Peter Abelard's life & hard times

As noted in the previous post on Peter Abelard, he was one of the great thinkers of the twelfth century, one of the most outstanding examples of the medieval assumption that faith and reason (religion and science, we would probably say) would give you the same answer.  Some people who really ought to know better have seen him as anachronistic, as someone just like us only living in the twelfth century, because he applied rationality to matters of faith.  But he was a totally twelfth-century kind of guy.

He also had a very adventurous life.  He was a teacher in the Paris schools that eventually became the University of Paris.  One of the cathedral priests had a very smart niece named Heloise, who he thought should get a good education, but girls couldn't attend these schools.  So he asked Peter Abelard to come give her private lessons.

The private lessons worked all right.  She learned a whole lot, some of it having to do with Latin and theology, some of it, well…  They named the baby "Astrolabe," after an astronomical device that had just been invented.

They did indeed get married, although Heloise initially didn't want to, afraid marriage would hurt Abelard's career, because it meant he could never be a priest.  Both were hassled by rumor-mongers (think today's paparazzi), so Abelard sent her off to stay in a nunnery, though not as a nun--indeed, they enjoyed "conjugal visits" behind the abbess's back.

Heloise's uncle back in Paris became distraught at hearing his niece was in a nunnery, thinking Abelard had dumped her there so he could pretend he wasn't married.  Deciding to teach Abelard a sharp lesson, he sent some thugs around to Abelard's house, who castrated him.

This pretty much ended Abelard's and Heloise's marriage, as you can imagine.  Now Heloise did become a nun, as abbess at a new house Abelard helped her found.  He called it "The Paraclete."  The paraclete is the Holy Spirit.  Abelard, a wise-ass as ever, said that God the Father and God the Son got all the press, and it was time to do something for the poor neglected God the Holy Spirit.  Young Astrolabe was sent to be trained as a monk.

Abelard went off to be the abbot of a monastery in Brittany, near where he'd come from originally.  It was a terrible monastery, where the monks had no interest in leading a regular, austere life, and who decided it would be fun to poison their strict abbot with his hot-shot Paris ways.  (It didn't work.)

Back in Paris (I wonder why) Abelard returned to teaching.  He got in trouble for a book he wrote on the Trinity.  The difficulty with his "solution" to the "universals" problem, that categories really exist but only in our brains, is that certain abstract nouns like "the Trinity" are really supposed to exist in external reality, and people noticed.  Abelard denied he had ever said anything unorthodox about the Trinity, and quoted Augustine to back him up and told the judges at his trial that they knew no theology or even Latin, but it didn't help.  He was ordered to burn his book on the Trinity, which he did, sobbing and explaining theological points the while.

He wrote up the account of all these adventures.  Heloise, who he hadn't been in touch with in several years, read it and sent him a scathing letter--"You never write!  You never call!  When I think of what I sacrificed for you!"  But after they got past this stage, they started quite an interesting correspondence, in which Abelard argued that because women are weaker physically than men, their privations, fasting, and the like are more pleasing to God.  (So much for the idea that medieval people considered women inferior.)  But they never saw each other again.

Heloise, as is clear in her letters, was certainly just as smart as Abelard, even if neither one had as much common sense as one would prefer.  After a while, still smarting over having to burn his book on the Trinity, he rewrote it and set off to Rome to see if he could get the pope to say it was fine after all.  But he died on the way and has been (since the nineteenth century) buried next to Heloise in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.  (So are Molière and Jim Morrison of the Doors.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Peter Abelard

"Universals."  Scholastic method.  "No and Yes."  Say what?

These are all related to Peter Abelard, one of the great intellects of the twelfth century and one of the biggest wise-asses of his time.

As I noted in a previous post on medieval universities, the twelfth century was a time when (unlike now) it was assumed that faith and reason were not opposed forces.  Rather, it was assumed that what we would call religion and science should and would give you the same answer.  Peter Abelard is an outstanding example of this.

He started his career at the end of the eleventh century as a wandering teacher; these were relatively common in a time when universities had not yet developed and yet people were interested in intellectual issues.  He lectured on what was then a hot topic, whether "universals" (things like chairs, or abstract nouns like beauty or goodness) really existed as "universals," or whether they were just convenient names or categories we had created ("nominalism").  Abelard out-argued his own teacher (demonstrating his wise-ass characteristics), arguing that universals really were real, but they did not exist in some vague outside-the-world-place (as Plato had had it), but rather only in our brains.  This sort of ended the nominalism-realism debate on universals for about 3 centuries.

But Abelard is best known for his great work, "Sic et Non" ("Yes and No" in Latin), in which he embraced all the contradictions inherent in Christian theology.  The New Testament, the Old Testament, pronouncements of popes, pronouncements of councils, writings of church Fathers all contradict each other.  This is and was undeniable.

But how to resolve these contradictions?  You couldn't reply, "Just do what the Church says," because all these contradictory writings were written by completely orthodox churchmen, and in some cases were in the Bible.  The answer was to use human reasoning powers to figure it out.

Abelard's great work was a series of theological questions, such as, "Could God make black be white?"  He answered them both Yes and No, giving citations to support each side.  He did not then actually attempt to resolve the question, although that was clearly his intent, saying he left it as an exercise to the reader (another sign of being a wise-ass).

(God never changes, therefore He would never make black be white.  But God is omnipotent, so He can make colors be any colors He wants.  See what I mean?)

Abelard never "got into trouble" for this.  Everyone knew about the contradictions.  Now there was a way to deal with them beyond hoping they would go away.  His method, quickly named the "scholastic method" (because used in the schools), was immediately adopted by other intellectuals.  Within a few years, Gratian at the University of Bologna and Peter Lombard at the emerging University of Paris both wrote textbooks, in respectively law and theology, that became the textbooks for studying their fields.  Both used Abelard's method of answering a question two ways, with supporting citations on each side. They differed, however, in giving a final answer.

Peter Abelard is also known for his affair with Heloise (less romantic than you might have thought), but that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

King Arthur

Everybody loves King Arthur stories.  The sword in the stone, the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle, the tragic betrayal by Mordred, who is Arthur's nephew and son, the Holy Grail even before Indiana Jones and Monty Python got hold of it.

Medieval audiences loved these stories just as much.  There was a thirteenth-century preacher who noticed his audience dozing off and woke them all up by saying, "Once upon a time there was a king named Arthur."  (Once they were alert, of course, he chided them for preferring a story to a good moral lesson.)

Curiously, loving King Arthur stories has made many modern readers want to find the "historical Arthur" and attach the stories to him.  There actually seems to have been a historical Arthur, but he doesn't match what people want to find out about him.  The real Arcturus was a Romanized Briton, not a king (Britain had no kings once it was conquered by the Romans) but probably a dux, a war leader.  Arcturus is a good Roman name.  He would have also been a good Christian.

He would have lived in the late fifth/early sixth centuries, at the time that imperial Rome was pulling its troops out of the west and focusing on war with Persia (see more here on the "fall" of the Roman Empire).  The Angles and Saxons, Germanic peoples, came across the North Sea once there were no more pesky Roman legions in Britain, conquered, and settled.  The historical Arcturus seems to have fought to keep them at bay for at least a few decades.

This was the beginning of the period called (misleadingly) the "Dark Ages" in Britain.  The Romanized, Christianized population fled to the margins, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, the areas that still think of themselves as Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon.  They remembered in story the mythical adventures of Arthur, who had once withstood those nasty English, but whose final brave defense ended in glorious failure.  There is some thought that the dragon, now a Welsh symbol and later attached to Arthur (Pendragon and all that), came from the dragons on Roman military banners.

The idea of the glorious leader Arthur stayed alive over the centuries, but without any of the accompaniments now taken for granted.  Guinevere and Lancelot were first added in the twelfth century.  So was the Holy Grail.  Other aspects, like the sword in the stone, Mordred, the lady of Shallot, and Morgan Le Fay were added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  What we think of as the "standard" Arthur story was put together by Thomas Malory at the end of the fifteenth century, trying to organize and combine all the different stories in circulation.

Like modern audiences, medieval audiences wanted to believe Arthur was real.  In the twelfth century, the rather obscure monastery of Glastonbury "discovered" that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at their monastery.  Pilgrims flocked from all over.  Glastonbury is on a hill (a "tor") in a rather marshy region, which, without too much difficulty, could be equated with the "island" of Avalon.  It all made sense.

All medieval authors retold stories of Arthur as stories about their own period, making the weaponry, the castles, and the manners at court match what their audiences knew--except of course much fancier and bigger.  Nonetheless, they usually set these stories "officially" in late Roman Britain, only a few generations after Joseph of Arimathea had (theoretically) brought Christianity to the island.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Medieval feasts

As I discussed in an earlier post on what medieval people ate, for most of the population, including the aristocracy, food choices were very limited by our standards and very bland.  But for a feast, to celebrate a great holiday (like Christmas) or a special event (like a wedding or knighting), cooks at an aristocratic household would throw themselves into creating something special.

Because the daily norm was to have just enough food to get by (dieting was not a big concern in the Middle Ages), one mark of a feast was for everyone to have seconds.  Another marker of a feast would be to have a great many courses.  A feast would start in mid-afternoon and go on until no one could eat any more.

A good feast would include soup, several different kinds of meat (fish, fowl, red meat), plus vegetables, cheese, and puddings, as well as plenty of bread, of course.  Spices were used enthusiastically.  Some birds which we would not think of eating, like swans, would be roasted whole.  (They didn't have turkeys, though they did have geese; maybe they were making do with what they had.)

It was considered extremely elegant to present the bird looking as though it still had feathers.  Bits of vegetable curls (shavings of turnip, say) could be stuck onto the roast carcass with honey.  Something similar could be done with a pig, which might be presented whole, an apple in its mouth.  Food was supposed to look visually special, as well as tasting special.

Because a feast was a display of wealth and elegance as well as a celebration, a great deal of attention went into the setting.  Special wall hangings would be brought out.  Medieval castles did not have dining rooms, so trestle tables were set up in the great hall for a feast, with table cloths for all--or at least for the most esteemed guests.  Everyone was expected to wash their hands, and servants brought basins and fine towels.

Seating was strictly hierarchical, with the most esteemed guests at the head table with their own chairs, lower status people at long tables with benches along the sides, and others somewhere in between.  Guests were expected to wear their finest clothes.  Everyone got plenty to eat, even though the high table would have elegant table ware, while those down on the benches would be happy with a thick slice of bread on which the meat was piled.  They had spoons but not forks, requiring eating with one's fingers--part of the reason you washed carefully before dinner.

Because no one can eat without stopping for six hours straight, there would be interludes of entertainment.  Music, song, and humorous skits filled the gaps between courses.  In the King Arthur stories, the king would refuse to eat on a feast day until some marvel had appeared--which of course always happened in the stories  Because the wine flowed freely at a feast, there was doubtless a great deal of joking and laughing as the evening wore on, whether anything was funny or not.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Middle Ages and Renaissance

There's a general, vague feeling that the Renaissance came after the Middle Ages.  But this is not the case.  The Renaissance is actually just a name for late medieval Italy.

In addition, in spite of a sense that it must have marked something new and improved (after all, we use the word Renaissance, meaning rebirth), the Renaissance began with the Black Death of 1347 and continued with economic disaster.  The art that we now see as the most glorious achievement of Renaissance Italy (and it is) really appears only a century or so after self-styled Italian humanists declared they were living in a new time, a Rinascimento (Italian for Renaissance), and should be seen as a defiant cry against the despair of the age.

As I discussed in an earlier post on medieval Italy, the peninsula was the most urbanized part of medieval Europe, a major trade center where luxury goods from the East first reached Europe.  This focus on trade meant that intellectual life took something of a back seat--why think deep thoughts when one could be making money?  Italy did have Europe's first university, Bologna, but it concentrated on law, not philosophy or the classics--these were studied instead at northern universities, especially Paris (see more here on medieval universities).

So when the trade routes collapsed in the aftermath of the plague, the always energetic Italians looked for something new to concentrate on and focused on ancient philosophy and the arts.  They were, not surprisingly, especially enamored with ancient Rome.  Scholars set out to try to discover "pure," classical Latin, without any of the words medieval people had added to it in the last thousand years.  They started building their churches and monuments in a neo-Roman style.  At parties they would dress Roman and address each other as Cicero or Horace (a little different from the modern vision of toga parties…)

These scholars called themselves humanists, umanistici.  Note that although in modern usage we often use the term "humanist" to mean a secularist, as opposed to a religious person, the Italian humanists were intensely religious.  For them, the term meant someone interested in ancient philosophy and ideas.

One sometimes sees the term "northern Renaissance."  This is specifically an art-history term, meaning the flourishing of art in places like Flanders in the sixteenth century, or the new interest in reading Greek and Latin works in the original, spurred by the invention of the printing press.  This "northern Renaissance" overlaps with the Protestant Reformation, which started in the first decades of the sixteenth century and led to such disasters as the Thirty Years War (unfortunately, even now, religion has always seemed like a good thing to have a war over.)

For a lot of people, life was worse in the Italian Renaissance than it was earlier.  With the new interest in Rome, slavery was revived, after not being seen in western Europe for centuries, because Rome, after all, had been a slave society.  In imitation of patriarchal Rome, Renaissance husbands tried (without notable success) to make women obey.  The cities of the Renaissance, in a time of turmoil and huge discrepancies of wealth, were violent, dangerous places.

It is interesting that the belief that the Renaissance came after the Middle Ages is so strong that some textbooks have a chapter on the fifteenth century--including such things as Joan of Arc, the end of the Hundred Years War, and the War of the Roses in England--before rather than after the chapter on the fourteenth-century Renaissance.

The Italian humanists, convinced they represented something new (they indeed invented the term Middle Ages, dividing history into antiquity, their own glorious modern period, and the age "in the middle"), would have been shocked to discover that events around the year 1500, including the printing press, Columbus's discovery of the New World, and the Reformation marked a bigger change than did their toga parties.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Norman Conquest

I hope no one reading this blog thinks of history as "memorizing dates."  But there are still a few dates that everyone ought to know.  One of those is 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest of England.  It had major political, social, and cultural ramifications for England (and subsequently for the US.)

Between the seventh century and the eleventh, England was a Christian territory, with some scholars very well educated in Latin.  But its primary language was Anglo-Saxon, not the Old French of the territory right across the Channel.  England did not have the knights, the castles, or the fiefs that developed on the Continent in the first half of the eleventh century.

In 1066 King Edward of England died childless.  He was nicknamed "the Confessor" for his holy way of life--a confessor is a sort of second-class saint.  Several people were convinced they were Edward's rightful heir, including Harold Godwinson, an Anglo-Saxon lord, and William, duke of Normandy in France.

(Vikings had settled in Normandy--named for them--at the beginning of the tenth century and had in the subsequent generations become French, if lively French.)

Indeed, William claimed that Harold Godwinson had promised that he would be the next English king, after William had rescued him from shipwreck.  Harold remembered the whole event quite differently.  William is nicknamed "the Conqueror," so you can tell how this is going to turn out.

When Edward died, Harold Godwinson was elected king by the witangemot, the Anglo-Saxon general assembly of nobles. But no sooner was he crowned than he heard that England was being invaded--from Scandinavia.  A third claimant from there, Harald Hardrada, had allied with Harold Godwinson's brother and decided that he was rightful king of England.

Harold Godwinson met Harald Hardrada in a great battle and won.  Unfortunately for Anglo-Saxon purists, this great battle is now nearly forgotten, for no sooner had the English won than they learned that William had sailed from Normandy.  The exhausted English army met the Normans near Hastings and held their own remarkably well, in spite of just having marched on foot all the way down from Yorkshire, and in spite of having to face mounted knights.

But Harold Godwinson was killed, and many of the English lords with him.  William then declared his own men a witangemot, they elected him (who could have predicted?), and he was crowned king.

England under the so-called Anglo-Norman kings was immediately transformed.  Knights and castles were established on Continental models.  William declared the men who had accompanied him were now dukes and counts (earls) and insisted they hold from him in fief, the first time a king had been involved in fief-holding.  As English bishops died, they were replaced with French ones.

This was the beginning of the creation of the language we now call English, which has both Germanic elements (from Anglo-Saxon) and French/Latinate ones (from Norman French).  Modern English indeed has as many words as modern German and modern French combined.  In Anglo-Norman England, there were two distinct languages, one for the conquerors and one for the conquered.  In modern English, built on both these languages, a pig running around is a swine, a Germanic word, until it reaches the table and becomes pork, a French word--an Anglo-Saxon peasant raised swine, but a Norman lord ate pork.

Even now, the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon term is the simplest and pithiest, the French the more elegant.  You can say things in English in two ways.  It is possible to express a concept in English in a dual manner.  (See what I mean?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval political and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Italy

We think of countries as having clear borders.  In fact, borders are constantly changing, and what we think of as Europe's countries and boundaries are only moderately related to those of the Middle Ages.

Everyone knows where Italy is, that big boot-shaped peninsula sticking out into the Mediterranean.  But where exactly are its northern boundaries?  They are in the Alps somewhere, up in a region that is at least partially German-speaking.  (When they found the Ice Man in a glacier, it was initially unclear whether he was in Austria or Italy.)  Are Sardinia and Corsica part of Italy or not? (Corsica is now part of France).  And how far around the Adriatic to the east does Italy go?

In the Middle Ages, Italy was not its own country, even though that big boot-shaped peninsula was known then as now as Italia.  It had of course been the heart of the original Roman Empire, and its northern half (or so) had been part of Charlemagne's empire.  As I discussed in my previous post on the Holy Roman Empire, from the tenth century on the western Empire was basically Germany and Italy.

German kings would be elected and crowned, then cross the Alps to be crowned emperor in Rome, beating up some Italians en route.  Then they would go home again.  This kept Italy from developing into its own kingdom, as France and England and even Germany were doing.  Machiavelli in the sixteenth century deeply deplored this.  In fact, Italy did not become a unified country until the nineteenth century.

When it was finally unified, there were a few bits never properly incorporated.  Venice, which had been an independent state since its ninth-century foundation, was the last to join.  San Marino is still a tiny, independent country completely surrounded by Italy.  Vatican City is the largest and most important independent unit within Italy.

Sicily, the football at the toe of Italy's boot, had been a separate kingdom from the twelfth century.  It is still looked on with suspicion by northern Italy.

Medieval Italy was the most urbanized part of Europe, with more cities (and bishoprics) per square mile than anywhere else.  Its cities flourished as trade centers, for Italy was where the luxury goods of the East, the silk and spices, first reached Europe.  Italian merchants understood capitalism, "Buy low, sell high," and had complicated business models to raise money by having people invest in merchant ships and cargo, essentially selling stock.

Initially the cities were all headed by elected city councils and usually a mayor; in effect, they were oligarchies, run by the rich merchant families.  During the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, most cities were taken over by tyrants, men who seized power and didn't want to hear any opposing views.  Florence was about the last to remain, at least nominally, a republic.  Late medieval popes ran Rome and its surrounding region essentially as tyrants.  (Click here for more on late medieval popes.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval cities and commerce, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.