and pearls. The contents of books were frequently read aloud: in monastic refectories during meals, in aristocratic halls during feasts, by chaplains in private chapels. Books were rare even towards the end of our period, and the medieval invention of print would change the ubiquity, visibility, and accessibility of books forever.

Those books associated with religion or with the entertainment of the rich and leisured were often decorated lavishly. The 13th century manuscript of the miracles of the Virgin Mary made at the request of Alfonso X (1221–84), king of Castile, contains the text in verse, in the courtly Galician, inscribed on pages which were also heavily decorated with illustrations of the text as well as by notes for singing it. Far less ornate are the thousands of surviving work-oriented books: texts for study in universities, or manuals for parish priests at their pastoral care, books of law, medicine, and work Bibles. These were often copied in smaller—sometimes cursive—handwriting, without any adornment. To such work books were often attached, especially from the 13th century, indices and thematic retrieval systems to facilitate use, systems we still appreciate today. They combined colour markings of chapter headings—called rubrics, since they were often marked in red ink—with the arrangement of commentaries and glosses on the margins of pages. It is interesting to observe how some of these aids have been translated digitally to our screens.

The production of books was laborious, parchment and inks were expensive—a small working Bible of c.1300 required parchment from some 35 animals—and so only limited social and professional groups could hope to own them. Books were so precious that owners bequeathed them in wills, and passed them on within families. They were particularly costly when they contained illuminations and drawings, as so many books for religious use did. Demand for books by informed lay people as well as by the professional religious encouraged craftsmen to develop efficient methods of reproduction. The silversmiths—experts in engraving of fine metals—led the way. Johann Gutenberg (1395–1468) was a goldsmith from the city of Mainz, an entrepreneur who experimented in many innovative ventures associated with the religious culture of his day. None was more momentous than his invention of moveable type for the printing of texts. He printed the first Bible in 1455.

The rest is history.

Song

Out of the blend of traditions—Latin and vernacular, religious and secular, north and south, two ambitious cycles of poetry written in the 14th century have made their way into the canon of great world literature. They are each the result of the interaction of a poet’s vision with a vast array of literary, theological, political, and scientific knowledge accumulated over the centuries we are studying. Both were ambitious projects, and each is considered as the moment when their language was perfected as a medium for literary expression—Tuscan and English—they are Dante Alighieri’s (c.1265–1321) Divine Comedy, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c.1343–1400) Canterbury Tales. Both poem cycles are organized around a journey: the former is Dante’s way through Hell, Purgatory, and on to Paradise accompanied by the poet Virgil; Chaucer’s is that of a group of pilgrims making their way from Southwark to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Each in its way is a meditation on human worth and frailty, on the power of exemplary figures to inspire and elevate.

Poets in our period were heirs to several traditions. From antiquity they inherited the ambitious epics of war, love, and power, the greatest of all being Virgil’s Aeneid, known to every child schooled in Latin; the Bible taught the rich structure and imagery of the Psalms, poetry which formed the daily liturgy of all religious and many engaged lay people. Traditions of oral poetry intersected with the classical and biblical all over Europe, and particularly powerfully in Iceland, Ireland, and Wales. Al-Andalus produced an exquisite culture of poetry in Arabic, whose sounds and rhythms in turn inspired the fine Hebrew poetry of Judah ha-Levi (c.1075–1141), and influenced the music of the Occitan troubadours. Traditions of epic poetry recounted deeds of heroism, like theChanson de Roland, in the vernacular, and for the delight of aristocratic audiences.

The region between France and Spain—Occitania—set the tone for poetry and song from the early-12th century, and remained a point of reference for much later poetry. Poetry and music were combined and their subject was love. Human feeling, human thought, and human voice came together in the work of the Troubadours, men and women who sang love in all its pain and yearning. European love song has remained alive in European culture—later in world culture—for some one thousand years. It was produced by amateurs and professionals, by men and women, and lived both on the written page and in performance: the singer and the song, like Dylan and Baez, trubadour and trobairitz.

At the same time, Europe’s religious lore was translated from Latin into vernacular languages with the aim of enriching the life of the laity. The miracles of the Virgin Mary, lovingly collected in Latin by English monks in the 12th century, were translated in the next century into the languages of England, Provence, Castile, northern France, and later on into Icelandic, Hungarian and were turned into song.

Nurtured in the courts of counts and dukes of southern France, areas that had been in constant contact with Muslim Spain, a world of warfare, lordship, and separation, songs of yearning achieved an extraordinary blend of word and sound. Somewhat later in northern France and England, songs were written by men with a Latin education, and convey a mixture of exaltation and objectification of women. This developed into the cultural style of courtly love, in which women were objects of desire, fought over by men: distant, even cruel. In the world of court and song, women were prominent patrons and promoters of love-song. Courtly love was imaginary and aspirational, but it influenced some patterns of interaction between men and women, in the etiquette of wooing and romance, which still reverberates in many genres of modern culture.

Poetry and song became attached to the rich legacy of heroic tale, which coalesced around the figure of the Briton, King Arthur, and which spread throughout Europe into all its languages. Arising from the heightened awareness of origins and ethnicity engendered by the Norman Conquest of England, in that most multi-ethnic land, the British traditions were rewritten as history. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (c.1100–c.1155) History of the Kings of Britain, based on Welsh and Latin sources, created a historical narrative from the Trojans who settled in Britain after the war in Troy, through complex lineages to the time of King Arthur.

Courts inspired life styles, religious and cultural trends, and influenced manners. Courts were also hubs for the production and display of luxury goods and of literature, especially the poetry which was recited and performed, sometimes sung, for the entertainment of audiences of men and women. Courts began to play at Arthurian legend, to emulate the competition, sociability, love-sickness, and gender roles this depicted. People began to take the names of Arthurian celebrities—Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere—and to design jousts and festivities around them.

Such playfulness was the privilege of European elites for centuries, and in the 20th century it inspired a global playground. The courtly song of medieval romance provides the language of courtship, yearning, self-understanding for the world’s youth. It now also fills large spaces of the imagination through role-play, games, literature, and film.

Now you know how it came about.

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