False dawn

C. HUGH LAWRENCE

The Twelfth Century Renaissance Christopher Brooke (Thames & Hudson 35s)

Forty-three years ago the American mediaevalist Charles Homer Haskins wrote a book about the great upsurge of new in- tellectual- and artistic life in mediaeval Europe and called it The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The label has stuck; it is as handy as any other. The mental world of that time experienced a series of convulsions so great and so various in their effects that they defy classification under a single formula. Between 1050 and 1200 both the methods and the content of western learning were revolutionised. Within this span of time, the law teachers of Bologna began to erect the massive fabric of mediaeval civil Jurisprudence and canon law, while their col- leagues at Paris were creating a new theological science; during this time also the first fandations of experimental science were laid and Romanesque architecture and

sculpture reached the peak of its achieve- ment. Before the end of the century the rise of a large migratory student population and its confluence into a few centres had created the earliest European universities.

Although the intellectual current of the age was fed by many streams, its major source was clearly the flood of translations of Greek and Arabic works which was pour- ing into the schools of northern Europe from Italy and Spain. Within a few decades much of the lost treasure of Graeco-Arabic philosophy and science was made available to the Latin-reading scholars of the West and the intellectual ferment produced by these discoveries was enormous. They seemed to offer for the first time a rational and systematic analysis of the operations of the

human mind and its environment. Surely a new age had dawned: 'I wonder how it is that Aristotle's book [The Topics] was overlooked for to long by our forbears and allowed to fall into almost total neglect, so

that our age has recovered it so as to recall men from error and signpost the true path to discovery.' The writer is the Englishman John of Salisbury, the best known humanist of the twelfth century.

The quest for humanism forms the central thread of Professor Brooke's book. Here humanism is understood, not of course as a positivist philosophy of man, which would have been inconceivable in the twelfth cen- tury, but as a cultivated interest in the an- cients, a concern with human personality and sentiment and a readiness to express this concern in writing. The study is built rouiul

a series of personalities who all displayed some of this quality in their work : Abelard,

John of Salisbury, Gratian the canonist, Gislebert the sculptor of Autun and abbot Suger of St Denis. the historians Eadmer and William of Malmesbury, and the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Few students of humanism have shown themselves capable of writing as humanely about it as Professor Brooke does. He has already made important contributions to our knowledge of the twelfth century. This book assimilates the most up-to-date scholarship on the period and communicates it with all the freshness, lightness of touch, and imaginative insight that we have come to ex- pect from its author. His argument is illu- strated with a series of plates, and if a few of the reproductions are poor, none of them is hackneyed or uninteresting. I can think of no more exciting introduction to the writers and artists of this time.

The conceptual artefacts of the period evoke less of the author's excitement, I suspect, than the physical ones. Anselm's on- tological argument is given short shrift as an ethereal argument for God's existence' and the great theological construction of Peter Lombard, the master of the mediaeval theological schools, clearly arouses less of Brooke's interest than the theological ques- tionings of Wolfram, the German knight. But the selection is defensible. After all, so much has been written about scholastic

theology, and so little about the religious at- titudes of the laity in the Middle Ages. If I

have any complaint it is that the natural sciences do not get a look-in at all. The physical model of the universe, what C. S. Lewis called 'the discarded image', is surely a basic part of men's mental furniture which impinges on much of their thinking: In some ways, the experience of the twelfth century was unique and unrepeatable. In the visual arts, humanism

was to flower in the Gothic image, but for literary humanism in Professor Brooke's sense, the twelfth century was a false dawn. What happened? I fear the sad truth is, humane letters were killed by the dons. In the following century powerful university corporations arose which imposed rules—formal matriculation, statutory cur- ricula of set books, and examination for the master's licence.

The poets and orators who had been so lovingly cultivated at Chartres and Orleans were squeezed out of the curriculum, and the aspirant to an arts degree was forced through a five-year steeplechase of lectures and dis- putations on formal logic. The system pro- duced mental agility and many a scholastic summa, but it must have had a suffocating effect on the creative imagination. Even the business of letter writing was reduced to stereotyped rules. The human heart went out of it.