The Age of Faith

There were magical means to knowledge as well as to health. Most of the old pagan methods for divining the future or seeing the absent flourished throughout the Middle Ages despite repeated condemnation by the Church. Thomas à Becket, wishing to advise Henry II about a contemplated invasion of Brittany, consulted an aruspex, who foretold the future by watching the flight of birds, and a chiromancer, who predicted by studying the lines of the hand.¹⁹ This art of palmistry claimed divine sanction from a verse in Exodus (xiii, 9): “It shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand.” Other prophets tried to foretell events by observing the movements of the winds (aëromancy) or the waters (hydromancy), or the smoke rising from a fire (pyromancy). Some, imitating the Moslems, marked points at random upon the earth (or upon any writing material), connected the points with lines, and told fortunes from the geometrical figures so formed (geomancy). Some, it was alleged, learned the future from the evoked dead (necromancy); Albertus Grotus, at the request of Frederick Barbarossa, evoked (we are told) the spirit of the Emperor’s wife.²⁰ Some consulted prophetic books, like those purporting to contain the predictions of the Sibyls, or Merlin, or Solomon. Some opened the Bible at random (sortes sanctorum) or the Aeneid (sortes vergilianae), and told the future from the first verse seen. The gravest medieval historians nearly always found (like Livy) that important events had been directly or symbolically foretold by portents, visions, prophecies, or dreams. There were heaps of books—e.g., one by Arnold of Villanova—offering the latest scientific interpretation of dreams (oneiromancy)—not much sillier than those which famous scientists have written in the twentieth century. Nearly all these modes of divination or clairvoyance had been practiced in antiquity, and are practiced today.

But our time, despite some effort, has not yet equaled the Age of Faith—in Islam, Judaism, or Christendom—in belief that the future is decipherably written in the stars. If the climate of the earth, and the growth of plants, could be so clearly-influenced by the heavenly bodies, why should not these affect—nay, determine—the growth, nature, illnesses, periods, fertility, epidemics, revolutions, and destinies of men or states? So nearly every medieval mind believed. A professional astrologer could be found in the household of almost every prince or king. Doctors bled their patients, as many farmers still plant their seeds, according to phases of the moon. Most universities gave courses in astrology, meaning by it the science of the stars; astronomy was included in astrology, and progressed largely through astrologic interest and aims. Sanguine students professed to have found predictable regularities in the effects of celestial bodies on the earth. Persons born under the ascendancy of Saturn would be cold, cheerless, saturnine; those born under Jupiter, temperate and jovial; under Mars, ardent and martial; under Venus, tender and fruitful; under. Mercury, inconstant, mercurial; under a high moon, melancholy almost to the point of lunacy. Genethlialogy predicted the entire life of the individual from the position of the constellations at his birth. To draw a proper horoscope, therefore, one had to observe the hour, take the precise moment of birth, the precise position of the stars. Astronomic tables were compiled chiefly to aid the drawing of such horoscopes.

Certain names stand out in this period as pundits of the occult. Peter of Abano almost reduced philosophy to astrology; and Arnold of Villanova, a famous physician, had a predilection for magic. Ceceo d’Ascoli (1257?-1327), who taught astrology at the University of Bologna, boasted that he could read a man’s thoughts, or tell what he concealed in his hand, by knowing the date of his birth. To illustrate his views he cast the horoscope of Christ, and showed how the constellations at the Nativity had made the crucifixion inevitable. He was condemned by the Inquisition (1324), abjured, was spared on condition of silence, went to Florence, practiced astrology for numerous clients, and was burned at the stake for denying the freedom of the will (1327). Many sincere students—Constantine the African, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Vincent of Beauvais—were accused of magic, and of relations with devils, because the people could not believe that their knowledge had been obtained by natural means. Michael Scot earned the suspicion by writing famous treatises on the occult: a Liber introductorias on astrology; a Physiognomia on the correlation of qualities of character with peculiarities of body; and two texts of alchemy. Michael condemned magic, but enjoyed writing about it. He listed twenty-eight methods of divination, and seems to have believed in all of them.²¹ Unlike most of his contemporaries he made careful observations, and some experiments; on the other hand he suggested that carrying a jasper or topaz would help a man to preserve continence.²² He was clever enough to keep on good terms with both Frederick II and the popes; but the inexorable Dante consigned him to hell.

The Church and the Inquisition were part of the environment of European science in the thirteenth century. The universities for the most part operated under ecclesiastical authority and supervision. The Church, however, allowed considerable latitude of doctrine to professors, and in many cases encouraged scientific pursuits. William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris (d. 1249), promoted scientific investigation, and ridiculed those who were ready to see the direct action of God in any unusual event. Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln was so advanced in the study of mathematics, optics, and experimental science that Roger Bacon ranked him with Aristotle. The Dominican and Franciscan Orders made no known objection to the scientific studies of Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon. St. Bernard and some other zealots discouraged the pursuit of science, but this view was not adopted by the Church.²³ She found it hard to reconcile herself to the dissection of human cadavers, for it was among her basic doctrines that man was made in the image of God and that the body, as well as the soul, would rise from the grave; and this reluctance was fully shared by the Moslems and the Jews,²⁴ and by the people at large.²⁵ Guido of Vigevano in 1345 spoke of dissection as “forbidden by the Church”;²⁶ but we find no ecclesiastical prohibition before the bull De sepulturis of Boniface VIII in 1300; and this merely forbade the cutting up of corpses and the boiling away of their flesh in order to send the sterilized bones of dead Crusaders back to their relatives for burial at home.²⁷ This may have been misinterpreted as forbidding post-mortem dissection, but we find the Italian surgeon Mondino boiling and dissecting corpses about 1320, without any known ecclesiastical protest.²⁸

If the achievements of medieval science in the West should seem meager in the following summary, let us remember that it grew in a hostile environment of superstition and magic, in an age that drew the best minds into law and theology, and at a time when nearly all men believed that the major problems of cosmic and human origin, nature, and destiny had been solved. Nevertheless, after 1150, as wealth and leisure grew, and translations began to pour in from Islam, the mind of Western Europe was aroused from its torpor, curiosity flared into eagerness, men began to discuss the brave old world of the unfettered Greeks, and within a century all Latin Europe was astir with science and philosophy.

II. THE MATHEMATICAL REVOLUTION

The first great name in the science of this period is Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa.

Sumerian mathematics, born of forgotten parentage, had descended through Babylonia to Greece; Egyptian geometry, still visible in the pyramids, had passed, perhaps through Crete and Rhodes, to Ionia and Greece; Greek mathematics had gone to India in the wake of Alexander, and had played a part in the Hindu development that culminated in Brahmagupta (588?-660); about 775, translations were made of Hindu mathematicians, and soon afterward of Greek mathematicians, into Arabic; about 830 the Hindu numerals entered Eastern Islam; about 1000 Gerbert brought them to France; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew mathematics streamed into Western Europe through Spain and Sicily, and came with Italian merchants to Venice and Genoa, Amalfi and Pisa. Transmission is to civilization what reproduction is to life.

Another line of transmission appeared in the sixth century B.C. in the form of the Chinese abacus (Greek abax, a board), an instrument for counting by transferring little bamboo rods from one group to another; its descendant, the suanpan, is still used by the Chinese. In the fifth century B.C., says Herodotus, the Egyptians reckoned with pebbles, “bringing the hand from right to left”; the Greeks proceeded contrariwise. The Romans used several forms of the abacus; in one form the counters slid in grooves; they were made of stone, metal, or colored glass, and were called calculi, little stones.²⁹ Boethius, about 525, mentioned the abacus as enabling one to count by tens; but this invitation to a decimal system was ignored. The merchants of Italy used the abacus, but wrote the results in clumsy Roman numerals.

Leonardo Fibonacci was born at Pisa in 1180. His father was manager of a Pisan trade agency in Algeria; Leonardo in adolescence joined him there, and was taught by a Moslem master. He traveled in Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Sicily, studied the methods of the merchants, and learned to reckon, he tells us, “by a marvelous method through the nine figures of the Indians”;³⁰ here at the outset of their European career the new numerals were properly called Hindu, and what is now a bore and chore of our childhood was then a wonder and delight. Perhaps Leonardo learned Greek as well as Arabic; in any case we find him well acquainted with the mathematics of Archimedes, Euclid, Hero, and Diophantus. In 1202 he published his Liber abaci; it was the first thorough European exposition of the Hindu numerals, the zero, and the decimal system by a Christian author, and it marked the rebirth of mathematics in Latin Christendom. The same work introduced Arabic algebra to Western Europe, and made a minor revolution in that science by occasionally using letters, instead of numbers, to generalize and abbreviate equations.³¹ In his Practica geometriae (1220) Leonardo, for the first time in Christendom so far as we know, applied algebra to the treatment of geometrical theorems. In two smaller works of the year 1225 he made original contributions to the solution of equations of the first and second degree. In that year Frederick II presided at Pisa over a mathematical tournament in which different problems were set by John of Palermo and solved by Fibonacci.

Despite his epoch-making work, the new method of calculation was long resisted by the merchants of Europe; many of them preferred to finger the abacus and write the results with Roman numerals; as late as 1299 the abacists of Florence had a law passed against the use of the “new-fangled figures.”³² Only a few mathematicians realized that the new symbols, the zero, and the decimal alignment of units, tens, hundreds… opened the way to such developments of mathematics as were almost impossible with the old letter numerals of Greeks, Romans, and Jews. Not till the sixteenth century did the Hindu numerals finally replace the Roman; in England and America the duodecimal system of reckoning survives in many fields; 10 has not finally won its thousand-year-long war against 12.

Mathematics in the Middle Ages had three purposes: the service of mechanics, the keeping of business accounts, and the charting of the skies. Mathematics, physics, and astronomy were closely allied, and those who wrote on one of them usually contributed to the others as well. So John of Holy wood (in Yorkshire), known to the Latin world as Joannes de Sacrobosco, studied at Oxford, taught at Paris, wrote a Tractatus de sphaera—Treatise on the (Earthly) Sphere—and an exposition of the new mathematics, Algorismus vulgaris—Mathematics for the Millions (c. 1230). Algorismus, a corruption of the name al-Khwarizmi, was the Latin term for an arithmetical system using the Hindu numerals. John credited the “Arabs” with the invention of this system, and was partly responsible for the misnomer “Arabic numerals.”³³ Robert of Chester, about 1149, in adapting the astronomical tables of al-Battani and al-Zarqali, brought Arabic trigonometry to England, and introduced the word sinus (bay, sine) into the new science.

Interest in astronomy was maintained by the needs of navigation and the passion for astrology. The immense authority of the oft-translated Almagest petrified the astronomy of Christian Europe into the Ptolemaic theory of eccentrics and epicycles, with the earth at the hub of the world; alert minds like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon felt the force of the criticisms that the Moorish astronomer al-Bitruji had aimed at this system in the twelfth century; but no satisfactory alternative to Ptolemy’s celestial mechanics was found before Copernicus. Christian astronomers in the thirteenth century pictured the planets as revolving about the earth; the fixed stars, snared in a crystal firmament, and steered by divine intelligences, revolved as a regimented host around the earth; the center and summit of the universe was that same man whom the theologians described as a miserable worm tainted with sin and mostly doomed to hell. The suggestion offered by Heracleides Ponticus, four centuries before Christ, that the apparent daily motion of the heavens was due to the axial rotation of the earth, was discussed by Semitic astronomers in the thirteenth century, but was quite forgotten in Christendom. Another notion of Heracleides, that Mercury and Venus revolve about the sun, had been handed down by Macrobius and Martianus Capella; John Scotus Erigena had seized upon it in the eighth century, and had extended it to Mars and Jupiter; the heliocentric system was on the verge of victory;³⁴ but these brilliant hypotheses were among the casualties of the Dark Ages, and the earth held the center of the stage till 1521. All astronomers, however, agreed that the earth is a sphere.³⁵

The astronomical instruments and tables of the West were imported from Islam, or were modeled on Islamic originals. In 1091 Walcher of Lorraine, later Prior of Malvern Abbey, observed lunar eclipses in Italy with an astrolabe; this is the earliest known case of observational astronomy in the Christian West; but even two centuries later (c. 1296) William of St. Cloud had to remind astronomers, by precept and example, that the science grew best on observation rather than on reading or philosophy. The best contribution to Christian astronomy in this period was the Alfonsine Tables of celestial movements, prepared for Alfonso the Wise by two Spanish Jews.

The accumulation of astronomic data revealed the imperfections of the calendar established by Julius Caesar (46 B.C.) from the work of Sosigenes, which made the year too long by eleven minutes and fourteen seconds; and the increasing intercourse of astronomers, merchants, and historians across frontiers exposed the inconvenience of conflicting calendars. Al-Biruni had made a useful study of the rival systems of dividing time and dating events (c. 1000); Aaron ben Meshullam and Abraham bar Hiyya furthered the study in 1106 and 1122; and Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon followed with constructive proposals in the thirteenth century. The Computus (c. 1232) of Grosseteste—a set of tables for calculating astronomic events and movable dates (e.g., Easter)—was the first step toward the Gregorian calendar (1582) that guides and confuses us today.

III. THE EARTH AND ITS LIFE

The least progressive medieval science was geology. The earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God. Moslem, Jew, and Christian alike covered mineralogy with superstition, and composed “lapidaries” on the magical powers of stones. Marbod, Bishop of Rennes (1035–1123), wrote in Latin verse a popular Liber lapidum, describing the occult qualities of sixty precious stones; a sapphire held in the hand during prayer, said this erudite bishop, would secure a more favorable answer from God.³⁶ An opal folded in a bay leaf rendered its holder invisible; an amethyst made him immune to intoxication; a diamond made him invincible.³⁷

The same eager curiosity that spawned superstitions upon the minerals of the earth sent medieval men wandering over Europe and the East, and slowly enriched geography. Giraldus Cambrensis—Gerald of Wales (1147–1223)—roamed over many lands and topics, mastered many tongues but not his own, accompanied Prince John to Ireland, lived there two years, toured Wales to preach the Third Crusade, and wrote four vivacious books on the two countries. He weighed down his pages with bias and miracles, but lightened them with vivid accounts of persons and places, and lively gossip of the trivial things that make the color of a character or an age. He was sure that his works would immortalize him,³⁸ but he underestimated the forgetfulness of time.

He was one of thousands who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made a pilgrimage to the East. Maps and routes were drawn to guide them, and geography benefited. In 1107–11 Sigurd Jorsalafare, King of Norway, sailed as a crusader with sixty ships via England, Spain, and Sicily to Palestine; after fighting Moslems at every opportunity he led his lessened band to Constantinople, and thence overland through the Balkans, Germany, and Denmark to Norway; the story of this adventurous journey forms one of the great Scandinavian sagas. In 1270 Lanzarotte Malocello rediscovered the Canary Islands, which had been known to antiquity. About 1290 Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldo, acording to an unverified tradition, set out from Genoa in two galleys to sail around Africa to India; all hands, it appears, were lost. A famous hoax took the form of a letter from a mythical “Prester John” (c. 1150), who told of his dominions in Central Asia, and gave a fantastic geography of the Orient. Despite the Crusades, few Christians believed in the antipodes; St. Augustine considered it “incredible that a people inhabits the antipodes, where the sun rises when it sets with us, and where men walk with their feet toward ours.”³⁹ An Irish monk, St. Fergil, had suggested, about 748, the possibility of “another world and other men under the earth”;⁴⁰ Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon accepted the idea, but it remained the daring concept of a few until Magellan circumnavigated the globe.

The chief contributions to European knowledge of the Far East were made by two Franciscan monks. In April 1245 Giovanni de Piano Carpini, sixty-five and fat, was sent by Innocent IV to the Mongol court at Karakorum. Giovanni and his companion suffered in the enterprise every hardship this side of death. They traveled for fifteen months, changing horses four times a day. Pledged by the Franciscan rule to eat no meat, they almost starved among nomads who had hardly any other food to give them. Giovanni’s mission failed, but after his return to Europe he compiled an account of his journey which is a classic in the literature of geography—clear, impersonal, matter-of-fact, without a word of self or complaint. In 1253 Louis IX sent William of Rubruquis (Wilhelm van Ruysbroeck) to the Creat Khan to renew the Pope’s suggestion of an alliance; William brought back a stern invitation to submit France to the Mongol power;⁴¹ and all that came of the expedition was William’s excellent account of Mongol manners and history. Here, for the first time, European geography learned the sources of the Don and the Volga, the position of Lake Balkhash, the cult of the Dalai Lama, the settlements of Nestorian Christians in China, and the distinction of Mongols from Tatars.

The most famous and successful of medieval European travelers in the Far East were the Polo family of Venetian merchants. Andrea Polo had three sons—Marco the elder, Niccolò, and Maffeo—all engaged in Byzantine trade, and living in Constantinople. About 1260 Niccolò and Maffeo moved to Bokhara, where they remained three years. Thence they traveled in the train of a Tatar embassy to the court of Kublai Khan at Shangtu. Kublai sent them back as emissaries to Pope Clement IV; they took three years to reach Venice, and by that time Clement was dead. In 1271 they started back to China, and Niccolò took with him his boy Marco the younger, then seventeen. For three and a half years they traveled across Asia via Balkh, the Pamir plateau, Kashgar, Khotan, Lop Nor, the Gobi Desert, and Tangut; when they reached Shangtu Marco was almost twenty-one. Kublai took a fancy to him, gave him important posts and missions, and kept the three Poli in China for seventeen years. Then they sailed back, through three years, via Java, Sumatra, Singapore, Ceylon, and the Persian Gulf, overland to Trebizond, and by boat to Constantinople and Venice, where, as all the world knows, no one would believe the tales “Marco Millions” told of the “gorgeous East.” Fighting for Venice in 1298, Marco was captured, and was kept for a year in a Genoese jail; there he dictated his narrative to a fellow prisoner. Nearly every element in the once incredible story has been verified by later exploration. Marco gave the first description of a trip across all Asia; the first European glimpse of Japan; the first good account of Pekin, Java, Sumatra, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, the Zanzibar coast, Madagascar, and Abyssinia. The book was a revelation of the East to the West. It helped to open new routes to commerce, ideas, and arts, and shared in molding the geography that inspired Columbus to sail westward to the East.

As the orbit of commerce and travel widened, the science of cartography crept laboriously back toward the level it had reached in Augustus’ days. Navigators prepared portolani—guides to the ports of trade, with maps, charts, itineraries, and descriptions of the various harbors; in the hands of the Pisans and Genoese these portolani reached a high degree of accuracy. The mappae mundi drawn by the monks of this period are by comparison schematic and incomprehensible.

Stimulated by the zoological treatises of Aristotle and the botanical classic of Theophrastus, the awakening mind of the West struggled to graduate from legend and Pliny to a science of animals and plants. Nearly everyone believed that minute organisms, including worms and flies, were spontaneously generated from dust, slime, and putrefaction. “Bestiaries” had almost replaced zoology; since monks did almost all the writing, the animal world was considered largely in theological terms, as a storehouse of edifying symbolism; and additional creatures were invented in playful fancy or pious need. Said Bishop Honorius of Autun in the twelfth century:

The unicorn is a very fierce beast with only one horn. To capture it a virgin maid is placed in the field. The unicorn approaches her, and resting in her lap, is so taken. By the beast Christ is figured; by the horn his insuperable strength…. Resting in the womb of a virgin, he was taken by the hunters—i.e., Christ was found in the form of a man by those who loved him.⁴²

The most scientific work of medieval biology was Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus, a 589-page treatise on “the art of hunting with birds.” It was based partly on Greek and Moslem manuscripts, but largely on direct observation and experiment; Frederick himself was an expert falconer. His description of bird anatomy contains a great number of original contributions; his analysis of the flight and migration of birds, his experiments on the artificial incubation of eggs and the operations of vultures show a scientific spirit unique in his age.⁴³ Frederick illustrated his text with hundreds of drawings of birds, perhaps from his own hand—drawings “true to life down to the tiniest details.”⁴⁴ The menagerie that he collected was not, as most contemporaries thought, a whim of bizarre display, but a laboratory for the direct study of animal behavior. This Alexander was his own Aristotle.

IV. MATTER AND ENERGY

Physics and chemistry did better than geology and biology; their laws and marvels have always harmonized better than a “Nature red in tooth and claw” with a theistic view of the world. Their vitality is suggested near the outset of this period by the efforts of Oliver of Malmesbury to make an airplane; in 1065 his contraption was ready, he soared in it from a high place, and was killed.⁴⁵

The science of mechanics produced in the thirteenth century a remarkable figure, a Dominican monk who anticipated several basic conceptions of Isaac Newton. Jordanus Nemorarius became the second General of the Dominican Order in 1222; that such a man could do such brilliant work in science bears witness—if Albert and Thomas were not enough—to the intellectual eagerness of the Preaching Friars. In three mathematical treatises rivaling those of Fibonacci in courage and influence, he accepted the Hindu numerals, and advanced algebra by regularly using letters instead of figures for his general formulas. His Elementa super demonstrationem ponderis studied the component of gravity along a trajectory, and laid down a principle now known as the axiom of Jordanus: that which can raise a certain weight to a certain height can raise a weight K times heavier to a height K times less. Another treatise, De ratione ponderis (perhaps by a pupil), analyzed the notion of statical moment—the product of a force into its lever arm—and anticipated modern ideas in the mechanics of the lever and the inclined plane.⁴⁶ A third treatise, ascribed to “the school of Jordanus,” gave tentative expression to the theory of virtual displacements—a principle developed by Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, and John Bernoulli, and finally formulated by J. Willard Gibbs in the nineteenth century.

The progress of mechanics slowly affected invention. In 1271 Robert of England clearly stated the theory of the pendulum clock. In 1288 we hear of a great clock in a tower at Westminster, and, about the same time, of similar giants in churches on the Continent; but there is no certain indication that these were fully mechanical. The first clear mention of a clock operated by pulleys, weights, and gears is dated 1320.⁴⁷

The most successful branch of physics in this period was optics. The Arabic treatises of al-Haitham, translated into Latin, opened almost a new world to the West. In an essay on the rainbow Robert Grosseteste, about 1230, wrote of a

third branch of perspective… untouched and unknown among us until the present time… [which] shows us how to make things very far off seem very close at hand, and how to make large objects which are near seem tiny, and how to make distant objects appear as large as we choose.

These marvels, he adds, can be achieved through breaking up “the visual ray” by passing it through several transparent objects or lenses of varying structure. These ideas fascinated his pupil Roger Bacon. Another Franciscan monk, John Peckham, probably also a pupil of Grosseteste at Oxford, dealt with reflection, refraction, and the structure of the eye in a treatise Perspectiva communis; when we recall that Peckham became Archbishop of Canterbury we perceive again an unsuspected entente between science and the medieval Church.

One result of these studies in optics was the invention of spectacles. Magnifying glasses had been known to Greek antiquity,⁴⁸ but the construction of such glasses to focus properly when near the eye seems to have awaited research in the geometry of refraction. A Chinese document of uncertain date between 1260 and 1300 speaks of glasses called ai tai, which enabled old people to read fine script. A Dominican friar, preaching at Piacenza in 1305, remarked: “It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making eyeglasses [occhiali], which enable one to see well…. I myself have spoken to the man who first discovered and made them.” A letter dated 1289 says: “I am so heavy with years that without the glasses called okiali, recently invented, I should not be able to read or write.” The invention is usually credited to Salvino d’Amarto, whose tombstone, dated 1317, read: “the inventor of spectacles.” In 1305 a Montpellier physician announced that he had prepared an eyewash that made spectacles superfluous.⁴⁹

The attractive power of the magnet had also been known to the Greeks. Its power to indicate direction was apparently discovered by the Chinese in the first century of our era. Chinese tradition ascribes to Moslems, about 1093, the earliest use of the magnetic needle in guiding navigation. Such use was probably widespread among Moslem and Christian mariners by the end of the twelfth century. The oldest Christian reference to it is in 1205, the oldest Moslem reference is in 1282;⁵⁰ but perhaps those who had long known the precious secret had been in no haste to publish it. Moreover, mariners who used it were suspected of magic, and some sailors refused to sail with a captain who kept such a demonic instrument.⁵¹ The first known description of a pivoted floating compass occurs in an Epistola de magnete by Petrus Peregrinus in 1269. This Peter the Pilgrim recorded many experiments, advocated the experimental method, and expounded the operation of the magnet in attracting iron, magnetizing other objects; and finding the north. He tried also to construct a perpetual motion machine operated by self-regenerating magnets.⁵²

Chemistry advanced largely through alchemical research. From the tenth century onward Arabic texts in this field were translated into Latin, and soon the West steamed with alchemy, even in monasteries. Brother Elias, successor to St. Francis, edited a work on alchemy for Frederick II; another Franciscan, Grosseteste, wrote in favor of the possibility of transmuting metals; and one of the most famous of medieval books, the Liber de causis, presented alchemy and astrology in a work foisted upon Aristotle. Several European kings employed alchemists in the hope of rescuing their treasuries by changing cheap metals into gold.⁵³ Other zealots continued the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone. In 1307 the Church condemned alchemy as a diabolical art, but its practice continued. Perhaps to escape ecclesiastical censure several authors of the twelfth or thirteenth century attributed their works on alchemy to the Moslem “Gebir.”

Medical experience with drugs added to chemical knowledge, and industrial operations almost compelled experiment or discovery. The brewing of beer, the manufacture of dyes, pottery, enamels, glass, glue, lacquer, ink, and cosmetics contributed to the science of chemistry. Peter of St. Omer, about 1270, composed a Liber de coloribus faciendis, containing recipes for the various pigments used in painting; one recipe described the making of oil colors by mixing the pigment with linseed oil.⁵⁴ About 1150a treatise known as the Magister Salernus—presumably a product of the Salerno school of medicine—mentioned the distillation of alcohol; this is the first clear reference to that now universal operation. The grape-producing countries distilled wine, and called the result aqua vitae, eau de vie water of life; the North, with less grapes and bitterer cold, found it cheaper to distill grain. The Celtic term uisqebeatha, which was shortened into whisky, also meant “water of life.”⁵⁵ Distillation had been known long before to Moslem alchemists; but the discovery of alcohol—and, in the thirteenth century, of mineral acids—vastly enlarged chemical knowledge and industry.

Almost as important in its effects as the distillation of alcohol was the discovery of gunpowder. The old Chinese claim to priority here is now challenged; and there is no clear mention of the substance in Arabic manuscripts before 1300.⁵⁶ The earliest known notice of the explosive is in a Liber ignium ad comburendos hostes, or Book of Fires for Burning Enemies, written by Marcus Graecus, about 1270. After describing Greek fire and phosphorescence Mark the Greek gave a recipe for making gunpowder: reduce to a fine powder, separately, one pound of live sulphur, two pounds of charcoal from the lime or willow tree, and six pounds of saltpeter (potassium nitrate); then mix them.⁵⁷ There is no record of any military use of gunpowder before the fourteenth century.

V. THE REVIVAL OF MEDICINE

Poverty always mingles myth with medicine, for myth is free and science is dear. The basic picture of medieval medicine is the mother with her little store of household remedies; old women wise in herbs and plasters and magic charms; herbalists peddling curative plants, infallible drugs, and miraculous pills; midwives ready to sever new life from old in the ridiculous ignominy of birth; quacks ready to cure or kill for a pittance; monks with a heritage of monastic medicine; nuns quietly comforting the sick with ministration or prayer; and, here and there, for those who could afford them, trained physicians practicing more or less scientific medicine. Monstrous drugs and fabulous formulas flourished; and just as certain stones held in the hand were by some believed to ward off conception, so—even in medical Salerno—some women and men ate asses’ dung to promote fertility.⁵⁸

Until 1139 some members of the clergy practiced medicine, and what hospitalization could be had was usually to be found in monastic or conventual infirmaries. The monks played an honorable role in preserving the medical heritage, and led the way in the cultivation of medicinal plants; and perhaps they knew what they were doing in mingling miracle with medicine. Even nuns might be skilled in healing. Hildegarde, the mystic Abbess of Bingen, wrote a book of clinical medicine—Causae et curae (c. 1150)—and a book of Subtilitates, marred here and there with magic formulas, but rich in medical lore. The retirement of old men or women into monasteries or convents may have been motivated in part by a desire for continuous medical attendance. As lay medicine developed, and the love of gain infected monastic healing, the Church (1130, 1339, 1663) progressively forbade the public practice of medicine by the clergy; and by 1200 the ancient art was almost completely secular.

Scientific medicine survived the Dark Ages in the West chiefly through Jewish physicians, who circulated Greco-Arabic medical knowledge in Christendom; through the Byzantine culture of southern Italy; and through translations of Greek and Arabic medical treatises into Latin. Probably the School of Salerno was best situated and prepared to take advantage of these influences; Greek, Latin, Moslem, and Jewish physicians taught or studied there; and till the twelfth century it remained the leading medical institution in Latin Europe. Women studied nursing and obstetrics at Salerno;⁵⁹ mulleres Salernitanae were probably midwives trained in the school. One of the most famous Salernitan products was an obstetrical treatise of the early twelfth century, entitled Trotulae curandarum aegritudinum muliebrum—Trotula on the Cure of Diseases of Women; in the generally accepted theory Trotula was a midwife of Salerno.⁶⁰ Several important treatises, covering nearly all branches of medicine, have reached us from the School of Salerno. One, by Archimatheus, prescribes the proper bedside manner: the physician must always regard the patient’s condition as grave, so that a fatal end may not disgrace him, and a cure may add another marvel to his fame; he should not flirt with the patient’s wife, daughter, or maidservant; and even if no medicine is necessary he should prescribe some harmless concoction, lest the patient think the treatment not worth the fee, and lest nature should seem to have healed the patient without the physician’s aid.⁶¹

The School of Salerno gave way to the University of Naples after 1268, and little is heard of it thereafter. By that time its graduates had spread Salernitan medicine through Europe. Good schools of medicine existed in the thirteenth century at Bologna, Padua, Ferrara, Perugia, Siena, Rome, Montpellier, Paris, and Oxford. In these schools the three main medical traditions of the Middle Ages—Greek, Arabic, and Judaic—were merged and absorbed, and the entire medical heritage was reformulated to become the basis of modern medicine. Ancient methods of diagnosis by auscultation and urinalysis retained (and retain) their popularity, so that in some places the urinal became the emblem or signboard of the medical profession.⁶² Ancient methods of treatment by purgation and bloodletting continued, and in England the physician was a “leech.” Hot baths were a favorite prescription; patients traveled to “take the waters” of mineral springs. Diet was minutely prescribed in nearly every illness.⁶³ But drugs abounded. Almost every element was used as a cure, from seaweed (rich in iodine), which Roger of Salerno recommended for goiter in 1180, to gold, which was imbibed to “comfort sore limbs”⁶⁴—apparently our fashionable treatment for arthritis. Practically every animal organ found some therapeutic use in the medieval pharmacopeia—the horns of deer, the blood of dragons, the bile of vipers, the semen of frogs; and animal excrement was occasionally prescribed.⁶⁵ The most popular of all drugs was theriacum, a weird mixture composed of some fifty-seven substances, of which the chief was the flesh of poisonous snakes. Many drugs were imported from Islam, and kept their Arabic names.

As the supply of trained physicians increased, governments began to regulate medical practice. Roger II of Sicily, probably influenced by old Moslem precedents, restricted the practice of medicine to persons licensed by the state. Frederick II (1224) required for such practice a license from the School of Salerno. To obtain it the student had to survive a three-year course in scientia logicalis—presumably meaning natural science and philosophy; he had then to study medicine at the school for five years, pass two examinations, and practice for a year under the supervision of an experienced physician.⁶⁶

Every city of any importance paid physicians to treat the poor without charge.⁶⁷ Some cities had a measure of socialized medicine. In Christian Spain of the thirteenth century a physician was hired by the municipality to care for a specified part of the population; he made periodically a medical examination of each person in his territory, and gave each one advice according to his findings; he treated the poor in a public hospital, and was obliged to visit every sick person three times a month; all without charge, except that for any visit above three in any month he was allowed to ask a fee. For these services the physician was exempted from taxes, and received an annual salary of twenty pounds,⁶⁸ equivalent to some $4000 today.*

As licensed physicians were not numerous in thirteenth-century Christian Europe, they earned good fees, and had a high social status. Some amassed considerable fortunes; some became art collectors; several won an international reputation. Petrus Hispanus—Peter of Lisbon and Compostela—migrated to Paris and then to Siena, wrote the most popular medieval handbook of medicine (Thesaurus pauperum—Treasure of the Poor) and the best medieval discussion of psychology (De anima), became Pope John XXI in 1276, and was crushed to death by a falling ceiling in 1277. The most famous Christian physician of this period was Arnold of Villanova (c. 1235–1311). Born near Valencia, he learned Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek, studied medicine at Naples, taught it or natural philosophy at Paris, Montpellier, Barcelona, Rome, and wrote a great number of works on medicine, chemistry, astrology, magic, theology, wine making, and the interpretation of dreams. Made physician to James II of Aragon, he repeatedly warned the King that unless he protected the poor against the rich he would go to hell.⁷⁰ James loved him nevertheless, and sent him on many diplomatic missions. Shocked by the misery and exploitation that he saw in many countries, he became a follower of the mystic Joachim of Flora, and declared, in letters to princes and prelates, that the wickedness of the mighty and the luxury of the clergy heralded the destruction of the world. He was accused of magic and heresy, and was charged with having alchemically produced ingots of gold for King Robert of Naples. He was condemned by an ecclesiastical court, but was released from prison by Boniface VIII. He successfully treated the old Pope for kidney stones, and received from him a castle at Anagni. He warned Boniface that unless the Church should be thoroughly reformed the divine wrath would soon descend upon her; soon thereafter Boniface suffered famous indignities at Anagni, and died in despair. The Inquisition continued to pursue Arnold, but kings and popes protected him for their ailments’ sake, and he died by drowning on a mission from James II to Clement V.⁷¹

Surgery in this period fought a two-front war against the barbers on one side and general practitioners on the other. For a long time the barbers had given enemas, pulled teeth, treated wounds, and let blood. Surgeons who had received formal medical training protested against the tonsorial performance of such ministrations, but the law defended the barbers throughout the Middle Ages. In Prussia till the time of Frederick the Great it remained one of the duties of the army surgeon to shave the officers.⁷² Partly through this overlapping of functions, the surgeons were considered inferior to the physicians in science and society; they were looked upon as simple technicians obeying the directions of the doctor, who usually, before the thirteenth century, disdained to practice surgery himself.⁷³ Surgeons were further discouraged by fear of imprisonment or death if their procedures failed; only the bravest undertook dangerous operations; and most surgeons, before such an enterprise, required a written guarantee that no harm would come to them in case of failure.⁷⁴

Nevertheless surgery advanced more rapidly in this period than any other branch of medicine, partly because it was forced to deal with conditions rather than theories, partly through plentiful opportunity to treat the wounds of soldiers. Roger of Salerno, about 1170, published his Practica chirurgiae, the earliest surgical treatise in the Christian West; for three centuries it remained a classic text. In 1238 Frederick II ordered that a corpse should be dissected in every five-year period at Salerno;⁷⁵ such dissection of cadavers was practiced regularly in Italy after 1275.⁷⁶ In 1286 a Cremona physician opened a corpse to study the cause of a current pestilence; this is the first known case of a post-mortem examination. In 1266 Teodorico Borgognoni, Bishop of Cervia, began a long struggle of Italian medicine against the Arabic notion that suppuration must first be encouraged in the treatment of wounds; his discussion of aseptic treatment is a classic of medieval medicine. Guglielmo Salicetti—William of Saliceto (1210–77)—professor of medicine at Bologna, made notable improvements in his Chirurgia (1275); it associated surgical diagnosis with a knowledge of internal medicine, used careful clinical records, showed how to suture divided nerves, and advocated the knife—as allowing better healing, and leaving less scar—in preference to the cautery so popular with Moslem practitioners. In a general treatise—Summa conservationis et curationis—William ascribed chancre and bubo to intercourse with an infected courtesan, gave a classical description of dropsy as due to hardening and narrowing of the kidneys, and offered excellent advice on hygiene and diet for every age of life.

His pupils Henri de Mondeville (1260?-1320) and Guido Lanfranchi (d. 1315) brought the medical lore of Bologna to France. Like Teodorico, de Mondeville improved asepsis by advocating a return to Hippocrates’ method of maintaining simple cleanliness in a wound. Lanfranchi, exiled from Milan in 1290, went to Lyons and Paris, and wrote a Chirurgia magna which became the recognized text of surgery at the University of Paris. He laid down a principle that rescued surgery from barberism: “No one can be a good physician if he is ignorant of surgery; and no one can properly perform operations if he does not know medicine.”⁷⁷ Lanfranchi was the first to use neurotomy for tetanus, and intubation of the esophagus, and gave the first surgical description of concussion of the brain. His chapter on injuries of the head is one of the peaks in the history of medicine.

Surgical sleeping draughts are mentioned by Origen (185–254) and Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (c. 353). The usual method of anesthesia in medieval Christendom was by inhaling, and probably drinking, a mixture based on mandragora (mandrake), and generally containing also opium, hemlock, and mulberry juice; mention of this “soporific sponge” occurs from the ninth century onward.⁷⁸ Local anesthesia was induced by a poultice soaked in a similar solution. The patient was awakened by applying fennel juice to his nostrils. Surgical instruments had as yet made no progress since the Greeks. Obstetrics had fallen behind the practice of Soranus (C. A.D. 100) and Paul of Aegina (C. A.D. 640). Caesarean section was discussed in the literature, but apparently not practiced. Embryotomy—mutilation of the foetus for removal from the womb—was in many cases performed because the obstetrician rarely understood version. Delivery was accomplished in specially designed chairs.⁷⁹

Hospitals were now advanced far beyond anything known in antiquity. The Greeks had had asklepieia, religious institutions for the treatment of the sick; the Romans had maintained hospitals for their soldiers; but it was Christian charity that gave the institution a wide development. In 369 St. Basil founded at Caesarea in Cappadocia an institution called after him the Basilias, with several buildings for patients, nurses, physicians, workshops, and schools. St. Ephraim opened a hospital at Edessa in 375; others rose throughout the Greek East, and in specialized variety. The Byzantine Greeks had nosocomia for the sick, brephotrophia for foundlings, orphanotrophia for orphans, ptochia for the poor, xenodochia for poor or infirm pilgrims, and gerontochia for the old. The first hospital in Latin Christendom was founded by Fabiola at Rome about 400. Many monasteries provided small hospitals, and several orders of monks—Hospitalers, Templars, Antonines, Alexians—and nuns arose to care for the sick. Innocent III organized at Rome in 1204 the hospital of Santo Spirito, and under his inspiration similar institutions were set up throughout Europe; Germany alone had, in the thirteenth century, over a hundred such “hospitals of the Holy Spirit.” In France the hospitals served the poor and old and the pilgrim, as well as the sick; like the monastic centers they offered hospitality. About 1260 Louis IX established at Paris an asylum, Les Quinze-vingt; originally a retreat for the blind, it became a hospital for eye diseases, and is now one of the most important medical centers in Paris. The first English hospital known to history (not necessarily the first) was established at Canterbury in 1084. Usually the service in these hospitals was provided free for those who could not pay, and (except in monastic hospitals) the attendants were nuns. The apparently cumbersome costume of these “angels and ministers of grace” took form in the thirteenth century, probably to protect them from communicable disease; hence, perhaps, the shearing of the hair and the covering of the head.⁸⁰

Two special diseases evoked special defenses. “St. Anthony’s fire” was a skin ailment—perhaps erysipelas—so severe that an order of monks, the Congregation of the Antonines, was founded about 1095 to treat its victims. Leper hospitals are mentioned by Gregory of Tours (c. 560); the Order of St. Lazarus was organized to serve in these leprosaria. Eight diseases were regarded as contagious: bubonic plague, tuberculosis, epilepsy, scabies, erysipelas, anthrax, trachoma, and leprosy. A victim of any of these was forbidden to enter a city except under segregation; or to engage in selling food or drink. The leper was required to give warning of his approach by horn or bell. Usually his disease expressed itself in purulent eruptions on face and body. It was only mildly contagious, but probably medieval authorities feared that it could be spread by coitus. Possibly the term was used to include what would now be diagnosed as syphilis; but there is no certain reference to syphilis before the fifteenth century.⁸¹ No special provision seems to have been made for the care of the insane before the fifteenth century.

The Middle Ages, too poor to be clean or properly fed, suffered more than any other known period from epidemics. The “Yellow Plague” devastated Ireland in 550 and 664, killing, we are unreliably informed, two thirds of the population.⁸² Similar pestilences struck Wales in the sixth century, England in the seventh. A malady known to the French as mal des ardents—which was described as burning out the intestines—swept through France and Germany in 994, 1043, 1089, and 1130. Plagues of “leprosy” and scurvy may have come from returning Crusaders. The plica polonica, a disease of the hair, was apparently brought to Poland by the Mongol invasion of 1287. The harassed population ascribed these epidemics to famines, droughts, swarms of insects, astral influences, poisoning of wells by Jews, or the wrath of God; the likelier causes were the crowded condition of the small walled towns, poor sanitation and hygiene, and a consequent lack of defense against infections carried by returning soldiers, pilgrims, or students.⁸³ We have no mortality statistics for the Middle Ages, but it is probable that not more than half of those born reached maturity. The fertility of women labors to atone for the stupidity of men and the bravery of generals.

Public sanitation improved in the thirteenth century, but never in the Middle Ages did it regain its excellence under Imperial Rome. Most cities and wards appointed officials to care for the streets,⁸⁴ but their work was primitive. Moslem visitors to Christian towns complained—as Christian visitors now to Moslem towns—of the filth and smell of the “infidel cities.”⁸⁵ At Cambridge, now so beautiful and clean, sewage and offal ran along open gutters in the streets, and “gave out an abominable stench, so… that many masters and scholars fell sick thereof.”⁸⁶ In the thirteenth century some cities had aqueducts, sewers, and public latrines; in most cities rain was relied upon to carry away refuse; the pollution of wells made typhoid cases numerous; and the water used for baking and brewing was usually—north of the Alps—drawn from the same streams that received the sewage of the towns.⁸⁷ Italy was more advanced, largely through its Roman legacy, and through the enlightened legislation of Frederick II for refuse disposal; but malarial infection from surrounding swamps made Rome unhealthy, killed many dignitaries and visitors, and occasionally saved the city from hostile armies that succumbed to fever amid their victories.

VI. ALBERTUS MAGNUS: 1193–1280

Three men stand out in this period as devotees of science: Adelard of Bath, Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon.

Adelard, after studying in many Moslem countries, returned to England and wrote (c. 1130) a long dialogue, Quaestiones naturales, covering many sciences. It begins Platonically by describing Adelard’s reunion with his friends. He asks about the state of affairs in England; he is told that the kings make war, judges take bribes, prelates drink too much, all promises are broken, all friends are envious. He accepts this as a genial summary of the natural and unchangeable condition of things, and proposes to forget it. His nephew inquires what has Adelard learned among the Moslems? He expresses a general preference for Arabic as against Christian science; they challenge him; and his replies constitute an interesting selection from all the sciences of the age. He inveighs against the bondage of tradition and authority. “I learned from my Arabian masters under the leading of reason; you, however, captivated by… authority, follow your halter. For what else should authority be called than a halter?” Those who are now counted as authorities gained their reputation by following reason, not authority. “Therefore,” he tells his nephew, “if you want to hear anything more from me, give and take reason…. Nothing is surer than reason… nothing is falser than the senses.”⁸⁸ Though Adelard relies too confidently on deductive reasoning, he gives some interesting replies. Asked how the earth is upheld in space, he answers that the center and the bottom are the same. How far would a stone fall if dropped into a hole bored through the center of the earth to the other side?—he answers, Only to the center of the earth. He states clearly the indestructibility of matter, and argues that universal continuity makes a vacuum impossible. All in all, Adelard is a brilliant proof of the awakening intellect in Christian Europe in the twelfth century. He was enthusiastic about the possibilities of science, and proudly calls his age—the age of Abélard—modernus,⁸⁹ the climax of all history.

Albertus Magnus had a little less of the scientific spirit than Adelard, but so cosmic a curiosity that the very immensity of his product won him the name Great. His scientific, like his philosophical, works took mostly the form of commentaries on the corresponding treatises of Aristotle, but they contain now and then fresh breaths of original observation; amid a cloud of quotations from Greek, Arabic, and Jewish authors he finds some opportunities to look at nature in the first person. He visited laboratories and mines, studied diverse metals, examined the fauna and flora of his native Germany, noted displacements of land by sea, sea by land, and explained thereby the fossil shells in rocks. Too much of a philosopher to be a thorough scientist, he allowed a priori theories to color his vision, as when he claimed to have seen horsehairs in water change into worms. But, like Adelard, he rejected the explanation of natural phenomena in terms of the will of God; God acts through natural causes, and man must seek Him there.

His notion of experiment was obscured by his confidence in Aristotle. A famous passage in Book X of his De vegetabilibus stirs us with the words Experimentum solum certificat, which seems to say that “only experiment gives certainty.” But the word experimentum had then a broader meaning than now; it meant experience rather than experiment, as appears from the context of the passage: “All that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know to have written what their personal experience has confirmed; for in these matters experimentum solum certificat.” Even so, it was a wholesome advance. Albert laughs at such mythical creatures as the harpies or the griffin, and the animal legends of a then popular book, the Physiologus, and he notes that “philosophers tell many lies.”⁹⁰ Sometimes, not often, he performed experiments, as when he and his associates proved that a beheaded cicada continued for a while to sing. But he trusted Pliny’s authority with saintly innocence, and believed too simply the tales told him by such notorious liars as hunters and fishermen.⁹¹

He yielded to his times in accepting astrology and divination. He attributes marvelous powers to gems and stones, and claims to have seen with his own eyes a sapphire that cured ulcers. He thinks, like undoubting Thomas, that magic is real, and is due to demons. Dreams sometimes foretell events. In corporeal matters “the stars are in truth rulers of the world”; the conjunctions of the planets probably explain “great accidents and great prodigies”; and comets may signify wars and the death of kings. “There is in man a double spring of action—nature, and the will; the nature is ruled by the stars, the will is free; but unless the will resists it is swept along by nature.” He believes that competent astrologers may in considerable measure prophesy the events of a man’s life, or the issue of an enterprise, from the position of the stars. He accepts, with certain reserves, the alchemic (today the nuclear physicist) theory of the transmutation of elements.⁹²

His best scientific work was in botany. He was the first botanist since Theophrastus (so far as we know) to consider plants for their own sake instead of for their use in agriculture or medicine. He classified plants, described their color, odor, parts, and fruit, studied their feeling, sleep, sex, and germination, and ventured an essay on husbandry. Humboldt was surprised to find in Albert’s De vegetabilibus “exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants.”⁹³ His enormous work De animalibus is largely a paraphrase of Aristotle, but here, too, we find original observation. Albert tells of “sailing the North Sea for the sake of research [experimenti causa], and landing on islands and sandy shores to collect” objects for study.⁹⁴ He compared similar organs in animals and man.⁹⁵

From the vantage point of our hindsight these works contain many mistakes; viewed against the intellectual background of their time they are among the major achievements of the medieval mind. Albert was recognized in his own lifetime as the greatest teacher of his age, and he lived long enough to be quoted as an authority by men like Peter of Spain and Vincent of Beauvais, who both died before him. He could not rival Averroës or Maimonides or Thomas in keenness of judgment or philosophic grasp; but he was the greatest naturalist of his time.

VII. ROGER BACON: C. 1214–92

The most famous of medieval scientists was born in Somerset about 1214. We know that he lived till 1292, and that in 1267 he called himself an old man.⁹⁶ He studied at Oxford under Grosseteste, and caught from the great polymath a fascination for science; already in that circle of Oxford Franciscans the English spirit of empiricism and utilitarianism was taking form. He went to Paris about 1240, but did not find there the stimulation that Oxford had given him; he marveled that so few Parisian professors knew any learned language besides Latin, that they gave so little time to science, and so much to logical and metaphysical disputes that seemed to Bacon criminally useless for life. He “majored” in medicine, and began to write a treatise on the relief of old age. To get data he visited Italy, studied Greek in Magna Graecia, and there became acquainted with some works of Moslem medicine. In 1251 he returned to Oxford, and joined the teaching staff. He wrote in 1267 that in the preceding twenty years he had spent “more than £2000 in the purchase of secret books and instruments,” and in training young men in languages and mathematics.⁹⁷ He engaged Jews to teach him and his students Hebrew, and to help him read the Old Testament in the original. About 1253 he entered the Franciscan Order, but he seems never to have become a priest.

Sick of the metaphysics of the schools, Bacon gave himself with passion to mathematics, natural science, and philology. We must not think of him as a lone originator, a scientific voice crying out in the scholastic wilderness. In every field he was indebted to his predecessors, and his originality was the forceful summation of a long development. Alexander Neckham, Bartholomew the Englishman, Robert Grosseteste, and Adam Marsh had established a scientific tradition at Oxford; Bacon inherited it, and proclaimed it to the world. He acknowledged his indebtedness, and gave his predecessors unmeasured praise. He recognized also his debt—and the debt of Christendom—to Islamic science and philosophy, and through these to the Greeks, and suggested that the “heathen” savants of Greece and Islam had also, in their own fashion, been inspired and guided by God.⁹⁸ He had a high regard for Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol, and other Hebrew thinkers, and had the courage to say a good word for the Jews who lived in Palestine at the time of the crucifixion of Christ.⁹⁹ He learned avidly not only from learned men, but from any man whose practical knowledge in handicraft or husbandry could augment his store. He writes with unwonted humility:

It is certain that never, before God is seen face to face, shall a man know anything with final certainty…. For no one is so learned in nature that he knows all… the nature and properties of a single fly…. And since, in comparison with what a man knows, those things of which he is ignorant are infinite, and beyond comparison greater and more beautiful, he is out of his mind who extols himself in regard to his own knowledge…. The wiser men are, the more humbly they are disposed to receive the instruction of another, nor do they disdain the simplicity of the teacher, but behave humbly toward peasants, old women, and children, since many things are known to the simple and unlearned which escape the notice of the wise…. I have learned more important truths from men of humble station than from all the famous doctors. Let no man, therefore, boast of his wisdom.¹⁰⁰

He labored with such fervor and haste that in 1256 his health broke down; he retired from university life, and for ten years we lose track of him. Probably in this period he composed some of his minor works—De speculis comburentibus (On Burning Glasses), De mirabili potestate artis et naturae (On the Marvelous Power of Invention and Nature), and Computus naturalium (Computation of Natural Events). Now also he planned his “Principal Work”—Scriptum principale, a one-man encyclopedia to be in four volumes: (1) grammar and logic; (2) mathematics, astronomy, and music; (3) natural science—optics, geography, astrology, alchemy, agriculture, medicine, and experimental science; and (4) metaphysics and morals.

He had written some scattered portions when what seemed a stroke of good fortune interrupted his program. In February, 1265, Guy Foulques, Archbishop of Narbonne, became Pope Clement IV, and carried into the papacy something of the liberal spirit that had developed in southern France from the mingling of peoples and creeds. In June he wrote to Bacon bidding him send a “fair copy” of his works, “secretly and without delay,” and “notwithstanding the prohibition of any prelate, or any constitution of thy Order.”¹⁰¹ Bacon set himself feverishly (as may be seen from the passion of his style) to finish his encyclopedia; then, in 1267, fearing that Clement might die or lose interest before its completion, he put it aside, and composed in twelve months—or put together from his manuscripts—the preliminary treatise which we known as the Opus maius, or Larger Work. Suspecting that even this would prove too long for a busy Pope, he wrote a synopsis of it, an Opus minus, or Smaller Work. Early in 1268 he sent these two manuscripts to Clement, with an essay De multiplicatione specierum (On the Multiplication of Vision). Worried lest these be lost in transit, he composed still another summary of his ideas, an Opus tertium, and sent it to Clement by special messenger, together with a lens with which, he suggested, the Pope might himself make experiments. Clement died in November, 1268. So far as we know, no word of acknowledgment from him or his successors ever reached the eager philosopher.

The Opus maius, therefore, is now for us literally his “major work,” though in his intention it was but a prelude. It is substantial enough. Its 800 pages are divided into seven treatises: (1) on ignorance and error; (2) the relations between philosophy and theology; (3) the study of foreign languages; (4) the usefulness of mathematics; (5) perspective and optics; (6) experimental science; (7) moral philosophy. The book contains its due quota of nonsense, and many digressions, and too many extensive quotations from other authors; but it is written with vigor, directness, and sincerity, and is more readable today than any other work of medieval science or philosophy. Its excited disorder, its adulation of the papacy, its anxious professions of orthodoxy, its reduction of science and philosophy to the role of servants to theology, are understandable in a book of such scope and subject, written in hasty summary, and designed to win papal support for scientific education and research. For. Roger, like Francis, Bacon felt that the advancement of learning would need the aid and money of prelates and magnates for books, instruments, records, laboratories, experiments, and personnel.

As if anticipating the “idols” denounced by his namesake three centuries later, Roger begins by listing four causes of human error: the “example of frail and unworthy authority, long-established custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of one’s ignorance under the show of wisdom.”¹⁰² He takes care to add that he is “in no way speaking of that solid and sure authority which… has been bestowed upon the Church.” He regrets the readiness of his time to consider a proposition proved if it can be found in Aristotle, and declares that if he had the power he would burn all the books of the Philosopher as a fountain of error and a stream of ignorance;¹⁰³ after which he quotes Aristotle on every second page.

“After the four causes of error have been banished to the lower regions,” he writes at the outset of Part II, “I wish to show that there is one wisdom which is perfect, and that this is contained in the Scriptures.” If the Greek philosophers enjoyed a sort of secondary inspiration, it was because they read the books of the prophets and patriarchs.¹⁰⁴ Bacon apparently accepts the Biblical story with simple faith, and wonders why God no longer allows men to live 600 years.¹⁰⁵ He believes in the approaching advent of Christ and end of the world. He pleads for science as revealing the Creator in the creation, and as enabling Christians to convert heathens immune to Scripture. So “the human mind can be influenced to accept the truth of the Virgin Birth, because certain animals in a state of virginity conceive and bear young, as for example vultures and apes, as Ambrose states in the Hexaemeron. Moreover, mares in many regions conceive by virtue of the winds alone, when they desire the male, as Pliny states”¹⁰⁶—unlucky instances of trust in authority.

In Part III Bacon labors to teach the Pope Hebrew. The study of languages is necessary to theology, philosophy, and science, for no translation conveys the precise sense of the Scriptures or the heathen philosophers. In the Opus minus Bacon gives a remarkably learned account of the various translations of the Bible, and shows an intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew and Greek texts. He proposes that the Pope appoint a committee of scholars learned in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to revise the Vulgate, and that this revised version—and no longer the Sentences of Peter Lombard-be made the main study in theology. He urges the establishment of university professorships in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Chaldean. He denounces the use of force in converting non-Christians, and asks how the Church can deal with Greek, Armenian, Syrian, Chaldean Christians except through their own languages. In this field Bacon labored as well as preached; he was the first scholar in Western Christendom to complete a Greek grammar for Latin use, and the first Christian to compose a Hebrew grammar. He claimed ability to write Greek and Hebrew, and seems also to have studied Arabic.¹⁰⁷

When Bacon reaches the subject of mathematics his pages become eloquent with enthusiasm, then recondite with theorems. “Next to languages I hold mathematics necessary.” He makes his usual obeisance to theology: mathematics “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell,” promote our knowledge of Biblical geography and sacred chronology, and enable the Church to correct the calendar;¹⁰⁸ and observe, he says, how “the first proposition of Euclid”—constructing an equilateral triangle on a given line—helps us to “perceive that if the person of God the Father be granted, a Trinity of equal persons presents itself.”¹⁰⁹ From this sublimity he proceeds to a remarkable anticipation of modern mathematical physics, by insisting that though science must use experiment as its method, it does not become fully scientific until it can reduce its conclusions to mathematical form. All nonspiritual phenomena are the product of matter and force; all forces act uniformly and regularly, and may consequently be expressed by lines and figures; “it is necessary to verify the matter by demonstrations set forth in geometrical lines”; ultimately all natural science is mathematics.¹¹⁰

But though mathematics is the result, experiment must be the means and test of science. Whereas the Scholastic philosophers from Abélard to Thomas had put their trust in logic, and had made Aristotle almost a member of the Trinity, veritably a holy ghost, Bacon formulates a scientific revolution in terms of mathematics and experiment. The most rigorous conclusions of logic leave us uncertain until they are confirmed by experience; only a burn really convinces us that fire burns. “He who wishes to rejoice without doubt with regard to the truths underlying phenomena must know how to devote himself to experiment.”¹¹¹ At times he seems to think of experimentum not as a method of research but as a final mode of proof through putting ideas—reached by experience or reasoning—to test by constructing on their basis things of practical utility.¹¹² More clearly than Francis Bacon, he perceives and declares that in natural science experiment is the only proof. He did not pretend that this idea was new; Aristotle, Hero, Galen, Ptolemy, the Moslems, Adelard, Petrus Hispanus, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and others had made or lauded experiments. Roger Bacon made the implicit explicit, and planted the flag of science firmly on the conquered ground.

Except in optics and calendar reform, Roger, like Francis, Bacon made only negligible contributions to science itself; they were philosophers of science rather than scientists. Continuing the work of Grosseteste and others, Roger concluded that the Julian calendar exaggerated the length of the solar year by one day every 125 years—the most accurate computation theretofore made—and that the calendar, in 1267, was ten days ahead of the sun. He proposed that a day be dropped from the Julian calendar every 125 years. Almost as brilliant were the hundred pages on geography in Part IV of the Opus maius. Bacon talked eagerly with William of Rubruquis on the return of his fellow Franciscan from the Orient, learned much from him about the Orient, and was impressed by William’s account of the unnumbered millions who had never heard of Christianity. Starting from statements in Aristotle and Seneca, he remarked that “the sea between the end of Spain on the west and the beginning of India on the east is navigable in a very few days if the wind is favorable.”¹¹³ This passage, copied in the Imago mundi (1480) of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, was cited by Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1498 as one of the suggestions that had inspired his voyage of 1492.¹¹⁴

Bacon’s work in physics is a vision of modern inventions, colored now and then with the popular ideas of his time. Here, in literal translation, are the famous passages in which he leaps from the thirteenth to the twentieth century:

A fifth part of experimental science concerns the fabrication of instruments of wonderfully excellent usefulness, such as machines for flying, or for moving in vehicles without animals and yet with incomparable speed, or of navigating without oarsmen more swiftly than would be thought possible through the hands of men. For these things have been done in our day, lest anyone should ridicule them or be astonished. And this part teaches how to make instruments by which incredible weights can be raised or lowered without difficulty or labor…,¹¹⁵ Flying machines can be made, and a man sitting in the middle of the machine may revolve some ingenious device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird…. Also machines can be made for walking in the sea and the rivers, even to the bottom, without danger.¹¹⁶

A passage in the Opus maius (vi, 12) has been interpreted as referring to gunpowder:

Important arts have been discovered against foes of the state, so that without a sword or any weapon requiring physical contact they could destroy all who offer resistance…. From the force of the salt called saltpeter so horrible a sound is produced at the bursting of so small a thing, namely, a small piece of parchment, that… it exceeds the roar of sharp thunder, and the flash exceeds the greatest brilliancy of the lightning accompanying the thunder.

In a possibly interpolated passage of the Opus tertium Bacon adds that certain toys, “crackers,” are already in use, containing a mixture of saltpeter (41.2%), charcoal (29.4%), and sulphur (29.4%);¹¹⁷ and he suggests that the explosive power of the powder can be increased by enclosing it in solid material. He does not claim to have invented gunpowder; he was merely one of the first to study its chemistry and foresee its possibilities.

The best work of Bacon is Part V of the Opus maius, “On Perspectival Science,” and in the supplementary treatise On the Multiplication of Vision. This brilliant essay on optics stemmed from Grosseteste’s work on the rainbow, from Witelo’s adaptation of al-Haitham, and from the tradition of optical studies mounting through Avicenna, al-Kindi, and Ptolemy to Euclid (300 B.C.), who had ingeniously applied geometry to the movements of light. Is light an emanation of particles from the object seen, or is it a movement of some medium between the object and the eye? Bacon believed that every physical thing radiates force in all directions, and that these rays may penetrate solid objects:

No substance is so dense as altogether to prevent rays from passing. Matter is common to all things, and thus there is no substance on which the actions involved in the passage of a ray may not produce a change…. Rays of heat and sound penetrate through the walls of a vessel of gold or brass. It is said by Boethius that a lynx’s eye will pierce thick walls.¹¹⁸

We are not so sure of the lynx, but otherwise we must applaud the bold fancy of the philosopher, “of imagination all compact.” Experimenting with lenses and mirrors, Bacon sought to formulate the laws of refraction, reflection, magnification, and microscopy. Recalling the power of a convex lens to concentrate many rays of the sun at one burning point, and to spread the rays beyond that point to form a magnified image, he wrote:

We can so shape transparent bodies [lenses], and arrange them in such a way with respect to our sight and the objects of vision, that the rays will be refracted and bent in any direction we desire; and under any angle we wish we shall see the object near or at a distance. Thus from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters, and number grains of dust or sand…. Thus a small army might appear very large and… close at hand…. So also we might cause the sun, moon, and stars in appearance to descend here below,… and many similar phenomena, so that the mind of a man ignorant of the truth could not endure them….¹¹⁹ The heavens might be portrayed in all their length and breadth on a corporeal figure moving with their diurnal motion; and this would be worth a whole kingdom to a wise man…. An infinite number of other marvels could be set forth.¹²⁰

These are brilliant passages. Almost every element in their theory can be found before Bacon, and above all in al-Haitham; but here the material was brought together in a practical and revolutionary vision that in time transformed the world. It was these passages that led Leonard Digges (d. c. 1571) to formulate the theory on which the telescope was invented.¹²¹

But what if the progress of physical science gives man more power without improving his purposes? Perhaps the profoundest of Bacon’s insights is his anticipation of a problem that has become clear only in our time. In the concluding treatise of the Opus maius he expresses the conviction that man cannot be saved by science alone.

All these foregoing sciences are speculative. There is, indeed, in every science a practical side…. But only of moral philosophy can it be said that it is… essentially practical, for it deals with human conduct, with virtue and vice, with happiness and misery…. All other sciences are of no account except as they help forward right action. In this sense “practical” sciences, such as experiment, chemistry (alkimia), and the rest, are seen to be speculative in reference to the operations with which moral or political science is concerned. This science of morality is the mistress of every department of philosophy.¹²²

Bacon’s final word is not for science but for religion; only by a morality supported by religion can man save himself. But which religion should it be? He tells of the parliament of religions—Buddhist, Mohammedan, Christian—which William of Rubruquis reported to have been held at Karakorum at the suggestion and under the presidency of Mangu Khan.¹²³ He compares the three religions, and concludes in favor of Christianity, but with no merely theological conception of its function in the world. He felt that the papacy, despite Grosseteste’s criticisms, was the moral bond of a Europe that without it would be a chaos of clashing faiths and arms; and he aspired to strengthen the Church with science, languages, and philosophy for her better spiritual government of the world.¹²⁴ He ended his book as he had begun it, with a warm profession of fidelity to the Church, and concluded with a glorification of the Eucharist—as if to say that unless man seeks periodical communion with his highest ideal he will be lost in the conflagration of the world.

Perhaps the failure of the popes to respond in any way to Bacon’s program and appeals darkened his spirit and embittered his pen. In 1271 he published an unfinished Compendium studii philosophiae, which contributed little to philosophy, but much to the odium theologicum that was disordering the schools. He settled summarily the subsiding debate between realism and nominalism: “a universal is nothing but the similarity of several individuals,” and “one individual has more reality than all universals put together.”¹²⁵ He adopted Augustine’s doctrine of rationes seminales, and arrived at a view in which the efforts of all things to better themselves engendered a long series of developments.¹²⁶ He accepted the Aristotelian notion of an Active Intellect or Cosmic Intelligence “flowing into our minds and illuminating them,” and came dangerously near to Averroistic pantheism.¹²⁷

But what shocked his time was not his philosophical ideas so much as his attacks upon his rivals and the morals of the age. In the Compendium philosophiae almost every phase of thirteenth-century life felt his lash: the disorder of the papal court, the degeneration of the monastic orders, the ignorance of the clergy, the dullness of sermons, the misconduct of students, the sins of the universities, the windy verbiage of the philosophers. In a Tractatus de erroribus medicorum he listed “thirty-six great and radical defects” in the medical theory and practice of his time. In 1271 he wrote a passage that may incline us to take with better grace the shortcomings of our age:

More sins reign in these days than in any past age… the Holy See is torn by the deceit and fraud of unjust men…. Pride reigns, covetousness burns, envy gnaws upon all; the whole Curia is disgraced with lechery, and gluttony is lord of all…. If this be so in the Head, what then is done among the members? Let us see the prelates, how they run after money, neglect the care of souls, promote their nephews and other carnal friends, and crafty lawyers who ruin all by their counsel…. Let us consider the Religious Orders; I exclude none from what I say; see how far they are fallen, one and all, from their right state; and the new Orders [the Friars] are already horribly decayed from their original dignity. The whole clergy is intent upon pride, lechery, and avarice; and wheresoever clerks [students] are gathered together … they scandalize the laity with their wars and quarrels and other vices. Princes and barons and knights oppress one another, and trouble their subjects with infinite wars and exactions…. The people, harassed by their princes, hate them, and keep no fealty save under compulsion; corrupted by the evil example of their betters, they oppress and circumvent and defraud one another, as we see everywhere with our eyes; and they are utterly given over to lechery and gluttony, and are more debased than tongue can tell. Of merchants and craftsmen there is no question, since fraud and deceit and guile reign beyond all measure in their words and deeds…. The ancient philosophers, though without that quickening grace which makes men worthy of eternal life, lived beyond all comparison better than we, both in decency and in contempt of the world with all its delights and riches and honors, as all men may read in the works of Aristotle, Seneca, Tully, Avicenna, al-Farabi, Plato, Socrates, and others; and so it was that they attained to the secrets of wisdom and found out all knowledge. But we Christians have discovered nothing worthy of those philosophers, nor can we even understand their wisdom; which ignorance of ours springs from this cause, that our morals are worse than theirs…. There is no doubt whatever among wise men but that the Church must be purged.¹²⁸

He was not impressed by his contemporaries in philosophy; not one of them, he wrote to Clement IV, could in ten years write such a book as the Opus maius; their tomes seemed to Bacon a mass of voluminous superfluity and “ineffable falsity”;¹²⁹ and the whole structure of their thought rested upon a Bible and an Aristotle mistranslated and misunderstood.¹³⁰ He ridiculed Thomas’ long discussion of the habits, powers, intelligence, and movements of the angels.¹³¹

Such an exaggerated indictment of European life, morals, and thought in a brilliant century must have left Bacon alone against the world. Nevertheless there is no evidence that his Order or the Church persecuted him, or interfered with his freedom of thought or utterance, before 1277—i.e., six years after the issuance of the above Jeremiad. But in that year John of Vercelli, head of the Dominicans, and Jerome of Ascoli, head of the Franciscans, conferred to allay certain quarrels that had arisen between the two orders. They agreed that the friars of each order should abstain from criticizing the other, and that “any friar who was found by word or deed to have offended a friar of the other order should receive from his provincial such punishment as ought to satisfy the offended brother.”¹³² Shortly thereafter Jerome, according to the fourteenth-century Franciscan Chronicle of the XXIV Generals of the Order, “acting on the advice of many friars, condemned and reprobated the teaching of Friar Roger Bacon, master of sacred theology, as containing some suspected novelties, on account of which the same Roger was condemned to prison.”¹³³ We have no further knowledge of the matter. Whether the “novelties” were heresies, or reflected a suspicion that he dabbled in magic, or covered up a decision to silence a critic offensive to Dominicans and Franciscans alike, we cannot say. Nor do we know how severe were the conditions of Bacon’s imprisonment, nor how long it lasted. We are told that in 1292 certain prisoners condemned in 1277 were freed. Presumably Bacon was released then or before, for in 1292 he published a Compendium studii theologiae. Thereafter we have only an entry in an old chronicle: “The noble doctor Roger Bacon was buried at the Grey Friars” (the Franciscan church) “in Oxford in the year 1292.”¹³⁴

He had little influence on his time. He was remembered chiefly as a man of many marvels, a magician and conjurer; it was as such that he was presented in a play by Robert Greene 300 years after his death. It is hard to say how much Francis Bacon (1561–1626) owed to him; we can only note that the second Bacon, like the first, rejected Aristotelian logic and Scholastic method, questioned authority, custom, and other “idols” of traditional thought, praised science, listed its expected inventions, charted its program, stressed its practical utility, and sought financial aid for scientific research. Slowly, from that sixteenth century, Roger Bacon’s fame grew, until he became a legend—the supposed inventor of gunpowder, the heroic freethinker, the lifelong victim of religious persecution, the great initiator of modern thought. Today the pendulum returns. Historians point out that he had only a confused idea of experiment; that he did little experimenting himself; that in theology he was more orthodox than the pope; that his pages were peppered with superstitions, magic, misquotations, false charges, and legends taken for history.

It is true. It is also true that though he made few experiments he helped to state their principle and to prepare their coming; and that his protestations of orthodoxy may have been the diplomacy of a man seeking papal support for suspected sciences. His errors were the infection of his time or the haste of a spirit too eager to take all knowledge for its province; his self-praise was the balm of genius ignored; his denunciations the wrath of a frustrated Titan helplessly witnessing the submergence of his noblest dreams in an ocean of ignorance. His attack on authority in philosophy and science opened the way to wider and freer thought; his emphasis on the mathematical basis and goal of science was half a millennium ahead of his age; his warning against subordinating morality to science is a lesson for tomorrow. With all its faults and sins, his Opus maius deserves its name as a work greater than any other in all the literature of its amazing century.

VIII. THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS

Intermediate between science and philosophy were the reckless polymaths who sought to give order and unity to the expanding knowledge of their period, to bring science and art, industry and government, philosophy and religion, literature and history into an orderly whole that might provide a base for wisdom. The thirteenth century excelled in encyclopedias, and in summae that were all-encompassing syntheses. The more modest encyclopedists limited themselves to summarizing natural science. Alexander Neckam, Abbot of Cirencester (c. 1200), and Thomas of Cantimpré, a French Dominican (c. 1244), wrote popular surveys of science under the title of The Nature of Things; and Bartholomew of England, a Franciscan, sent forth a chatty volume On the Properties of Things (c. 1240). About 1266 Brunetto Latini, a Florentine notary exiled for his Guelf politics, and living for some years in France, wrote in the langue d’oïl Li livres dou tresor (The Treasure Books), a brief encyclopedia of science, morals, history, and government. It proved so permanently popular that Napoleon thought of having a revised edition published by the state, half a century after the world-shaking Grande Encyclopédie of Diderot. All these works of the thirteenth century mingled theology with science, and superstition with observation; they breathed the air of their time; and we should be chagrined if we could foresee how our own omniscience will be viewed seven centuries hence.

The most famous encyclopedia of the Christian Middle Ages was the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1200-c. 1264). He joined the Dominican Order, became tutor to Louis IX and his sons, was given charge of the King’s library, and undertook, with several aides, the task of reducing to digestible form the knowledge that encompassed him. He called his encyclopedia Imago mundi, Image of the World, presenting the universe as a mirror that reflected the divine intelligence and plan. It was a gigantic compilation, equal to forty sizable modern tomes. Vincent, with copyists and shears, completed three parts—Speculum naturale, Speculum doctrinale, Speculum historiale; the heirs of the task added, about 1310, a Speculum morale, largely “cribbed” from Thomas’ Summa. Vincent himself was a modest and gentle soul. “I do not know even a single science,” he said; he disclaimed all originality, and merely proposed to gather excerpts from 450 authors, Greek, Latin, or Arabic. He transmitted Pliny’s errors faithfully, accepted all the marvels of astrology, and filled his pages with the occult qualities of plants and stones. Nevertheless the wonder and beauty of nature shine out now and then through his paste, and he himself feels them as no mere bookworm could:

I confess, sinner as I am, with mind befouled in flesh, that I am moved with spiritual sweetness toward the Creator and Ruler of this world, and honor Him with greater veneration, when I behold the magnitude and beauty… of His creation. For the mind, lifting itself from the dunghill of its affections, and rising, as it is able, into the light of speculation, sees as from a height the greatness of the universe containing in itself infinite places filled with the diverse orders of creatures.¹³⁵

The outburst of scientific activity in the thirteenth century rivals the magnitude of its philosophies, and the variety and splendor of a literature ranging from the troubadours to Dante. Like the great summae and The Divine Comedy, the science of this age suffered from too great certainty, from a failure to examine its assumptions, and from an indiscriminate mingling of knowledge with faith. But the little bark of science, riding an occult sea, made substantial progress even in an age of faith. In Adelard, Grosseteste, Albert, Arnold of Villanova, William of Saliceto, Henri de Mondeville, Lanfranchi, Bacon, Peter the Pilgrim, and Peter of Spain, fresh observation and timid experiment began to break down the authority of Aristotle, Pliny, and Galen; a zest for exploration and enterprise filled the sails of the adventurers; and already at the beginning of the wonderful century Alexander Neckam expressed the new devotion well: “Science is acquired,” he wrote, “at great expense, by frequent vigils, by great expenditure of time, by sedulous diligence of labor, by vehement application of mind.”¹³⁶

But at the end of Alexander’s book the medieval mood spoke again, at its best, with timeless tenderness:

Perchance, O book, you will survive this Alexander, and worms will eat me before the bookworm gnaws you…. You are the mirror of my soul, the interpreter of my meditations… the true witness of my conscience, the sweet comforter of my grief…. To you as faithful depositary I have confided my heart’s secrets;… in you I read myself. You will come into the hands of some pious reader who will deign to pray for me. Then indeed, little book, you will profit your master; then you will recompense your Alexander by a most grateful interchange. I do not begrudge my labor. There will come the devotion of a pious reader who will now let you repose in his lap, now move you to his breast, sometimes place you as a sweet pillow beneath his head; sometimes, gently closing you, he will fervently pray for me to Lord Jesus Christ, Who with Father and Holy Spirit lives and reigns God through infinite cycles of ages. Amen.¹³⁷

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The Age of Romance

1100–1300

I. THE LATIN REVIVAL

EVERY age is an age of romance, for men cannot live by bread alone, and imagination is the staff of life. Perhaps the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe were slightly more romantic than most periods. Besides inheriting all the mystic creatures of Europe’s faery lore, they accepted the Christian epic in all the beauty and terror of its vision, they made an art and religion of love and war, they saw the Crusades, they imported a thousand tales and wonders from the East. In any case they wrote the longest romances known to history.

The growth of wealth and leisure and laic literacy, the rise of towns and the middle class, the development of universities, the exaltation of woman in religion and chivalry—all furthered the literary flowering. As schools multiplied, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, Sallust, Lucan, Seneca, Statius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Suetonius, Apuleius, Sidonius, even the ribald Martial and Petronius, brightened with their art and exotic world many a pedagogic or monastic retreat, perhaps, here and there, some palace bower. From Jerome to Alcuin to Héloïse and Hildebert Christian souls stole minutes from their Hours to chant the Aeneid’s music silently. The University of Orléans particularly cherished the classics of pagan Rome, and a horrified puritan complained that it was the old gods, not Christ or Mary, that were worshiped there. The twelfth century was almost “the Age of Ovid”; he dethroned then the Virgil whom Alcuin had made the poet laureate of Charlemagne’s court, and monks and ladies and “wandering scholars” alike read with delight the Metamorphoses, the Heroides, and the Art of Love. We can forgive many a benedictine carouse to the monks who preserved these damned souls so lovingly, and taught them so devotedly to the reluctant, then grateful, young.

From such classic studies a medieval Latin arose whose diversity and interest are among the most pleasant surprises of literary exploration. St. Bernard, who thought so poorly of intellectual accomplishments, wrote letters of loving tenderness, vituperative eloquence, and masterly Latin. The sermons of Peter Damian, Bernard, Abélard, and Berthold of Regensburg kept Latin a language of living power.

The monastic chroniclers wrote terrible Latin, but they made no claim to offer esthetic thrills. They recorded first of all the growth and history of their own abbeys—the elections, buildings, and deaths of abbots, the miracles and quarrels of the monks; they added notes on the eclipses, comets, droughts, floods, famines, plagues, and portents of their time; and some of them expanded to include national, even international, events. Few scrutinized their sources critically, or inquired into causes; most of them were carelessly inaccurate, and added a cipher or two to bring dead statistics to life; all dealt in miracles, and showed an amiable credulity. So the French chroniclers assumed that France had been settled by noble Trojans, and that Charlemagne had conquered Spain and captured Jerusalem. The Gesta Francorum (c. 1100) attempted a relatively honest account of the First Crusade, but the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1280) provided frankly fictional history for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and a thousand romancers. Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100–54) made his Historia Britonum a kind of national mythology, in which poets found the legends of King Lear and Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram, Perceval, and the Holy Grail. Still living literature, however, are the gossipy and guileless chronicles of Jocelyn of Bury St. Edmunds (c. 1200) and Fra Salimbene of Parma (c. 1280).

About 1208 Saxo Lange, posthumously named Saxo Grammaticus, dedicated to Archbishop Absalon of Lund his Gesta Danorum or Deeds of the Danes, a bit bombastic, incredibly credulous,¹ but a vivid narrative nevertheless, with more continuity than in most contemporary chronicles of the West. In Book III we learn of Amleth, Prince of Jutland, whose uncle killed the king and married the queen. Amleth, says Saxo, “chose to feign dullness and an utter lack of wits. This cunning course ensured his safety.” The courtiers of the fratricide king tested Amleth by putting a pretty woman in his way; he accepted her embraces, but won her love and fidelity. They tried him with cunning questions, but “he mingled craft and candor in such wise that there was nothing to betoken the truth.” From such bones Shakespeare made a man.

Five Latin historians in these centuries rose from chronicles to history, even when keeping the chronicle form. William of Malmesbury (c. 1090–1143) arranged the matter of his Gesta pontificum and Gesta regum Anglorum to give a connected and lively story, trustworthy and fair, of British prelates and kings. Ordericus Vitalis (c. 1075–1143), born in Shrewsbury, was sent as an oblate at the age of ten to the monastery of St. Evroul in Normandy; there he lived the remainder of his sixty-eight years, never seeing his parents again. Eighteen of these years he spent on the five volumes of his Historia ecclesiastica, only stopping, we are told, on the coldest winter days, when his fingers were too numb to write. It is remarkable that a mind so limited in space should have spoken so well of varied affairs, secular as well as ecclesiastical, with asides on the history of letters and manners and every-day life. Bishop Otto of Freising (c. 1114–58), in De duabus civitatibus (On the Two Cities), narrated the history of religion and the secular world from Adam to 1146, and began a proud biography of his nephew Frederick Barbarossa, but died while his hero was in mid-career. William of Tyre (c. 1130–90), a Frenchman born in Palestine, became chancellor to Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, and then Archbishop of Tyre; learned French, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and some Hebrew; and wrote in good Latin our most reliable source for the history of the earlier Crusades—Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Events Overseas). He sought natural explanations for all events; and his fairness in depicting the characters of Nur-ud-din and Saladin had much to do with the favorable opinion that Christian Europe formed of those infidel gentlemen. Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1259) was a monk of St. Albans. As historiographer to his abbey, and later to King Henry III, he composed his lively Chronica maiora, covering the major events of European history between 1235 and 1259. He wrote with clarity, accuracy, and unexpected partialities; he condemned the “avarice that has alienated the people from the pope,” and favored Frederick II against the papacy. He crowded his pages with miracles, and told the story of the Wandering Jew (anno 1228), but he frankly recorded the skepticism with which Londoners viewed the transference of some drops of Christ’s blood to Westminster Abbey (1247). He drew for his book several maps of England, the best of the period, and may himself have made the drawings that illustrate his work. We admire his industry and learning; but his sketch of Mohammed (anno 1236) is an astonishing revelation of how ignorant an educated Christian could be of Islamic history.

The greatest historians of this age were two Frenchmen writing in their own language, and sharing with the troubadours and trouvères the honor of making French a literary tongue. Geoffroy de Villehardouin (c. 1150- c. 1218) was a noble and a warrior, of little formal education; but precisely because he knew not the tricks of rhetoric taught in the schools, he dictated his Conquête de Constantinople (1207) in a French whose simple directness and matter-of-fact precision made his book a classic of historiography. Not that he was impartial; he played too intimate a role in the Fourth Crusade to see that picturesque treachery with an objective eye; but he was there, and saw and felt events with an immediacy that gave his book a living quality half immune to time. Almost a century later Jean Sire de Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, after serving Louis IX on crusade and in France, wrote, when he was eighty-five, his Histoire de St. Louis (1309). We are grateful to him for describing, with artless sincerity, the human beings of history, and for lingering on illuminating customs and anecdotes; through him we feel the tang of the time as not even in Villehardouin. We are with him when he leaves his castle after pawning nearly all his possessions to go on crusade; he did not dare look back, he says, lest his heart should melt at sight of the wife and children whom he might never see again. He had not the subtle and crafty mind of Villehardouin, but he had common sense, and saw the clay in his saint. When Louis wished him to go a second time on crusade he refused, foreseeing the hopelessness of the enterprise. And when the pious King asked him, “Which would you choose—to be a leper or to have committed a mortal sin?”

I, who never lied to him, answered that I would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than be a leper. When the monks had departed he called me to him alone, and made me sit at his feet, and said: “How came you to say that?” … And I told him that I said it again. And he replied: “You spoke hastily and foolishly. For you should know that there is no leprosy so hideous as being in mortal sin.” … He asked me if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. “Sire,” said I, “it would make me sick! The feet of these villeins will I not wash.” “In truth,” said the King, “that was ill said, for you should never disdain what God did for our teaching. So I pray you, for the love of God first, and then for love of me, that you accustom yourself to wash the feet of the poor.”²

Not all Lives of the Saints were as honest as this. The sense of history, and the intellectual conscience, were so poorly developed in medieval minds that the writers of these edifying narratives seem to have felt that much good and little harm could come if their readers accepted the accounts as true. Probably in most cases the authors received the spreading tales from others, and believed what they wrote. If we take the Lives of the Saints simply as stories we shall find them full of interest and charm. Consider how St. Christopher got his name. He was a giant of Canaan, eighteen feet tall. He entered the service of a king because he had heard that this was the most powerful man in the world. One day the king crossed himself at mention of the Devil; Christopher concluded that the Devil was more powerful than the king, and thereupon he entered the Devil’s service. But at sight of a cross on the roadside the Devil took flight; and Christopher, reasoning that Jesus must be stronger than Satan, dedicated himself to Christ. He found it hard to observe the Christian fasts, there was so much of him to feed, and his great tongue tripped over the simplest prayers. A saintly hermit placed him on the bank of a ford whose swift waters annually drowned many who tried to cross it; Christopher took the wayfarers on his back and carried them dry and safe to the other shore. One day he bore a child across the stream; he asked why it was so heavy, and the child replied that it carried the weight of the world; safely across, the child thanked him, said, “I am Jesus Christ,” and disappeared; and Christopher’s staff, which he had stuck in the sand, suddenly blossomed with flowers.³ And who was Britain’s St. George? Near Silenum, in Libya, a dragon annually received as food a living youth or maiden, chosen by lot, as the price of not poisoning the village with his breath. Once the lot fell to the virgin daughter of the king. When the fated day arrived she walked to the pond where the dragon stayed. There St. George saw her, and asked why she wept. “Young man,” she said, “I believe that you have a great and noble heart, but hasten to leave me.” He refused, and induced her to answer his question. “Fear nothing,” he told her, “for I will help you in the name of Jesus Christ.” At that moment the monster emerged from the water. George made the sign of the cross, recommended himself to Christ, charged, and plunged his lance into the beast. Then he bade the maiden throw her girdle around the neck of the wounded dragon; she did, and the beast, yielding like any gallant to so potent a charm, followed her docilely forever afterward. These and other pretty tales were gathered, about 1290, into a famous book by Iacopo de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa; for each day in the year he told the story of its appointed saint; and he called his book Legenda sanctorum—Readings about the Saints. Iacopo’s collection became a favorite with medieval readers, who called it Legenda aurea, the Golden Legend. The Church counseled a certain suspension of belief in regard to some of these stories,⁴ but the people loved and accepted them all, and perhaps were not more deceived about life than the simple folk who absorb the popular fiction of our day.

The glory of medieval Latin was its verse. Much of it was poetry in form only, for all varieties of didactic material—history, legend, mathematics, logic, theology, medicine—were given rhythm and rhyme as mnemonic aids. And there were epics of small moment and great length, like Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (1176), which seem to us now as dull as Paradise Lost. There were also poetical disputations—between body and soul, death and man, mercy and truth, rustic and cleric, man and woman, wine and water, wine and beer, rose and violet, the poor student and the well-fed priest, even between Helen and Ganymede as to the rival merits of heterosexual and homosexual love.⁵ Nothing human was alien to medieval poetry.

The classic reliance on vowel quantity as the measure of meter was abandoned from the fifth century onward, and medieval Latin verse, rising out of popular feeling rather than from learned art, achieved a new poetry based on accent, rhythm, and rhyme. Such forms had existed among the Romans before Greek meters came to them, and had clandestinely survived a thousand years of the classic style. Classic forms—hexameter, elegiac, Sapphic-remained throughout the Middle Ages, but the Latin world had tired of them; they seemed unattuned to the moods of piety, tenderness, delicacy, and prayer that Christianity had spread. Simpler rhythms came, short lines of iambic feet that could convey almost any emotion from the beating of the heart to the tread of soldiers marching on to war.

Whence rhyme came to Western Christendom no one knows and many guess. It had been used in a few pagan poems, as by Ennius, Cicero, Apuleius; occasionally in Hebrew and Syriac poetry; sporadically in Latin poetry of the fifth century; abundantly in Arabic verse as early as the sixth century. Possibly the Moslem passion for rhymes affected the Christians who touched Islam; the surfeit of rhymes, medial and terminal, in medieval Latin verse recalls a like excess in Arabic poetry. In any case the new forms begot an entire new corpus of Latin poetry, utterly unlike the classic types, astonishing in abundance, and of unsuspected excellence. Here, for example, is Peter Damian (1007–72), the ascetic reformer, likening the call of Christ to the call of a lover to a maid:

Quis est hic qui pulsat ad ostium?

noctis rumperis somnium?

Me vocat: “O virginum pulcherimma,

soror, coniux, gemma splendidissima.

Cito, surgens aperi, dulcissima.

Ego sum summi regis filius,

primus et novissimus;

qui de caelis in has veni tenebras,

liberare captivorum animas:

passus mortem et multas iniurias.”

Mox ego dereliqui lectulum,

cucurri ad pessulum:

ut dilecto tota domus pateat,

et mens mea plenissime videat

quern videre maxime desiderat.

At ille iam inde transierat;

ostium reliquerat.

Quid ergo, miserrima, quid facerem?

Lacrymando sum secuta iuvenem

manus cuius plasmaverunt hominem….

Who is this that knocks at my door?

Would you shatter my night’s dream?

He calls me: “O loveliest of maidens,

Sister, mate, gem most resplendent!

Quick! rise! open, most sweet!

I am the son of the highest king,

His first and youngest son,

Who from heaven has come to this

darkness

To free the souls of captives;

Death have I suffered, and many injuries.”

Quickly I left my couch,

Ran to the threshold,

That to the beloved all the house might

lie open,

And my soul might in fullest see

Him whom it most longs to see.

But he so soon had passed by,

Had left my door.

What then, miserable me, should I do?

Weeping I followed after the youth

Whose hands formed man.

To Peter Damian poetry was an incident; to Hildebert of Lavardin (1055?-1133), Archbishop of Tours, it was a passion that fought his faith for his soul. Probably from the Bérenger of Tours who had studied under Fulbert at Chartres he imbibed a love for the Latin classics. After many tribulations he journeyed to Rome, not sure which he sought more—papal benediction or a sight of the scenes endeared to him by his reading. He was touched by the grandeur and decay of the old capital, and expressed his feelings in classic elegiac form:

Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina;

quam magni fueris integra fracta doces.

Longa tuos fastus aetas destruxit, et arces

Caesaris et superum templa palude iacent.

Ille labor, labor ille ruit quern dirus Araxes

et stantem tremuit et cecidisse dolet….

Non tamen annorum series, non flamma, nec ensis

ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus.*

Here for a moment a medieval poet used the Latin language as nobly as Virgil himself. But once a Christian, always a Christian. Hildebert found more comfort in Jesus and Mary than in Jupiter and Minerva; and in a later poem he impeccably dismissed the ancient shrines:

Gratior haec iactura mihi successibus illis;

maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens.

Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Caesare Petrus,

plus cinctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit.

Stans domui terras, infernum diruta pulso;

corpora stans, animas fracta iacensque rego.

Tunc miserae plebi, modo principibus tenebrarum

impero; tunc urbes, nunc mea regna polus.†

Not since Fortunatus had any Latin penned such poetry.

II. WINE, WOMAN, AND SONG

Our knowledge of the pagan or skeptical aspects of medieval life is naturally fragmentary; the past has not transmitted itself to us impartially, except in our blood. We must all the more admire the liberality of spirit—or the fellowship of enjoyment—that led the monastery of Benediktbeuern (in Upper Bavaria) to preserve the manuscript which reached print in 1847 as Carmina Burana (Beuern Poems), and is now our main source for the poetry of the “wandering scholars.”‡ These were not tramps; some were footloose monks straying from their monasteries, some were clerics out of a job, most were students en route, often by foot, between home and university, or from one university to another. Many students stopped at taverns on the way; some sampled wines and women, and learned unscheduled lore. Some composed songs, sang them, sold them; some abandoned hope of an ecclesiastical career, and lived from pen to mouth by dedicating their poetic powers to bishops or lords. They labored chiefly in France and western Germany, but as they wrote in Latin their poems achieved an international currency. They pretended to have an organization—the Ordo vagorum, or guild of wanderers; and they invented as its founder and patron saint a mythical Rabelaisian personage whom they called Golias. As early as the tenth century Archbishop Walter of Sens fulminated against the scandalous “family of Golias”; and as late as 1227 a Church council condemned the “Goliardi” for singing parodies on the most sacred songs of the liturgy.⁶ “They go about in public naked,” said the Council of Salzburg in 1281; “they lie in bake ovens, frequent taverns, games, harlots, earn their bread by their vices, and cling with obstinacy to their sect.”⁷

We know only a few of these Goliardic poets individually. One was Hugh or Hugo Primas, a canon at Orléans about 1140, “a vile fellow, deformed of visage,” says a rival scribe,⁸ but famed “through many provinces” for his ready wit and verse; dying of unbought poetry, and flinging angry satires at the ecclesiastical rich; a man of great erudition and little shame, writing coarse indecencies in hexameters almost as chaste as Hildebert’s. Still more renowned was one whose name is lost, but whom his admirers called Archipoeta, the Archpoet (c. 1161), a German knight who preferred wine and ink to sword and blood, and lived fitfully on the occasional charity of Rainald von Dassel, archbishop-elect of Cologne and ambassador of Barbarossa at Pavia. Rainald tried to reform him, but the poet begged off with one of the most famous of medieval poems—the “Confession of Goliath”—whose final stanza became a favorite drinking song in German universities.

1. Seething over inwardly

With fierce indignation,

In my bitterness of soul

Hear my declaration.

I am of one element,

Levity my matter,

Like enough a withered leaf

For the winds to scatter.

2. Never yet could I endure

Soberness and sadness.

Jests I love, and sweeter than

Honey find I gladness.

Whatsoever Venus bids

Is a joy excelling;

Never in an evil heart

Did she make her dwelling.

3. Down the broad way do I go,

Young and unregretting;

Wrap me in my vices up,

Virtue all forgetting.

Greedier for all delight

Than heaven to enter in,

Since the soul in me is dead,

Better save the skin.

4. Pardon pray you, good my lord,

Master of discretion,

But this death I die is sweet,

Most delicious poison.

Wounded to the quick am I

By a young girl’s beauty;

She’s beyond my touching? Well,

Can’t the mind do duty?

5. Sit you down amid the fire,

Will the fire not burn you?

Come to Pavia; will you

Just as chaste return you?

Pavia, where beauty draws

Youth with fingertips,

Youth entangled in her eyes,

Ravished with her lips.

6. Let you bring Hippolytus,

In Pavia dine him;

Never more Hippolytus

Will the morning find him.

In Pavia not a road

But leads to Venery,

Nor among its crowding towers

One to chastity.

7. Meum est propositum

in taberna mori,

ut sint vina proxima

morientis ori.

Tunc cantabunt laetius.

angelorum chori:

“Sit deus propitius

huic potatori!”

7. For on this my heart is set:

When the hour is nigh me,

Let me in the tavern die,

With a tankard by me,

While the angels, looking down,

Joyously sing o’er me:

Deus sit propitius

Huic potatori*⁹

The Carmina Burana range over all the themes of youth: spring, love, boasts of seductions achieved, delicate obscenities, tender lyrics of love unreturned, a student’s song counseling a moratorium on studies and a holiday with love (omittamus studia, dulce est desipere)…. In one song a girl interrupts a scholar’s labor with Quid tu facis, domine? Veni mecum ludere (“What are you doing, master? Come and play with me”); another sings the faithlessness of woman; another, the grief of the betrayed and forsaken lass whose horizontal growth brings down parental blows. Many chant the joys of drinking or gambling; some attack the wealth of the Church (“The Gospel According to the Silver Mark”); some parody the noblest hymns, like Thomas’ Lauda Sion; one is a Whitmanesque song of the open road.¹⁰ Many are doggerel, some are masterpieces of lyrical craftsmanship. Here is a lover’s idyl of ideal death:

When she recklessly

Gave herself wholly unto Love and me,

Beauty in heaven afar

Laughed from her joyous star.

Too great desire hath overwhelmed me;

My heart’s not great enough

For this huge joy that overmastered me,

What time my love Made in her arms another man of me,

And all the gathered honey of her lips

Drained in one yielded kiss.

Again, again I dream the freedom given

Of her soft breast;

And so am come, another god, to heaven

Among the rest;

Yea, and serene would govern gods and men

If I might find again

My hand upon her breast.¹¹

Most of the love poetry in the Carmina is frankly sensual; there are moments of tenderness and grace, but they are brief preludes. We might have guessed that by the side of the hymns of the Church there would sooner or later be hymns to Venus; woman, the devoted supporter of religion, is the chief rival of the gods. The Church listened patiently enough to these chants of love and wine. But in 1281 a council decreed that any cleric (therefore any student) who composed or sang licentious or impious songs should lose his clerical rank and privileges. Such wandering students as thereafter remained loyal to Golias sank to the level of jongleurs, and fell out of literature into ribald doggerel. By 1250 the day of the goliards was over. But as they had inherited a pagan current running beneath the Christian centuries, so their mood and poetry secretly survived to enter the Renaissance.

Latin poetry itself almost died with the goliards. The thirteenth century turned the best minds to philosophy; the classics retreated to a minor place in the university curriculum; and the almost Augustan grace of Hildebert and John of Salisbury had no heirs. When the thirteenth century ended, and Dante chose Italian for his medium, the vernacular languages became literature. Even drama, child and servant of the Church, put off its Latin dress, and spoke the peoples’ tongues.

III. THE REBIRTH OF DRAMA

The classic drama had died before the Middle Ages began, for it had degenerated into mime and farce, and had been replaced by hippodrome spectacles. The plays of Seneca and Hroswitha were literary exercises, which apparently never reached the stage. Two lines of active continuity remained: the mimetic rituals of agricultural festivals, and the farces played by wandering minstrels and clowns in castle hall or village square.¹²

But in the Middle Ages, as in ancient Greece, the main fountainhead of drama was in religious liturgy. The Mass itself was a dramatic spectacle; the sanctuary was a sacred stage; the celebrants wore symbolic costumes; priest and acolytes engaged in dialogue; and the antiphonal responses of priest and choir, and of choir to choir, suggested precisely that same evolution of drama from dialogue that had generated the sacred Dionysian play. In the ceremonies of certain holydays the dramatic element was explicitly developed. At Christmas, in some religious rites of the eleventh century, men dressed as shepherds entered the church, were greeted with “glad tidings” by a choirboy “angel,” and worshiped a wax or plaster babe in a manger; from an eastern door three “kings” entered, and were guided to the manger by a star pulled along a wire.¹³ On the 28th of December certain churches represented the “slaughter of the innocents”: boy choristers marched up nave and aisles, fell as if murdered by Herod, rose, and walked up into the sanctuary as a symbol of mounting into heaven.¹⁴ On Good Friday many churches removed the crucifix from the altar, and carried it to a receptacle representing the Holy Sepulcher, from which on Easter morning it was solemnly restored to the altar in token of resurrection.¹⁵ As far back as 380 the story of Christ’s Passion had been written as a Euripidean drama by Gregory Nazianzen, Patriarch of Constantinople;¹⁶ and from that time to this the Passion Play has kept its hold upon Christian peoples. The first such play recorded as having been performed was presented at Siena about 1200; probably there had been many such representations long before.

As the Church used architecture, sculpture, painting, and music to impress upon the faithful the central scenes and ideas of the Christian epic, so she appealed to the imagination, and intensified the piety, of the people by developing in increasing splendor and detail the dramatic implications of the greater feasts. The “tropes,” or amplifying texts added for musical elaboration to the liturgy, were sometimes turned into little plays. So an “Easter trope” in a tenth-century manuscript at St. Gall assigns this dialogue to parts of a choir divided to represent angels and the three Marys:

Angels: Whom seek ye in the tomb, O servants of Christ?

Marys: We seek Christ that was crucified, O heavenly host.

Angels: He is not here; He is risen, as He foretold. Go, and announce that He is risen.

United chorus: Alleluia, the Lord has risen.¹⁷

Gradually, from the twelfth century onward, the religious spectacles grew too complex for representation within doors. A platform was set up outside the church, and the ludus or play was performed by actors chosen from the people and trained to memorize an extended script. The oldest extant example of this form is a twelfth-century Representation of Adam, written in French with Latin “rubrics” in red ink as directions to the players.

Adam and Eve, dressed in white tunics, are shown playing in an Eden represented by shrubs and flowers in front of the church. Devils appear, in those red tights that have clung to them ever since in the theater; they run through the audience, twisting their bodies and making horrible grimaces. They offer the forbidden fruit to Adam, who refuses it, then to Eve, who takes it; and Eve persuades Adam. So convicted of a desire for knowledge, Adam and Eve are fettered with irons and are dragged off by the devils to hell—a hole in the ground, from which comes an infernal noise of rejoicing. In a second act Cain prepares to murder Abel. “Abel,” he announces, “you are a dead man.” Abel: “Why am I a dead man?” Cain: “Do you wish to hear why I want to kill you? … I will tell you. Because you ingratiate yourself too much with God.” Cain flings himself upon Abel, and beats him to death. But the author is merciful: “Abel,” reads the rubric, “shall have a saucepan beneath his clothes.”¹⁸

Such Biblical ludi were later called “mysteries,” from the Latin ministerium in the sense of an action; this was also the meaning of drama. When the story was post-Biblical it was called a miraculum or miracle play, and usually turned on some marvelous deed of the Virgin or the saints. Hilarius, a pupil of Abélard, composed several such short plays (c. 1125), in a mixture of Latin and French. By the middle of the thirteenth century the vernacular languages were the regular medium of such “miracles”; humor, increasingly broad, played a rising role in them; and their subjects became more and more secular.

Meanwhile the farce had made its own development toward drama. The evolution is exemplified in two short plays that have come down to us from the pen of an Arras hunchback, Adam de la Halle (c. 1260). One of them, Li jus Adam—the Play of Adam—is about the author himself. He had planned to be a priest, but fell in love with sweet Marie. “It was a beautiful and clear summer day, mild and green, with delightful song of birds. In the high woods near the brook … I caught sight of her who is now my wife, and who now seems pale and yellow to me…. My hunger for her is satisfied.” He tells her so with peasant directness, and plans to go to Paris and the university. Into this marital scene, with more rhyme than reason, the author introduces a physician, a madman, a monk begging alms and promising miracles, and a troop of fairies singing songs, like a ballet projected by main force into a modern opera. Adam offends one of the fairies, who lays upon him the curse of never leaving his wife. From such nonsense there is a line of continuous development to Bernard Shaw.

As secularization proceeded, the performances moved from the church grounds to the market place or some other square in the town. There were no theaters. For the few performances to be given—usually on some summer festival—a temporary stage was erected, with benches for the people and gaily decorated booths for nobilities. Surrounding houses might be used as background and “properties.” In religious plays the actors were young clerics; in secular plays they were town “mummers” or wandering jongleurs; women rarely took part. As the plays strayed farther from the church in scene and theme, they tended toward buffoonery and obscenity, and the Church, which had given birth to the serious drama, found herself forced to condemn the village ludi as immoral. So Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln classed the plays, even the “miracles,” along with drinking bouts and the Feast of Fools, as performances that no Christian should attend; and by such edicts as his (1236–44) the actors who took part were automatically excommunicated. St. Thomas was more lenient, and ruled that the profession of histrio had been ordained for the solace of humanity, and that an actor who practiced it becomingly might, by God’s mercy, escape hell.¹⁹

IV. EPICS AND SAGAS

The secularization of literature went hand in hand with the rise of the national languages. By and large, by the twelfth century, only clerics could understand Latin, and writers who wished to reach a lay audience were compelled to use the vernacular tongues. As social order grew, the reading audience widened, and national literatures rose to meet its demand. French literature began in the eleventh century, German in the twelfth, English, Spanish, and Italian in the thirteenth.

The natural early form of these indigenous literatures was the popular song. The song was drawn out into the ballad; and the ballad, by proliferation or agglutination, swelled into such minor epics as Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and the Cid. The Chanson was probably put together about 1130 from ballads of the ninth or tenth century. In 4000 simple, flowing iambic lines it tells the story of Roland’s death at Roncesvalles. Charlemagne, having “conquered” Moorish Spain, turns back with his army toward France; the traitorous Ganelon reveals their route to the enemy; and Roland volunteers to lead the dangerous rear guard. In a narrow winding gorge of the Pyrenees a horde of Basques pours down from the cliffs upon Roland’s little force. His friend Olivier begs him to sound his great horn as a call to Charlemagne for aid, but Roland proudly refuses to ask for help. He and Olivier and Archbishop Turpin lead their troops in a desperate resistance, and they fight till nearly all are dead. Olivier, blinded by blood flowing from mortal wounds in his head, mistakes Roland for an enemy, and strikes him. Roland’s helmet is split from crown to nosepiece, but saves him.

At this blow Roland looks at him,

Asks him gently and softly:

“Sir comrade, do you this in earnest?

I am that Roland who loves you so well.

In no wise have you sent me defiance.”

Says Olivier: “Now I hear you speak;

I do not see you. God see and save you!

Struck you have I. Forgive it to me!”

Roland replies: “I have no injury.

I forgive you here and before God.”

At this word one to the other bows;

And with such love they part.²⁰

Roland at last blows his oliphant, blows till the blood bursts from his temples. Charlemagne hears, and turns back to the rescue, “his white beard flying in the wind.” But the way is long; “high are the mountains, vast and dark; deep are the valleys, swift the streams.” Meanwhile Roland mourns over the corpse of Olivier, and says to it: “Sir comrade, we have been together through many days and many years. You never did me evil, nor I to you. Life is all pain if you are dead.” The Archbishop, also dying, begs Roland to save himself by flight; Roland refuses, and continues to fight till the attackers flee; but he too is mortally wounded. With his last strength he breaks his jeweled sword Durendal against a stone, lest it fall into heathen hands. Now “Count Roland lay under a pine tree, his face turned toward Spain…. Many memories came upon him then; he thought of the lands he had conquered, of sweet France, and his family, and Charles, who had brought him up, and he wept.” He held up his glove to God as a sign of loyal vassalage. Charles, arriving, finds him dead. No translation can catch the simple but knightly dignity of the original, and none but one reared to love France and honor her can feel to the full the power and sentiment of this, the national epic that every French child learns, almost with its prayers.

About 1160 an unknown poet, romantically idealizing the character and exploits of Ruy or Rodrigo Diaz (d. 1099), gave a national epic to Spain in the Poema del Cid. Here too the theme is the struggle of Christian knights against the Spanish Moors, the exaltation of feudal courage, honor, and magnanimity, the glory of war rather than the servitude of love. So Rodrigo, banished by an ungrateful king, leaves his wife and children in a nunnery, and vows never to live with them again until he has won five battles. He goes to fight the Moors, and the first half of the poem resounds with Homeric victories. Between battles the Cid robs Jews, scatters alms among the poor, feeds a leper, eats from the same dish with him, sleeps in the same bed, and discovers him to be Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. This, of course, is not the Cid of history, but it does no greater injury to fact than the Chanson with its idealization of Charlemagne. The Cid became a heady stimulant to Spanish thought and pride; hundreds of ballads were composed about its hero, and a hundred histories more or less historical. There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth, and the backbone of men and states is a concatenation of romance.

No one has yet explained why little Iceland, harassed by the elements and isolated by the sea, should have produced in this period a literature of scope and brilliance quite out of proportion to its place and size. Two circumstances helped: a rich store of orally transmitted historical traditions, dear to any segregated group; and a habit of reading—or being read to—which was favored by long winter nights. Already in the twelfth century there were many private libraries in the island, in addition to those in the monasteries. When writing became a familiar accomplishment, laymen as well as priests put this racial lore, once the property of scalds, into literary form.

By a rare anomaly the leading writer of thirteenth-century Iceland was also its richest man, and twice the president of the republic—the “speaker of the law.” Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241) loved life more than letters; he traveled widely, engaged vigorously in politics and feuds, and was murdered by his son-in-law at sixty-two. His Heimskringla—The Round World—told Norse history and legend with a spare and brief simplicity natural to a man of action. His Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, or Prose Edda, gave a summary of Biblical history, a synopsis of Norse mythology, an essay on poetic meters, a treatise on the art of poetry, and a unique explanation of the art’s urological origin. Two warring groups of gods made peace by spitting into a jar; from this spittle was formed a demigod, Kvasir, who taught men wisdom like Prometheus. Kvasir was slain by dwarfs, who mixed his blood with wine and produced a nectar that conferred the gift of song on all who drank of it. The great god Odin found his way to where the dwarfs had stored this poetic wine, drank it all up, and flew to heaven. But some of the pent-up liquid escaped from him by a means rarely used in public fountains; this divine stream fell in an inspiring spray upon the earth; and those who were bedewed by it imbibed the gift of poesy.²¹ It was a learned man’s nonsense, quite as rational as history.

The literature of Iceland in this period is astonishingly rich, and still alive with interest, vivacity, humor, and a poetic charm that pervades its prose. Hundreds of sagas were written, some brief, some as long as a novel, some historical, most of them mingling history and myth. In general they were civilized memories of a barbarous age, compact of honor and violence, complicated with litigation, and mitigated with love. The Ynglinga sagas of Snorri repeatedly tell of Norse knights who burned one another, or themselves, in their halls or cups. The most fertile of these legends was the Volsungasaga. Its stories had an early form in the Elder or Poetic Edda; they have their latest form in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs.

A Volsung was any descendant of Waels, a Norse king, who was great-grandson of Odin and grandfather to Sigurd (Siegfried). In the Nibelungenlied the Nibelungs are Burgundian kings; in the Volsungasaga they are a race of dwarfs guarding in the Rhine a gold treasure and ring which are infinitely precious but bring a curse and misfortune to all who possess them. Sigurd slays Fafnir the dragon guardian of the hoard, and captures it. On his wanderings he comes to a fire-encircled hill, on which the Valkyrie (an Odin-descended demigoddess) Brunhild sleeps; this is one form of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Sigurd is ravished by her beauty, and she is ravished; they plight their troth; and then—as is the way of men in many medieval romances—he leaves her and resumes his travels. At the court of Giuki, a Rhine king, he finds the princess Gudrun. Her mother gives him an enchanted drink, which enables him to forget Brunhild and marry Gudrun. Gunnar, son of Giuki, marries Brunhild, and brings her to the court. Resenting Sigurd’s amnesia, she has him killed; then in remorse she mounts his funeral pyre, slays herself with his sword, and is consumed with him.

The most modern in form of these Icelandic sagas is The Story of Burnt Njal (c. 1220). The characters are sharply defined by their deeds and words rather than by description; the tale is well constructed, and moves with inherent fatality through stirring events to the central catastrophe—the burning of Njal’s house, with himself and his wife Bergthora and his sons, by an armed band of enemies led by one Flosi, and bent on blood vengeance against Njal’s sons.

Then Flosi… called out to Njal, and said,

“I will offer thee, master Njal, leave to go out, for it is unworthy that thou shouldst burn indoors.”

“I will not go out,” said Njal, “for I am an old man, and little fitted to avenge my sons, but I will not live in shame.”

Then Flosi said to Bergthora, “Come thou out, housewife, for I will for no sake burn thee indoors.”

“I was given away to Njal young,” said Bergthora, “and I have promised him this, that we would both share the same fate.”

After that they both went back into the house.

“What counsel shall we now take?” said Bergthora.

“We will go to our bed,” said Njal, “and lay us down; I have long been eager for rest.”

Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari’s son, “Thee will I take out, and thou shalt not burn in here.”

“Thou hast promised me this, grandmother,” said the boy, “that we should never part so long as I wished to be with thee; but methinks it is much better to die with thee and Njal than to live after you.”

Then she bore the boy to her bed, and … put him between herself and Njal. Then they signed themselves and the boy with the cross, and gave over their souls into God’s hand; and that was the last word men heard them utter.²²

The age of the migrations (300–600) had deposited in the confused memory of peoples and minstrels a thousand stories of social chaos, barbaric courage, and murderous love. Some of these tales were carried to Norway and Iceland, and produced the V olsungasaga; many, with kindred names and themes, lived and multiplied in Germany in the form of legends, ballads, and sagas. At an unknown time in the twelfth century an unknown German, uniting and transforming such materials, composed the Nibelungenlied, or Song of the Nibelungs. Its form is a concatenation of rhyming couplets in Middle High German; its narrative is a brew of primitive passions and pagan moods.

Sometime in the fourth century King Gunther and his two brothers ruled Burgundy from their castle at Worms on the Rhine; and with them dwelt their young sister Kriemhild—“in no land was any fairer.” In those days King Siegmund governed the Lowlands, and enfeoffed his son Siegfried (Sigurd) with a rich estate near Xanten, also on the Rhine. Hearing of Kriemhild’s loveliness, Siegfried invited himself to Gunther’s court, made himself welcome there, lived there for a year, but never saw Kriemhild, though she, looking from her high window upon the youths tilting in the courtyard, loved him from the first. Siegfried surpassed all in jousts, and fought bravely for the Burgundians in their wars. When Gunther celebrated a victorious peace he bade the ladies join the feast.

Many a noble maiden adorned herself with care, and the youths longed exceedingly to find favor in their eyes, and had not taken a rich King’s land in lieu thereof…. And lo, Kriemhild appeared, like the dawn from out the dark clouds; and he that had borne her so long in his heart was no more aweary…. And Siegfried joyed and sorrowed, for he said in his heart, “How should I woo such as thee? Surely it was a vain dream; yet I were liefer dead than a stranger to thee”.… Her color was kindled when she saw before her the high-minded man, and she said, “Welcome, Sir Siegfried, noble knight and good.” His courage rose at her words; and graceful as beseemed a knight he bowed himself before her and thanked her. And love that is mighty constrained them, and they yearned with their eyes in secret.

Gunther, unmarried, hears of the Icelandic queen Brunhild; but she, he is informed, can be won only by one who excels her in three trials of strength; and if he fails in any, he forfeits his head. Siegfried agrees to help Gunther win Brunhild if the King will give him Kriemhild to wife. They cross the sea with the speed and ease of romance; Siegfried, made invisible by a magic cape, helps Gunther meet the tests; and Gunther brings the reluctant Brunhild home as his bride. Eighty-six damsels help Kriemhild prepare rich garments for her. In a double marriage of great pomp Gunther weds Brunhild, and Siegfried is joined to Kriemhild.

But Brunhild, seeing Siegfried, feels that he, not Gunther, was meant to be her mate. When Gunther goes in to her on their marriage night she repulses him, ties him in a knot, and hangs him up on the wall. Gunther, released, begs Siegfried’s aid; the hero, on the next night, disguises himself as Gunther, and lies beside Brunhild, while Gunther, hidden in the darkened room, hears all and sees nothing. Brunhild throws Siegfried out of bed, and engages him in a bone-crunching, head-cracking combat quite without rules. “Alas,” he says to himself amid the fight, “if I lose my life by the hand of a woman, all wives evermore will make light of their husbands.” Brunhild is finally overcome, and promises to be a wife; Siegfried retires unseen, bearing away her girdle and her ring; and Gunther’ takes his place beside the exhausted queen. Siegfried makes a present of the girdle and ring to Kriemhild. He brings her to his father, who crowns him King of the Lowlands. Using his Nibelungen wealth, Siegfried clothes his wife and her maidens more richly than ever women were robed before.

Some time later Kriemhild visits Brunhild at Worms; Brunhild, jealous of Kriemhild’s finery, reminds her that Siegfried is Gunther’s vassal. Kriemhild retorts by showing her the girdle and ring as proof that Siegfried, not Gunther, had overcome her. Hagen, gloomy half brother to Gunther, rouses him against Siegfried; they invite him to a hunt; and as he stoops over a brook to drink, Hagen pierces him with a spear. Kriemhild, seeing her hero dead, “lay senseless in a swoon all that day and night.” She inherits the Nibelung treasure as Siegfried’s widow, but Hagen persuades Gunther to take it from her. Gunther, his brothers, and Hagen bury it in the Rhine, and take oath never to reveal its hiding place.

For thirteen years Kriemhild broods over vengeance upon Hagen and her brothers, but finds no opportunity. Then she accepts the marriage proposal of the widowed Etzel (Attila), King of the Huns, and goes to Vienna to live as his queen. “So famed was Etzel’s rule that the boldest knights, Christian or heathen, drew ceaselessly to his court…. One saw there what one never sees now-Christian and heathen together. Howso diverse their beliefs, the King gave with such free hand that all had plenty.” There Kriemhild “ruled virtuously” for thirteen years, seeming to forgo vengeance. Indeed she asks Etzel to invite her brothers and Hagen to a feast; they accept despite Hagen’s warning, but come with an armed retinue of yeomen and knights. While the royal brothers, Hagen, and the knights enjoy the hospitality of the Hun court in Etzel’s hall, the yeomen outside are slain at Kriemhild’s command. Hagen is told of it, and springs to arms; a terrible battle ensues in the hall between the Burgundians and the Huns (perhaps recalling their actual war of 437); with his first blow Hagen strikes off the head of Ortlieb, the five-year-old son of Kriemhild and Etzel, and he flings the head into Kriemhild’s lap. When nearly all the Burgundians are dead Gernot, brother of Kriemhild and Gunther, asks Etzel to let the surviving visitors escape from the hall. The Hun knights wish it, Kriemhild forbids it, the slaughter goes on. Her youngest brother, Giselher, who was an innocent lad of five when Siegfried fell, appeals to her: “Fairest sister, how have I deserved death from the Huns? I was ever true to thee, nor did thee any hurt; I rode hither, dearest sister, for that I trusted to thy love. Needs must thou show mercy.” She agrees to let them escape if they will deliver Hagen to her. “God in heaven forbid!” cries Gernot; “liefer would we all die than give one man for our ransom.” Kriemhild draws the Huns from the building, locks the Burgundians in it, and has it set on fire. Maddened with heat and thirst, the Burgundians cry out in agony; Hagen bids them assuage their thirst with the blood of the slain; they do. Some emerge from the flaming and falling timbers; the battle continues in the courtyard until of the Burgundians only Gunther and Hagen remain alive. Dietrich the Goth fights and overcomes Hagen and brings him bound to Kriemhild. She asks Hagen where he has concealed the Nibelung treasure; he refuses to tell her as long as Gunther is alive; Gunther, also captive, is slain at his sister’s bidding, and his head is brought to Hagen. But Hagen defies her: “Now none knows where the hoard is save God and I alone; that to thee, devil-woman, shall never more be known.” She seizes his sword and strikes him dead. Then Hildebrand the Goth, one of her warriors, surfeited with her blood lust, slays Kriemhild.

It is a terrible tale, as red with gore as any in literature or beneath. We do some injustice to it by taking its direst moments from their context of feasting, jousting, hunting, and womanly affairs; but this is the central and bitter theme—a gentle maiden changed by the experience of evil into a ferocious murderess. Strangely little of Christianity is left in the story; it is rather a Greek tragedy of nemesis, without the Greek reluctance to let violence come upon the stage. In this stream of crime almost all feudal virtues are submerged, even the honor of host to invited guest. Nothing could surpass the barbarism of such a tale, until our time.

V. THE TROUBADOURS

At the end of the eleventh century, when we should have expected all European letters to be colored by the religious enthusiasm of the Crusades, there developed in southern France a school of lyric poetry aristocratic, pagan, anticlerical, bearing the marks of Arab influence, and signalizing the triumph of woman over the chastisement laid upon her by the theory of the Fall. This style of verse moved from Toulouse to Paris to London with Eleanor of Aquitaine, captured the lion heart of her son Richard I, created the minnesingers of Germany, and molded the Italian dolce stil nuovo that led to Dante.

At the origin of the style stands Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine. This reckless blade found himself at eleven (1087) the practically independent ruler of southwestern France. He joined the First Crusade and sang its victory; but, like so many nobles in his heresy-infected lands, he had scant respect for the Church, and made gay mockery of her priests. An old Provençal biography describes him as “one of the most courteous men in the world, and a great deceiver of ladies; and he was a brave knight and had much to do with love affairs; and he knew well how to sing and make verses; and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive the ladies.”²³ Though married, he carried off the beautiful viscountess of Châtellerault, and lived with her in open scandal. When the bold bald bishop of Angoulême bade him end his wicked ways he replied, “I will repudiate the viscountess as soon as your hair requires a comb.” Excommunicated, he one day met the bishop of Poitiers. “Absolve me,” he said, “or I will kill you.” “Strike,” answered the bishop, offering his neck. “No,” said William; “I do not love you well enough to send you to paradise.”²⁴ The Duke set a style of writing amorous poetry to noble dames. He suited the action to the word, led a short life and a merry one, and died at fifty-six (1137). He left to Eleanor his immense domain, and his taste for poetry and love.

She gathered poets about her at Toulouse, and willingly they sang for her and her court the beauty of women and the fever engendered by their charms. Bernard de Ventadour, whose poems seemed to Petrarch only slightly inferior to his own, began by praising the loveliness of the viscountess of Ventadour; she took him so seriously that her husband had to shut her up in his castle tower. Bernard, encouraged, turned to chant the splendor of Eleanor herself, and followed her to Rouen; when she preferred the love of two kings he emptied out his soul in a famous dirge. A generation later the troubadour Bertrand de Born became the bosom friend of Richard I, and his successful rival for the love of the most beautiful woman of her time, Dame Maenz of Martignac. Another troubadour, Peire Vidal (1167?-1215), accompanied Richard on crusade, returned intact, lived and rhymed in amours and poverty, and received at last an estate from Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.²⁵ We know the names of 446 other troubadours; but from these four we may judge their loose melodious tribe.

Some were musical vagabonds; most were minor nobles with a flair for song; four were kings—Richard I, Frederick II, Alfonso II, and Pedro III of Aragon. For a century (1150–1250) they dominated the literature of southern France, and molded the manners of an aristocracy emerging from rustic brutality into a chivalry that almost redeemed war with courtesy, and adultery with grace. The language of the troubadours was the langue d’oc or roman of southern France and northeastern Spain. Their name is a puzzle; troubadour is probably from the roman word trobar, to find or invent, as obviously the Italian trovatore is from trovare; but some would take it from the Arabic tarraba, to sing.²⁶ They called their art gai saber or gaya ciencia, “gay wisdom”; but they took it seriously enough to undergo a long period of training in poetry, music, and the forms and speech of gallantry; they dressed like the nobility, flaunted a mantle trimmed with gold embroidery and costly furs, rode often in knightly armor, entered the lists at tournaments, and fought with lance as well as pen for the ladies to whom they had pledged their lines, if not their lives. They wrote only for the aristocracy. Usually they composed music for their own lyrics, and hired minstrels to sing them at banquets or tournaments; but often they themselves would strum the lute and wring a passion through a song.

Probably the passion was a literary form; the burning longing, the celestial fulfillments, the tragic despair of the troubadours were poetic license and machinery; apparently the husbands took these ardors so, and had less sense of property than most males. Since marriage among the aristocracy was normally an incident in a transfer of property, romance had to come after marriage, as in French fiction; the amours of medieval literature are, with a few exceptions, tales of illicit love, from Francesca and Beatrice in the South to Isolde and Guinevere in the North. The general inaccessibility of the married lady generated the poetry of the troubadours; it is hard to romanticize desire fulfilled, and where there are no impediments there is no poetry. We hear of a few troubadours who received the ultimate favor from the ladies whom they had chosen for their lays, but this was a breach of literary etiquette; usually the poet had to sate his thirst with a kiss or a touch of the hand. Such restraint made for refinement; and in the thirteenth century the poetry of the troubadours—perhaps influenced by the worship of Mary—graduated from sensualism to an almost spiritual delicacy.

But they were seldom pious. Their resentment of chastity set them at odds with the Church. Several of them lampooned prelates, ridiculed hell,²⁷ defended the Albigensian heretics, and celebrated the victorious crusade of the impious Frederick where the saintly Louis had failed. Guillem Adémar approved one crusade, but only because it removed a husband from his path. Raimon Jorden preferred a night with his beloved to any promised trans-mundane paradise.²⁸

Forms of composition seemed more important to the troubadours than commandments of morality. The canzo was a song of love; the plante was a dirge for a friend or lover lost to death; the tenson was a rhymed debate on a question of love, morality, or chivalry; the sirvente was a song of war, feud, or political attack; the stxtine was a complicated rhyme sequence of six stanzas, each of six lines, invented by Arnaud Daniel and much admired by Dante; the pastourelle was a dialogue between a troubadour and a shepherdess; the aubade or alba, a song of the dawn, usually warned lovers that the day would soon reveal them; the serena or serenade was an evening song; the balada was a narrative in verse. Here is an anonymous aubade partly spoken by a twelfth-century Juliet.

In a garden where the white thorn spreads her leaves,

My lady hath her love lain close beside her,

Till the warden cries the dawn—ah, dawn that grieves!

Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!

“Please God that night, dear night, should never cease,

Nor that my Love should parted be from me,

Nor watch cry ‘Dawn’—ah, dawn that slayeth peace!

Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!

“Fair friend and sweet, thy lips! Our lips again!

Lo, in the meadow there the birds give song.

Ours be the love, and jealousy’s the pain!

Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!

“Of that sweet wind that comes from Far-Away

Have I drunk deep of my Beloved’s breath,

Yea, of my Love’s that is so dear and gay.

Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!”

Fair is this damsel and right courteous,

And many watch her beauty’s gracious way.

Her heart toward love is nowise traitorous.

Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!²⁹

The troubadour movement in France came to an end amid the thirteenth century, partly through the increasing artificiality of its forms and sentiments, partly through the ruin of south France by the Albigensian Crusades. For in that troubled time many castles fell that had harbored troubadours; and when Toulouse itself suffered a double siege the knightly order in Aquitaine collapsed. Some singers fled to Spain, some to Italy. There in the second half of the thirteenth century the art of the love lyric was reborn, and Dante and Petrarch were scions of the troubadours. The gay science of their gallantry helped to mold the code of chivalry, and to turn the barbarians of northern Europe into gentlemen. Literature ever since has felt the influence of those subtle songs; and perhaps love now bears a finer fragrance from the incense of their praise.

VI. THE MINNESINGERS

The troubadour movement spread from France to southern Germany, and flourished there in the golden age of the Hohenstaufen emperors. The German poets were called Minnesänger, love singers, and their poetry coincided with the Minnedienst (love service) and Frauendienst (lady service) of contemporary chivalry. We know over 300 of these minnesingers by name, and have a plentiful legacy of their verse. Some of them belonged to the lower nobility; most of them were poor, and depended upon imperial or ducal patronage. Though they followed a strict law of rhythm and rhyme, many of them were illiterate, and dictated the words and music of their Lieder; to this day the German term for poetry—Dichtung—means dictation. Usually they let minstrels sing for them; sometimes they themselves sang. We hear of a great Sängerkrieg, or song contest, held at the Castle Wartburg in 1207; there, we are told, both Tannhäuser and Wolfram von Eschenbach took part.³⁰* For a century the minnesingers helped to raise the status of woman in Germany, and the ladies of the aristocracy became the life and inspiration of a culture more refined than anything that Germany would know again till Schiller and Goethe.

Wolfram and Walther von der Vogelweide are classed as minnesingers because they wrote songs of love; but Wolfram and his Parzival may be better viewed under the heading of romance. Walther “of the Bird-Meadow” was born somewhere in the Tirol before 1170. Knight but poor, he made matters worse by taking to poetry. We find him at twenty singing for his bread in the homes of the Viennese aristocracy. In those youthful years he wrote of love with a sensuous freedom frowned upon by his rivals. His Unter den Linden is treasured to this day in Germany:

Unter den linden,

an der heide,

da unser sweier bette was;

du muget ir vinden

schone beide

gebrochen bluomen under gras.

Vor dem valde in einem tal—

tandaradei!—

schone sanc diu nahtegal.

Ich kam gegangen

zuo der ouwe;

do was min friedel komen e.

Da wart ich empfangen,

here frouwe!

Daz ich bin saelic iemer me.

Kiste er mich? Wol tusend stunt;

tandaradei!

Sehet, wie rot mir ist der munt.

Do het er gemachet

also riche

von bluomen eine bettestat.

Das wirt noch gelachet

innecliche,

kum iemen an daz selbe pfat,

bi den rosen er wol mac—

tandaradei!—

merken wa mir’z houbet lac.

Daz er bi mir laege,

wesse ez iemen

(nu en welle Got!) so schamte ich mich

wes er mit mir pflaege,

niemer niemen

bevinde daz wan er und ich

unde ein kleinez vogellin—

tandaradei! —

daz mac wol getriuwe sin.³¹

Under the linden,

On the heather,

For us two a bed there was;

There could you see,

Entwined together,

Broken flowers and bruised grass.

From a thicket in the dale—

Tandaradei! —

Sweetly sang the nightingale.

I sped thither

Through the glade;

My love had reached the spot before.

There was I snared,

Most happy maid!

For I am blessed evermore.

Many a time he kissed me there—

Tandaradei!

See my lips, how red they are!

There he contrived

In joyful haste

A bower of blossoms for us both.

That must be still

A fading jest

For those who take the selfsame path

And see the spot where on that day—

Tandaradei!—

My head among the roses lay.

How shamed were I

If anyone

(Now Heaven forfend!) had there been nigh.

There we two lay,

But that was known

To none except my love and I,

And the little nightingale—

Tandaradei! —

Who, I know, will tell no tale.³²

As he grew older his perception matured, and he began to see in woman charms and graces fairer than any budding flesh, and the rewards of unity in marriage seemed richer than the surface titillations of variety. “Happy the man, happy the woman, whose hearts are to each other true; their lives increase in price and worth; blessed their years, and all their days.”³³ He deprecated the adulation with which his fellow warblers perfumed the ladies of the court; he proclaimed wip (Weib, woman) a higher title than vrouwe (Frau, lady); good women and good men were the real nobility. He thought “German ladies fair as God’s angels; anyone who defames them lies in his teeth.”³⁴

In 1197 the Emperor Henry VI died, and Germany suffered a generation of chaos until Frederick II came of age. The aristocratic patronage of letters fell away, and Walther wandered from court to court, singing unhappily for his meals in competition with noisy jugglers and prideless clowns. An item in the expense account of Bishop Wolfger of Passau reads: “Five solidi, November 12, 1203, to Walther von der Vogelweide to buy himself a fur coat against the winter cold.”³⁵ It was a doubly Christian act, for Walther was a zealous Ghibelline, tuned his lyre against the popes, denounced the shortcomings of the Church, and raged at the way in which German coins flew over the Alps to replenish Peter’s Pence.³⁶ He was, however, a faithful Christian, and composed a mighty “Crusader’s Hymn.” But at times he could stand above the battle and see all men as brothers:

Mankind arises from one virgin;

We are alike both outward and within;

Our mouths are sated with the selfsame fare;

And when their bones into confusion fall,

Say ye, who knew the living man by sight,

Which is the villein now, and which the knight,

That worms have gnawed their carcasses so bare?

Christians, Jews, and heathens, serve they all,

And God has all creation in His care.³⁷

After a quarter century of wandering and poverty, Walther received from Frederick II an estate and an income (1221), and could spend in peace his remaining seven years. He mourned that he was too old and ill to go on crusade. He begged God to forgive him for not being able to love his enemies.³⁸ In a poetic testament he bequeathed his goods: “to the envious my ill luck; to the liars my sorrows; to false lovers my follies; to the ladies my heart’s pain.”³⁹ He was buried in Würzburg Cathedral, and near by a monument proclaims Germany’s affection for the greatest poet of his age.

After him the minnesinger movement lost itself in extravaganzas, and shared in the disasters that shattered Germany after the fall of Frederick II. Ulrich von Lichtenstein (c. 1200–c. 1276) tells in his poetic autobiography, Frauendienst, how he was reared in all the sentiments of “lady service.” He chose a lady as his goddess, had his harelip sewed up to mitigate her repulsion, and fought for her in tournament. When told of her surprise that he still had a finger which she thought he had lost in her honor, he cut off the offending member and sent it to her as tribute. He almost swooned with delight when fortune permitted him to drink the water in which she had washed her hands.⁴⁰ He received a letter from her, and carried it for weeks in his pocket before he found someone whom he could trust to read it for him secretly; for Ulrich could not read.⁴¹ On promise of her favor he waited two days in beggar’s clothing among the lepers at her gate; she admitted him; and finding him importunate, she had him lowered in a bed sheet from her window. All this time he had a wife and children.

The minnesinger movement ended with some dignity in Henrich von Meissen, whose songs in honor of women earned him the title Frauenlob, “women’s praise.” When he died at Mainz in 1317, the ladies of the city carried his bier with tuneful laments to bury him in the cathedral, and poured upon his coffin such abundance of wine that it flowed the full length of the church.⁴² After him the art of song fell from the hands of the knights, and was taken up by the middle class; the romantic mood of the lady worshipers passed, and was succeeded in the fourteenth century by the robust joy and art of the meistersinger, announcing to Parnassus the ascent of the bourgeoisie.

VII. THE ROMANCES

But in romance the middle class had already captured the field. As aristocratic troubadours and trovatori wrote delicate lyrics for the ladies of southern France and Italy, so in northern France the poets of humble birth —known to the French as trouvères or inventors—brightened the evenings of the middle and upper classes with poetic tales of love and war.

The typical compositions of the trouvères were the ballade, the lai, the chanson de geste, and the roncan. Some lovely examples of the lai have come down to us from one whom both England and France may claim as their first great poetess. Marie de France came from Brittany to live in England in the reign of Henry II (1154–89); at his suggestion she turned several Breton legends into verse, and with a delicacy of speech and sentiment not excelled by any troubadour. One of her lyrics craves room here, both for an unusual theme—the living beloved to her dead lover—and for an exquisite translation:

Hath any loved you well down there,

Summer or winter through?

Down there have you found any fair

Laid in the grave with you?

Is death’s long kiss a richer kiss

Than mine was wont to be—

Or have you gone to some far bliss

And quite forgotten me?

What soft enamoring of sleep

Hath you in some soft way?

What charméd death holds you with deep

Strange lure by night and day?

A little space below the grass,

Out of the sun and shade,

But worlds away from me, alas,

Down there where you are laid….

There you shall lie as you have lain,

Though, in the world above,

Another live your life again,

Loving again your love.

Is it not sweet beneath the palm?

Is it not warm day, rife

With some long mystic golden calm

Better than love and life?

The broad quaint odorous leaves like hands

Weaving the fair day through,

Weave sleep no burnished bird withstands,

While death weaves sleep for you.

And many a strange rich breathing sound

Ravishes morn and noon;

And in that place you must have found

Death a delicious swoon.

Hold me no longer for a word

I used to say or sing;

Ah, long ago you must have heard

So many a sweeter thing.

For rich earth must have reached your heart

And turned the faith to flowers;

And warm wind stolen, part by part,

Your soul through faithless hours.

And many a soft seed must have won

Soil of some yielding thought,

To bring a bloom up to the sun

That else had ne’er been brought;

And doubtless many a passionate hue

Hath made that place more fair,

Making some passionate part of you

Faithless to me down there.⁴³

The chanson de geste, or song of deeds, probably arose as a concatenation of ballads or lays. Upon a core of history usually offered by the chronicles, the poet laid a web of fancied adventures, running in lines of ten or twelve syllables to such lengths as only Northern winter evenings could sustain. The Chanson de Roland was a lithe forerunner of this genre. The favorite hero of the French chansons de geste was Charlemagne. Great in history, the trouvères raised him to almost supernatural grandeur in their poetry; they converted his failure in Spain into a glorious conquest, and sent him off on triumphant expeditions to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his legendary white beard waving majesty. As Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied echoed the “heroic age” of the migrations, so the chansons reflected the feudal era in subject, morals, and mood; whatever their theme or scene or time, they moved in a feudal atmosphere to feudal motives and in feudal dress. Their constant subject was war, feudal or international or interfaith; and amid their rough alarums woman and love found only a minor place.

As social order improved, and the status of woman rose with the growth of wealth, war yielded to love as the major theme of the trouvères, and in the twelfth century the chansons de geste were succeeded by the romans. Woman mounted the throne of literature, and held it for centuries. The name roman meant at first any work written in that early French which, as a Roman legacy, was called roman. The romances were not called romans because they were romantic; rather certain sentiments came to be called romantic because they were found so abundantly in the French romans. The Roman de la rose, or de Troie, or de Renard merely meant the tale of a rose, or of Troy, or of a fox, in roman or early French. Since no literary form should be born without legitimate parents, we may derive the romances from the chansons de geste crossed with the troubadour sentiment of courtly love. Some of their material may have come from such Greek romances as the Ethiopica of Heliodorus. One Greek book, translated into Latin in the fourth century, had enormous influence—the fictitious biography of Alexander falsely ascribed to his official historian Callisthenes. Alexander stories became the most popular and prolific of all the “cycles” of medieval romance in Europe and the Greek-speaking East. The finest form of the tale in the West was the Roman d’Alixandre composed by the trouvères Lambert li Tors and Alexander of Bernay about 1200, and running to some 20,000 twelve-syllabled “Alexandrine” lines.

Richer in variety, tenderer in sentiment, was the cycle of romances-French, English, and German—stemming from the siege of Troy. Here the chief inspiration was not Homer but Virgil; the story of Dido was already a romance; and had not France and England, as well as Italy, been settled by Trojans fleeing from undeserved defeat? About 1184 a French trouvère, Benoît de Ste.-Maure, retold the Roman de Troie in 30,000 lines; it was translated into a dozen languages and was imitated in a dozen literatures. In Germany Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote his Büche von Troye, of Iliadic size; in Italy Boccaccio took from Benoît the tale of Filostrato; in England Layamon’s Brut (c. 1205) described in 32,000 lines the foundation of London by Brutus, the imaginary great-grandson of Aeneas; and from Benoît came Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Shakespeare’s play.

The third great cycle of medieval romance was the Arthurian. We have seen reason to believe that Arthur was a British Christian noble who fought against the invading Saxons in the sixth century. Who was it that turned him and his knights into such delectable legends as only lovers of Malory have fully savored? Who created Gawaine, Galahad, Perceval, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, Tristram, the Christian knightliness of the Round Table, and the mystic story of the Holy Grail? After a century of discussion no certain answer remains; inquiry is fatal to certainty. The oldest references to Arthur are in English chroniclers. Some elements of the legend appear in the Chronicle of Nennius (976); it was expanded in the Historia Britonum (1137) of Geoffrey of Monmouth; Geoffrey’s account was put into French verse by Robert Wace, a trouvère of Jersey, in Le Brut d’Angleterre (1155); here first we find the Round Table. The oldest fragments of the legend are probably some Welsh tales now gathered in the Mabinogion; the oldest manuscripts of the developed story are French; Arthur’s court and the Holy Grail are by common consent located in Wales and southwestern Britain. The earliest full presentation of the legend in prose is in an English manuscript doubtfully ascribed to an Oxford archdeacon, Walter Map (1137–96). The oldest verse form of the cycle is in the romans of Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1140–91).

Of Chrétien’s life we know almost as little as of Arthur’s. Early in his literary career he composed a Tristan, now lost. It reached the eyes of the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and apparently led her to hope that Chrétien might be the man to phrase “courtly love,” and the highest ideals of chivalry, in the form of the roman. Marie invited him to be, so to speak, trouvère laureate at her court in Troyes. Under her patronage (1160–72) he composed four romances in rhyming couplets of eight-syllabled lines: Erec et Enide, Cligès, Yvain, and Le Chevalier de la charrette (The Knight of the Wagon)—no sublime title for the story of Lancelot the “perfect knight.” In 1175, at the court of Philip, Count of Flanders, he began his Conte del Graal, or Perceval le Gallois, wrote 9000 lines, and left it to be finished to 60,000 lines by another hand. The atmosphere of these stories appears at the outset of Erec:

One Easter Day King Arthur held court at Cardigan. Never was seen so rich a court; for many a good knight was there, hardy, bold, and brave, and rich ladies and damsels, gentle and fair daughters of kings. But before the court disbanded for the day the King told his knights that he wished on the morrow to hunt the White Stag, in order to observe worthily the ancient custom. When my lord Gawain heard this he was sore displeased, and said: “Sire, you will derive neither thanks nor good will from this hunt. We all know long since what this custom of the White Stag is: whoever can kill the White Stag must kiss the fairest maiden of your court…. But of this there might come great ill; for there are here 500 damsels of high birth,… and there is none of them but has a bold and valiant knight who would be ready to contend, whether right or wrong, that she who is his lady is the fairest and gentlest of them all.” “That I know full well,” said the King; “yet will I not desist on that account…. Tomorrow we shall all go gaily to hunt the White Stag.”⁴⁴

And at the outset, too, the amusing exaggerations of romance: “Nature had used all her skill in forming Enid, and Nature had marveled more than 500 times how on this occasion she had succeeded in making so perfect a creature.” In the Lancelot story we learn that “he who is a perfect lover is always obedient, and quickly and gladly does his mistress’ pleasure…. Suffering is sweet to him; for Love, who guides and leads him on, assuages and relieves his pain.”⁴⁵ But the Countess Marie had a flexible conception of love:

If a knight found a damsel or lorn maid alone, and if he cared for his fair name, he would no more treat her with dishonor than he would cut his own throat. And if he assaulted her he would be disgraced forever in every court. But if, while she was under his escort, she should be won at arms by another who engaged him in battle, then this other knight might do with her what he pleased, without receiving shame or blame.⁴⁶

Chrétien’s verses are graceful but feeble, and their dull abundance soon surfeits our modern haste. He has the distinction of having written the first full and extant statement of the chivalric ideal, in his picture of a court where courtesy and honor, bravery and devoted love, seemed of more moment than Church or creed. In his final romance Chrétien proved true to his name, and raised the Arthurian cycle to a nobler pitch by adding to it the story of the Holy Grail.* Joseph of Arimathea, ran the tale, had caught some of the blood falling from the crucified Christ in the bowl from which Christ had drunk at the Last Supper; Joseph or his offspring had brought the bowl and the imperishable blood to Britain, where it was kept in a mysterious castle by an ailing imprisoned king; and only a knight perfectly pure in life and heart could find the Grail and free the king, by asking the cause of his illness. In Chrétien’s story the Grail is sought by Perceval the Gaul; in the English form of the legend, by Galahad, the spotless son of the tarnished Lancelot; in both versions the finder carries it off to heaven. In Germany Wolfram von Eschenbach transformed Perceval into Parzival, and gave the tale its most famous medieval form.

Wolfram (c. 1165–c. 1220) was a Bavarian knight who risked his stomach on his verses, found patronage from the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, lived in the Castle Wartburg for twenty years, and wrote the outstanding poem of the thirteenth century. He must have dictated it, for we are assured that he never learned to read. He claimed to have derived his Parzival story not from Chrétien but from a Provençal poet named Kiot. We know of no such poet, nor of any other treatment of the legend between Chrétien’s (1175) and Wolfram’s (1205). Of the sixteen “books” in Wolfram’s poem eleven seem based on Chrétien’s Conte del Graal. The good Christians and fair knights of the Middle Ages felt no compulsion to acknowledge their literary debts. But the matter of the romances was felt to be common property; any man might forgivably borrow if he could improve. And Wolfram bettered Chrétien’s tutelage.

Parzival is the son of a knight of Anjou by Queen Herzeleide (Sorrowful Heart), who is a granddaughter of Titurel—the first guardian of the Grail—and sister to Amfortas, its present ailing king. Shortly before she bears Parzival she learns that her husband has fallen in knightly combat before Alexandria. Resolved that Parzival shall not die so young, she brings him up in rural solitude, conceals from him his royal lineage, and keeps him ignorant of arms.

Then full sore were her people grieved, for they held it an evil thing,

And a training that ill beseemed the son of a mighty king.

But his mother kept him hidden in the woodland valleys wild,

Nor thought, in her love and sorrow, how she wronged the royal

child.

No knightly weapon she gave him, save such as in childish play

He wrought himself from the bushes that grew on his lonely way.

A bow and arrows he made him, and with these, in thoughtless glee,

He shot at the birds as they caroled o’erhead in the leafy tree.

But when the feathered songster of the woods at his feet lay dead,

In wonder and dumb amazement he bowed down his golden head,

And in childish wrath and sorrow tore the locks of his sunny hair

(For I know full well, of all earth’s children was never a child so

fair)….

Then he thought him well how the music, which his hand had forever

stilled,

Had thrilled his soul with its sweetness, and his heart was with sorrow

filled.⁴⁷

Parzival grows to manhood healthy and ignorant. One day he sees two knights on the road, admires their gleaming armor, thinks them gods, and falls on his knees before them. Informed that they are not gods but knights, he resolves to be as splendid as they. He leaves home to seek King Arthur, who makes men knights; and his mother dies of grief at his going. On his way Parzival robs a sleeping duchess of a kiss, her girdle, and her ring; and the taint of this deed leaves him unclean for many years. He meets Ither the Red Knight, who sends by him a challenge to King Arthur. Presented to the King, Parzival asks permission to assume the challenge; he returns to Ither, slays him with beginner’s luck, dons his armor, and rides off to seek adventure. At night he asks hospitality of Gurnemanz; the old baron takes a liking to him, teaches him the tricks of feudal combat, and gives him knightly counsel:

Take pity on those in need; be kind, generous, and humble. The worthy man in need is ashamed to beg; anticipate his wants…. Yet be prudent, neither lavish nor miserly…. Do not ask too many questions, nor refuse to answer a question fitly asked. Observe and listen…. Spare him who yields, whatever wrong he has done you…. Be manly and gay. Hold women in respect and love; this increases a young man’s honor. Be constant—that is manhood’s part. Short his praise who betrays honest love.⁴⁸

Parzival sallies forth again, rescues the besieged Kondwiramur, marries her, challenges her returning husband to combat, kills him, and leaves his wife in search of his mother. By chance he comes to the castle of the Grail. He is entertained by its guardian knights, sees the Grail (here a precious stone), and—remembering the good Gurnemanz’ advice—asks no question about the magic Grail or the ailing king, whom he does not know to be his uncle. The next morning he finds the whole castle empty; he rides out, and the drawbridge rises behind him by unseen hands, as if forbidding his return. He rejoins Arthur’s court; but amid his welcome there the seeress Kundry accuses him of ignorance and discourtesy in not having asked the cause of Amfortas’ sickness. Parzival swears that he will find the Grail again.

But a mood of resentment darkens his life at this point. He feels that the disgrace that Kundry has laid upon him is unmerited; he perceives the abundance of injustice in the world, renounces and denounces God, and for four years visits no church, utters no prayer.⁴⁹ In those years he suffers a hundred misfortunes, ever seeking, never finding, the Grail. One day he stumbles upon the retreat of an anchorite, Trevrezent, who turns out to be his uncle; learns from him the story of the Grail, and how Amfortas’ undying illness was due to leaving the guardianship of the Grail to serve an illicit love. The hermit wins Parzival back to Christian faith, and takes upon him the penalty of Parzival’s sins. Humbled and chastened, cured of his ignorance and cleansed by his sufferings, Parzival resumes his quest of the Grail. The hermit reveals to Kundry that Parzival is Amfortas’ nephew and heir; she finds him and announces that he has been chosen to succeed Amfortas as king and guardian of the Grail. Guided by her to the hidden castle, he asks Amfortas the cause of his illness, and at once the old king is healed. Parzival finds his wife Kondwiramur, who comes with him to be his queen. Lohengrin is their son.

As if to provide Wagner with another libretto, Gottfried of Strasbourg produced, about 1210, the most successful version of the Tristan story. It is an enthusiastic glorification of adultery and disloyalty, and dishonors the feudal as well as the Christian moral code.

Tristan, like Parzival, is born to a young mother, Blanchefleur, soon after she receives news that her prince husband has been killed in battle; she names the infant Tristan—sorrowful—and dies. The boy is reared and knighted by his uncle Mark, King of Cornwall. Grown up, he excels in tournaments, and kills the Irish challenger Morold; but in the combat he receives a poisoned wound, which the dying Morold tells him can be cured only by Ireland’s queen Iseult. Disguised as Tantris, a harper, Tristan visits Ireland, is cured by the queen, and becomes the tutor of the queen’s daughter, also named Iseult. Returning to Cornwall he tells Mark of the young Iseult’s beauty and accomplishments, and Mark sends him back to woo her for him. Iseult is reluctant to leave her home; and discovering that Tristan is the slayer of her uncle Morold, she is inflamed with hatred for him. But the mother persuades her to go, and gives her maid Brangäne a love potion to administer to Iseult and Mark to arouse their love. The maid gives the potion by mistake to Iseult and Tristan, who soon fall into each other’s arms. Dishonor multiplies; they agree to conceal their love; Iseult marries Mark, sleeps with Tristan, and plots to kill Brangäne as knowing too much. Mark is here (hardly in Malory) the only gentleman in the tale; he discovers the deception, tells Iseult and Tristan that they are too dear to him for revenge, and contents himself with exiling his nephew. In his wanderings Tristan meets a third Iseult, and falls in love with her, though he has sworn to be with Mark’s queen “one heart, one troth, one body, one life.” Here Gottfried leaves the tale unfinished, and all the ideals of chivalry shattered. The rest of the tale belongs to Malory and a later age.

In this astonishing generation—the first of the thirteenth century—Germany produced another poet who, with Walther, Wolfram, and Gottfried, made a quartet unequaled elsewhere in the literature of contemporary Christendom. Hartmann von Aue began by lamely following Chrétien in the poetic romances Erec and lwein; but when he turned to the legends of his native Swabia he produced a minor masterpiece—Der arme Heinrich (c. 1205). “Poor Henry,” like Job, is a rich man who at the height of his splendor is stricken with leprosy, which can only by cured (for medieval magic must have a say) when some pure maiden freely dies for him. Not expecting such a sacrifice, Henry abandons himself to lamentation and despair. But lo and behold, such a maiden appears, resolved to die that Heinrich may be healed. Her parents, thinking her decision God-inspired, give their incredible consent, and the girl bares her pretty bosom to the knife. But Heinrich suddenly becomes a man, calls a halt, refuses the sacrifice, stops his moaning, and accepts his pain as a divine visitation. Transformed in spirit by this new mood, his bodily ills rapidly disappear, and his rescuer becomes his wife. Hartmann redeemed the absurdity of the story with simple, flowing, unpretentious verse, and Germany treasured the poem until our unbelieving age.

A prettier tale was told, sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century, by an unknown Frenchman under the title C’est d’Aucassin et Nicolette. Half romance, half laughing at romance, it was fittingly phrased now in poetry now in prose, with music noted in the poetic text.

Aucassin, son of the count of Beaucaire, falls in love with Nicolette, adoptive daughter of the viscount of Beaucaire. The count objects, desiring to marry his son into some feudal family that can bring him aid in war, and he bids his vassal viscount hide the girl. When Aucassin tries to see her the viscount counsels him to “leave Nicolette alone, or you will never see paradise.” To which Aucassin answers in a literary correlate to the rising skepticism of the time.

In paradise what have I to do? I care not to enter it, but only to have Nicolette…. For into paradise go none but such people as aged priests, old cripples, and the maimed, who all day and night cough before the altars…. With them have I nought to do. But to hell will I go. For to hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney or the great wars, and the stout archer, and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies, who have friends—two or three—besides their wedded lord. And there pass the … harpers and minstrels, and the kings of this world. With these will I go so only that I have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, by my side.⁵⁰

Nicolette’s father confines her to her room, and Aucassin’s father imprisons him in a cellar, where the lad sings of a strange and charming cure:

Nicolette, white lily-flower,

Sweetest lady found in bower,

Sweet as grape that brimmeth up

Sweetness in the spicèd cup,

On a day this chanced to you,

Out of Limousin there drew

One, a pilgrim, sore and dread,

Lay in pain upon his bed,

Tossed, and took with fear his breath,

Very dolent, near to death.

Then you entered, pure and white,

Softly to the sick man’s sight

Raised the train that swept adown,

Raised the ermine-bordered gown,

Raised the smock, and bared to him

Daintily each lovely limb.

Then a wondrous thing befell,

Straight he rose up sound and well,

Left his bed, took cross in hand,

Sought again his own dear land.

Lily-flower, so white, so sweet,

Fair the faring of thy feet,

Fair thy laughter, fair thy speech,

Fair our playing each with each.

Sweet thy kisses, soft thy touch,

All must love thee overmuch.⁵¹

Meanwhile the lily-flower makes a rope of her bed sheets, and lets herself down into the garden.

Then she took her skirt in both hands … and kilted her lightly against the dew which lay thickly on the grass, and so she passed through the garden. Her hair was golden, with little love-locks; her eyes blue and laughing; her face most dainty to see, with lips more vermeil than ever rose or cherry in summer heat; her teeth white and small; her breasts so firm that they showed beneath her vesture like two rounded nuts. So frail was she about the girdle that your two hands could have spanned her; and the daisies that she brake with her feet in passing showed altogether black against her instep and her flesh, so white was the fair young maid.⁵²

She finds her way to a barred window of Aucassin’s cell, cuts a tress of her hair, slips it to him, and swears that her love is as great as his. Her father sends searchers for her; she flees into the woods, and lives with appreciative shepherds. After some time Aucassin’s father, thinking her safely out of sight, frees him. Aucassin takes to the woods and hunts for her through half-comic vicissitudes. He finds her, sets her before him on his horse, “kissing her as they rode.” To escape their pursuing parents they take ship across the Mediterranean; they come to a land where men give birth and wars are fought by jolly pummeling with fruit. They are captured by less amiable warriors, are separated for three years, but at last are made one again. The irate parents kindly die, and Aucassin and Nicolette become the Count and Countess of Beaucaire. There is nothing more exquisite in all the rich literature of France.

VIII. THE SATIRICAL REACTION

The humorous interludes of this story suggest that the French were beginning to feel a surfeit of romance. The most famous poem of the Middle Ages—far more widely known and read than The Divine Comedy—began as a romance and ended as one of the heartiest, bluntest satires in history. About 1237 Guillaume de Lorris, a young scholar of Orléans, composed an allegorical poem which was designed to enclose the whole art of courtly love, and to be, through its very abstractions, a model and summary of all amorous romance. We know nothing of William of the Loire except that he wrote the first 4266 lines of the Roman de la rose. He pictures himself wandering in a dream into a gorgeous Garden of Love, where every known flower blooms and all birds sing, and happy couples, personifying the joys and graces of the gallant life—Mirth, Gladness, Courtesy, Beauty… —dance under the presidency of the God of Love; here is a new religion, with a new conception of paradise, in which woman replaces God. Within this garden-the dreamer sees a rose lovelier than all the beauty that surrounds it, but guarded by a thousand thorns. It is the symbol of the Beloved; and the hero’s longing to reach and pluck it becomes an allegory of all the amorous campaigns ever waged by checked desire feeding imagination. No human being but the narrator enters the tale; all the other actors are personifications of the qualities of character to be found at any court where women are pursued by men: Fair-Seeming, Pride, Villainy, Shame, Wealth, Avarice, Envy, Sloth, Hypocrisy, Youth, Despair, even “New Thought”—which here means inconstancy. The marvel of it is that with these abstractions Guillaume managed to make interesting verse—perhaps because at any age and in any guise love is as interesting as the blood is warm.*

William died prematurely, leaving his poem unfinished; and for forty years the world had to wonder if the Lover, shot by Cupid and shivering with love, had ever done more than kiss the Rose. Then another Frenchman, Jean de Meung, took up the torch, and carried it to over 22,000 lines, in a poem as different from William’s as Rabelais from Tennyson. The lapse of a generation had changed the mood; romance had talked itself out for a while; philosophy was casting the pall of reason over the poetry of faith; the Crusades had failed; the age of doubt and satire had begun. Some say that Jean wrote his boisterous continuation at the suggestion of the same King Philip IV who would send his skeptical lawyers to laugh in the face of the Pope. Jean Clopinel was born at Meung on the Loire about 1250, studied philosophy and literature at Paris, and became one of the most learned men of his time. We know not what imp of the perverse led him to put his learning, his anticlericalism, his contempt of woman and romance, into a continuation of the most romantic poem in all literature. In the same eight-syllabled lines and rhyming couplets as William’s, but with a verve and vivacity all the world away from William’s dreamy verse, Jean airs his views on all topics from the Creation to the Last Judgment, while his poor lover waits in the garden, all this time longing for the Rose. If Jean has any romance left in him it is Plato’s fancy of a Golden Age in the past, when “no man called this or that his own, and lust and rapine were unknown”; when there were no feudal lords, no state, no laws; when men lived without eating flesh or fish or fowl, and “all shared earth’s gift in common lot.”⁵³ He is not a freethinker; he accepts the dogmas of the Church without winking an eye; but he dislikes “those stout and thriving blades, the begging friars, who cheat with lying words while drink and meat they batten on.”⁵⁴ He cannot stomach hypocrites, and recommends garlic and onions to them to facilitate their crocodile tears.⁵⁵ He admits that a “gracious woman’s love” is life’s best boon, but apparently he has not known it.⁵⁶ Perhaps he did not deserve it; satire never won fair maiden; and Jean, too schooled in Ovid, thought and taught more of using women than of loving them. Monogamy is absurd, he says; nature intended toutes pour touz—all women for all men. He makes a sated husband chide a primping wife:

What comes of all this bravery?

What benefit accrues to me

From costly gowns and quaint-cut gear,

Your flirting tricks and mincing cheer?

What for these orphreys do I care

With which you twist and bind your hair,

Entwined with threads of gold? And why

Must you have set in ivory

Enameled mirrors, sprinkled o’er

With golden circlets? … Why these gems

Befitting kingly diadems?—

Rubies and pearls, and sapphires fair,

Which cause you to assume an air

Of mad conceit? These costly stuffs,

And plaited furbelows and ruffs,

And cinctures to set off your waist,

With pearls bedecked and richly chased?

And wherefore, say, then, do you choose

To fit your feet with gaudy shoes

Except you have a lust to show

Your shapely legs? By St. Thibaud,

Ere yet three days are past I’ll sell