Knowledge True and Useful: A Cultural History of Early Scholasticism

By Frank Rexroth

A radical shift took place in medieval Europe that still shapes contemporary intellectual life: freeing themselves from the fixed beliefs of the past, scholars began to determine and pursue their own avenues of academic inquiry. In Knowledge True and Useful, Frank Rexroth shows how, beginning in the 1070s, a new kind of knowledge arose in Latin Europe that for the first time could be deemed “scientific.”

In the twelfth century, when Peter Abelard proclaimed the primacy of reason in all areas of inquiry (and started an affair with his pupil Heloise), it was a scandal. But he was not the only one who wanted to devote his life to this new enterprise of “scholastic” knowledge. Rexroth explores how the first students and teachers of this movement came together in new groups and schools, examining their intellectual debates and disputes as well as the lifelong connections they forged with one another through the scholastic communities to which they belonged.

Rexroth shows how the resulting transformations produced a new understanding of truth and the utility of learning, as well as a new perspective on the intellectual tradition and the division of knowledge into academic disciplines—marking a turning point in European intellectual culture that culminated in the birth of the university and, with it, traditions and forms of academic inquiry that continue to organize the pursuit of knowledge today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824711

Frank Rexroth

Frank Rexroth is Professor of Medieval History at Georg-August University in Göttingen.

Book preview

Cover: Knowledge True and Useful, A Cultural History of Early Scholasticism by Frank Rexroth

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Series Editors

Ruth Mazo Karras

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

KNOWLEDGE TRUE AND USEFUL

A Cultural History of Early Scholasticism

Frank Rexroth

Translated by John Burden

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Originally published as Fröhliche Scholastik: Die Wissenschaftsrevolution des Mittelalters by C. H. Beck © 2018

English translation copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2470-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2471-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For Ingo, Jana, Marcel, and Katharina, for Sebastian, Katharina Ulrike, and Jan-Hendryk

And for Michael Borgolte

CONTENTS

Note on the English Translation

Preface

Chapter 1. Against the Clock

A Productive Anachronism

Scholasticism: Learned Knowledge Begins to Reflect on Itself

Chapter 2. Schools of Loyalty: Teaching and Learning in the Early Middle Ages

Studying to Be a Good Christian? Early Medieval Schools

Obliged to Love: The Norms Guiding Teacher-Student Interactions

Social Groups and Intimacy

Chapter 3. Groups of Enthusiasts: School as a Utopian Place in the Era of Church Reform

A Third Way: The Free Schools

Living in Groups: Personal Needs and Collective Solutions

Chapter 4. The Renaissance of Scientific Thought and Knowledge (c. 1070–1115)

Learned Knowledge Becomes Willful

Higher Knowledge: New Understanding and New Uses

A New Episteme in the Making

Chapter 5. Peter Abelard and the New Science

Accelerating Tradition

The New Knowledge and Its Modernized Requirements

Sic et non: Domesticating Error and Defending Doubt

Chapter 6. Abelard’s School: A Social History of Truth

Lifelong Schooling

Truth, Probability, Boldness: Disputing Toward the Unreachable

The New Scholarship Under Fire

Chapter 7. The Parisian School Environment

Other Minds, Other Horizons

The Most Amazing City in the Scholastic Universe

Europe After 1150: Knowledge Becomes Usable and Interconnective

Chapter 8. Knowledge Creates and Orders the Things of the World

Learned and Unlearned: Scholarship and the Layman’s Understanding

School and Abbey: Reciprocal Accreditation

Scholasticism and Humanism: Two Discourses on Knowledge and Education

Chapter 9. Truth and Utility

Experts of Utility: Law and Jurists

Mutual Perceptions Shape the Habitus

Chapter 10. We, the University: The Scholars’ Guild

Paris Just After 1200

The University of Contrasts

Epilogue

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Certain terms employed in the English version of this book require some initial explanation. The gap between the German word Wissenschaft and the English word science is especially difficult to bridge. The German terminology remains attached to the holistic idea of the Einheit der Wissenschaft (oneness of all sciences), which emphasizes the unity of rational criteria employed in all academic inquiry regardless of modern divisions into disciplines, clusters of disciplines, and categories based on empirical and hermeneutical methods. Since the following account is concerned with how the long twelfth century produced a new kind of scholarship that followed a common logic, the term science (including its word family) has been employed in the comprehensive sense of the German word Wissenschaft.

The term social group, however, is used in the narrower sense of real-world associations. For example, it might describe specific students gathered around a specific master. Members of social groups tend to have a notion that their interactions are defined by elaborate rules, traditions, and differentiated roles. According to this definition, medieval scholars are not a social group, but the classes of Adam of Petit-Pont or Accursius are.¹

Readers might find the frequent occurrence of the words willful / willfulness irritating. These terms are an ad hoc stand-in for the concept of Eigensinn / eigensinnig, which is known in the Anglophone world mainly through Alf Lüdtke’s research on the modern history of everyday life but has never been terminologically established in English.² It refers to the insistence by historical actors (usually collectives, i.e., social groups) that they establish working definitions of common terms within their shared social space. In other words, they infuse words with special meaning within their groups. Masters and students did this with the words true and false by subjecting them to scientific inquiry guided by their own willful ideas.

Another cluster of terms (communication, social system, environment, and self- / external referentiality) can be attributed to the profound influence of social systems theory, especially as associated with Niklas Luhmann, on this study.³ Particularly important is the idea that social systems like science, religion, or love do not consist of people (or groups of people) but rather come into being through communication. People certainly participate in these systems, but they shape their contributions according to system-specific expectations. Scholastic theologians, believers, and lovers each act according to certain rules, and they expect the same from others within the system. Social systems arise through sustained communication and thus are distinct from their environment (from everything not part of the system). The following chapters will focus especially on how exchange worked between systems and across boundaries (i.e., between truth-oriented scientific communication and student-teacher love based on fidelity).

PREFACE

I was well into the groundwork of this book when it occurred to me that I had been dealing with its main theme, academic willfulness and its social roots, for some time already.¹ When I enrolled at the University of Freiburg in 1980, everything was totally new to me—my family knew little of academia and higher education. Why was I assigned to the Faculty of Philosophy when I wanted to study German and history? What, I wondered, was a Historical Seminar, an institute, or a kind of gathering with an imposing name: Lehrveranstaltung?

Obviously, not all professors were the same. Lecturers differed in rank as well as in appearance. Those in what seemed to be a lower rung of the hierarchy wore parkas and long beards, and their courses progressed in cycles through the volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. Others wore suits and ties with their hair cleanly parted. Were they clerics in disguise? After all, they were called Ordinarii (tenured professors), which sounded like a title given to ecclesiastical dignitaries. Whereas my high school principal had obstinately insisted that it made no difference whether one learned history from Mr. Vain or Ms. Absence, it became obvious that the opposite was true here: we were advised to take note of our teachers’ mannerisms, areas of focus, and inclinations, and to set out our course schedules based on whether they seemed to speak to us or not.

Like other novices from nonacademic families, I viewed higher education with both fascination and a certain reserve. My transition was made easier when I learned to think of my new existence as a particular way of life rather than as an act of knowledge acquisition. I got to know seminars, libraries, and presentations, but also evenings out at cinemas, theaters, and concerts, not to mention discussions of readings over drinks at the pub. Thus fortified, I could engage the strange world of academia on my own terms and slowly begin to acclimate to it.

When I learned years later of the much-vaunted anthropological perspective, I immediately recognized it. I had already begun to notice that certain fields cultivated their own unique character, or at least attracted certain kinds of characters. Sitting in the campus café, one learned to reliably associate students with certain disciplines based solely on their appearance. Female sociologists usually wore jeans and pullovers while law students usually wore high-collared blouses and heirloom-style necklaces. The historians reflected something of the dignified pauper: the down-to-earth, do-it-yourself type in a corduroy jacket—not the kind who went to demonstrations, but the kind who at least had some opinion of them. They tended to speak with more confidence about their future careers than did most other humanities scholars.

I soon became determined to get to know better the topic Michael Borgolte introduced to me in my first seminar—research. A wonderfully wasteful economy followed in which as much time as possible was invested in what seemed most interesting, and money meant for food was spent instead on books. The clearer my research ideas became, the further I drifted from what I took to be a middle-class lifestyle. Outwardly speaking, I drew so close to the group of sloppy dressers that I was slightly ashamed when the day finally came that I took up my doctoral stipend and wore a suit jacket to work for the first time. I was now a state-approved researcher after all, and I needed a place for my felt-tipped pens and card catalog slips.

The next few years were not without their trials and tribulations. Uncertainty about what would come next weighed heavily on me following my doctoral exams, my dissertation defense, and especially my habilitation. After stays in London, Berlin, and Bielefeld, landing in Göttingen brought its own irritations. Unlike in my earlier locations, the research mentality there was not really in competition with the middle-class spirit: academic endeavor was not seen as incompatible with a middle-class lifestyle, but rather an enhanced form of it.

The challenges that eventually grew into something truly alarming, and that placed this book on its course, came from a different direction. I first began to notice them around 2005 when my alma mater and other educational institutions began to place more and more emphasis on good vibes, positive thinking, and corporate identity. This mentality gave rise to gigantic competitive initiatives that treated academic fields like trademarks, prolific minds like golden geese and research topics like export products. Competitive universities began to adopt their own corporate colors, their own strategically designed websites and letterheads, and even their own dubious mottos. Repercussions followed. My colleagues began to sport ties and scarves with their college logos on special occasions, and university research magazines, which until then had been simple news bulletins, turned into showcases of their finest offerings.

When I thought about these tendencies in terms of the broader political climate and the direction of its winds, I could not help but see a certain logic. Ever since Roman Herzog’s German presidency in the 1990s, there had been much talk of the need for major educational endeavors encompassing all walks of society. According to Herzog’s successor, Horst Köhler, in his 2004 inaugural address, Germany was too far away from becoming a knowledge society and needed, therefore, to become a land of ideas. Naturally, much pressure was put on the universities: curiosity and experimental vigor came into high demand along with courage, creativity, and an appetite for innovation. While the 2008 financial crisis brought pure dread to other places, those of us at German universities felt relatively secure in our business. After all, society needed colleges, and even though they had taken their fair share of abuse in the past, they had a reputation for administering exactly the kind of medicine needed at the time—knowledge. The universities returned the favor by signaling to society that it needed to imitate the vibrancy, flexibility, and optimism about the future that could be found in higher education.

Here the doubts began to set in. Did the skepticism and irreverence of my happy years in Freiburg no longer play a vital role in intellectual inquiry? Why was no one talking about these qualities? After all, the everyday practice of research was still centered on engaging critically with perceived truths and with the results, methods, and theories of those who came before. The whole point of having beginners tediously study manuals and textbooks was for them to eventually acquire the ability to ask new questions and pursue further research using new premises and perspectives. Initiating novices into the intellectual communities of their respective disciplines still involved imparting in them an attitude of doubt and dissent. This socialization process, if executed successfully, was already supposed to lead to a three-dimensional approach to knowledge, one which emphasized expansion, systematization, and reflexivity all at once. The goal was for them to constantly question what they had learned along with its underlying premises.

The job of an academic is to doubt and to frame questions. Only two generations ago, Germans could joke that a professor was a person of differing opinion.² How could this idea exist alongside the academic attitude of overbearing positivity? Should not the university promote willfulness? Should not a scholar act more like a skeptic than a crowd-pleaser?

A final point about social science past and present: in order to make claims about people, social groups, and societies, the field maintains the helpful illusion that it is not bound by the complex structures and processes that form the object of its study.³ This illusion is maintained, in turn, by theorizing about the position of the researcher relative to the researched. We hear of direct and indirect observation, of participatory observation, and of thick participation.⁴ We also hear of the gap between the social pressure to act and discourses purged of action on behalf of the observing researcher.⁵ Assuming that such distinctions are meaningful and necessary, should academia really identify so closely with the outside world and with the socially acceptable values of the day? Might not the contemporary academic zeitgeist interfere with the critical aptitude of the discipline? These questions are worth considering.

But where exactly? The frame of inquiry of the following chapters will no doubt surprise the reader. Focusing on the reemergence of academia in Latin Europe, we will treat certain processes that began in the middle of the eleventh century and became identifiable by the 1070s. We will follow them up to just after 1200, when they resulted in a more or less stable form of academic organization at Europe’s earliest universities. This book does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of early academia, only to outline the historical context that led to the emergence of a distinctive scholarly habitus. To this end, it traces several thought patterns—including their backgrounds and social consequences—that enabled academic inquiry. It is the present author’s conviction that the academic culture described so far, one that is firmly embedded in society, came into being at a certain time and for certain reasons.

The author is not so naive as to believe that it is possible to see through these earliest academics some pure form of science unspoiled by outside influences. Nor does he seek through the mirror of the long-distant past to reveal to his contemporaries a better form of academia and to convert them to it. This book makes no great claim of continuity (whoever wishes to understand the origins of the present must take interest in the Middle Ages) or assumption of alterity (dear reader, let us tell you of a distant, better world, and you may draw your own conclusions from it). Instead, it trusts that historians will be able to grasp something of value from anachronism—from the controlled application of present concepts, questions, and problems to distant times, and from the tentative transfer of past ideas and structures into the present.⁶

The past that is illuminated in this way can be assigned a rationale even if historical witnesses did not recognize it themselves. It also allows those in the present to obtain better information about the past; if not of precise details, then of the realms of possibility that constrained it. It can be rewarding, the French classical scholar Nicole Loraux has argued, to travel back from the present to the past with common, everyday questions in mind. How much more exciting should it be, then, for those weighed down by the problems of the past to finally return to the present and find themselves able to see it from a new and different perspective.⁷

CHAPTER 1

Against the Clock

A Productive Anachronism

The following account lays out the thesis that a form of knowledge that can meaningfully be described as scientific emerged in Latin western Europe in the decades following the 1070s. This knowledge was both a product of social change and an engine of it, and the effects of these changes reached far beyond the horizon of the scholars who practiced it. This account is also based on the idea that, at this early but decisive point in European history, the forms and contents of this knowledge, as well as the processes that produced it, depended on certain patterns of community formation. By examining the logic and dynamics of these social developments, we will see that scientific insight came to be socially construed and tied up with specific forms of community formation many centuries before the appearance of the first laboratories.¹

This kind of knowledge was already present when the first universities appeared in Europe around 1200. So expansive and malleable was it, and so inclined to link up with other forms of knowledge, that when the higher schools came to embody it, they also encompassed it and restricted it. The following account will span the earlier phase of unrestricted merry scholasticism between about 1070 and 1250. Although university structures hemmed in the scholastic spirit, they also added something of value: the long-term perpetuation of scientific knowledge.

Past Explanations: Heroic Master Narratives …

Is Western science a product of the Middle Ages? Most seasoned historians would prefer to place its origins in the saddle period (Reinhart Koselleck) on the threshold of modernity (c. 1760–1840).² Others might venture further back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the widely known Scientific Revolution, whose heroic milestones included Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and Newton’s Principia mathematica (1687).³ This latter account has often been propounded in the past, especially in support of a narrative that the origins of Western rationality resulted from new mathematical engagement with nature, from the introduction of experimentation as a method of analysis, or from renewed theorizing about the state. Within the broader narrative, each of these factors has been identified as a root cause for the emergence of modernity and the rise of the West.⁴ As Alexandre Koyré put it: I have been forced to recognize, as many others have before me, that during this period human, or at least European, minds underwent a deep revolution which changed the very framework and pattern of our thinking and of which modern science and modern philosophy are, at the same time, the root and the fruit. Herbert Butterfield, who had curiously enough made a name for himself as a critic of one-dimensional progress narratives, nevertheless saw in this scientific revolution the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality.⁵

Since then, intellectual historians have become more cautious regarding the triumphalist character of this narrative. We are now more likely to describe the Scientific Revolution as a Eurocentric ‘myth of origins’—a narrative by which we Western ‘moderns’ differentiate ourselves from ‘the rest’ (Mario Biagioli). Much new emphasis has been placed on the foreign and unmodern aspects of science and on learned practice during the early modern period.⁶

The master narrative of the Scientific Revolution experienced some resurgence around the turn of the last millennium as politicians began to promote the ideal of a knowledge society. To this end, Peter Burke published a book in the year 2000 titled A Social History of Knowledge, which dressed up the old master narrative with the contemporary vocabulary and concepts of the sought-after knowledge society.⁷ In 2004, Richard van Dülmen and Sina Rauschenbach covered similar ground in a collection of essays on early modern intellectual history with the subtitle The Emergence of the Modern Knowledge Society.⁸

Looking more closely, the essays in that volume argue for a transition between 1450 and 1580 that saw knowledge take on massive new importance in European societies. As one author claimed, intellectual inquiry came to be characterized by a creative aspiration … by and large foreign to medieval knowledge even in its most secular forms.⁹ Another contributor claimed as undisputed that the Reformation era introduced an unprecedented drive toward secularization, and many areas of life were dragged inexorably into modernity through the growing dominance of reason over faith.¹⁰ According to him, the era also saw a transition from a late medieval clerical culture to an early modern lay culture.¹¹ From then on, according to the editors, knowledge was able to intervene in and determine what happened in the world and in life.¹² Years earlier, one of the editors, Van Dülmen, had become known for his work on the dreadful punishment rituals of the early modern period and the antiquated punitive apparatuses of ancien régime princely states—in short, on the unmodern qualities of early modern culture.¹³ Compared to such dreary subjects, his more recent work feels like the cozy warmth of a fireplace. But was it really possible that these two worlds could have existed at the same time?

Many people first encountered this perspective on European knowledge societies through the impactful philosophical groundwork of Jürgen Mittelstrass.¹⁴ According to him, it was only in early modern times, which he calls the Leonardo World, that the epistemic and technological nature of man—the abilities to acquire knowledge and to craft tools—began to build on each other.¹⁵ Individual scientific innovations were not decisive here, but rather the "fundamental methodological reorientation that brought together two traditions that had until then existed apart: the academic world of the schools and the tradition of the workshops, science in the classical sense and technology in the classical sense."¹⁶

If this narrative does not win out, it will be in part because it overemphasizes some things at the expense of others. By focusing only on learned heroes such as Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, scholars like Mittelstrass obscure the fact that the everyday academic life and traditions of the era were far more diverse and colorful—in short: more medieval—than they have led us to believe. We should know by now to be wary of such heroic master narratives. In our case, we can use the controlled application of anachronism to help immunize ourselves against them. The basic idea is that the present and past should be brought together through discursive comparison rather than a unifying narrative; by assuming that the past will be foreign to us, we can use this distance to help identify which questions we should ask about the present.

… Shifting Historical Boundaries …

Medievalists have not always been immune to the temptation of monumental narratives. But they also have fewer excuses available to them than did Koyré and Butterfield as they crafted the Scientific Revolution. The pattern of such progress stories has been well known in the field since the era of Jacob Burckhardt and his magnum opus The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). From the appearance of Burckhardt’s book, the Middle Ages have served as a reservoir for everything that seems unmodern, static, and backward.¹⁷ The newness of later ages has been accentuated again and again by stigmatizing the old, by leaving behind the world in which it originated and setting aside its outdated certainties as double entries, as it were, in the book-keeping of scientific progress.¹⁸ Even earlier, Enlightenment polemic against the ancien régime found no more appropriate embodiment of the old than the Middle Ages: ces tristes temps, ces siècles d’ignorance.¹⁹ It was this tradition that Burkhardt took up and passed on to the twentieth century and that shaped the modern history of science, the culture of its leading personalities, and the social structure of its organizational forms. For all of them, the Middle Ages seemed—and indeed needed to be—something else entirely.

Even those who saw things differently tended to stick with the before-and-after narrative of historical change. They simply moved the transition from the static and archaic past to the dynamic and modern present to within the Middle Ages rather than between the medieval and early modern periods. One early advocate of this perspective was the theoretical physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), who insisted that the decisive breakthrough in natural science occurred in the early fourteenth century rather than the sixteenth century. He began in 1903 with a historical overview of modern, which is to say Cartesian, mechanics. He turned then to natural philosophy at the end of the Middle Ages, identifying the origins of the modern scientific worldview with the work of John Buridan (d. after 1358) and his fellow Parisian masters. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, he wrote in his late ten-volume work, the grandiose edifice of peripatetic [i.e., Aristotelian] physics was doomed. The Christian faith had undermined all of its essential principles; empirical science—or at least astronomy, the only empirical science somewhat developed by then—had rejected its conclusions. The ancient edifice was beginning to fade away, and modern natural science was taking its place.²⁰

Here again, we see the familiar image of a heroic take-off, of innovation striking out anew from the dead end of an older path.

A generation later, the philosopher Anneliese Maier (1905–71) moved in the same direction, albeit more cautiously. In 1939, she declared that her research would concentrate on the preliminary and beginning stages of exact natural science during the late Middle Ages. Her 1949 monograph on Galileo’s predecessors in the fourteenth century, along with her other work, brought new attention to the era of Buridan and Ockham, and to Parisian scholars such as Peter John Olivi, Albert of Saxony, and Marsilius of Inghen.²¹ It is no coincidence that both Maier and Duhem were devout Catholics. Duhem sought tirelessly to build bridges between contemporary science and Catholicism while Maier, born to a German-Protestant professorial dynasty, converted to Catholicism in 1943. Both numbered among those Catholic scientists who, in the tradition of Pope Leo XIII and his encyclical Aeterni patris (1879), sought to challenge negative stereotypes of the Middle Ages. Contradicting the current liberal-Protestant mainstream opinion, they emphasized the forward-thinking elements of orthodox medieval intellectualism.²²

Close in substance but distant in methodology to our project is the famous book of Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), another medievalist who shifted historical boundaries. A professor at Harvard University since 1902, Haskins sought, like us, to bring the academia of his day into dialogue with the scholastic era. Like Duhem and Maier, he argued passionately that the essence of modernity can be found in the Middle Ages. He also endorsed Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance but challenged its dating. For Burckhardt, it was the advent of Italian humanism in the fourteenth century that removed the faith, illusion, and childish prepossession of medieval culture that had sat like a veil before the eyes of man.²³ Haskins identified these developments more with the twelfth century, the time frame covered in the current book.²⁴

Haskins judged the era according to clear standards. For him, civilizational progress or backwardness in any era could be measured according to contemporary interest in classical literature. Major topics of The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century include the reception of ancient Latin literature, the recovery of Roman law, the sophisticated analytical techniques developed at the new schools, and the astonishing creativity in the spheres of poetry and art. For Haskins, what was worth praising and cherishing as signs of cultivation and progress was what could also make an impression on his departmental rivals working on Renaissance history.²⁵

The whole work, and not just the central fourth chapter, The Revival of the Latin Classics, is written in a refined, even aristocratic, register. Haskins celebrated this dynamic era so engrossed by literature, but he also ignored much that did not fit his picture. Since ecclesiastical progress would have disrupted his vision of a new age, his ode to the rediscovery of Roman law makes no mention of canon law. In the same way, his preference for secular poetry leaves no room for religious verse. Wandering scholars are treated as leading Renaissance figures while the monks of the new Carthusian and Cistercian orders are cast as conservative forces trying to preserve the outdated educational ideals of Benedictine monasticism. Only on the margins does Haskins acknowledge church reform, new devotional practices, and the growing importance of vernacular poetry in French, English, and German. Grammar and rhetoric lessons are described with affection, but no attention is given to logic, which is treated instead as a source of contamination: in addition to spoiling students’ Latin with standardized language, the arduous process of learning it distracted them from the study of grammar and poetry.²⁶

Some have attributed the imbalances in Haskins’s depiction to a desire to chart out the prehistory of a bourgeois educational ideal.²⁷ Regardless, his metanarrative of a twelfth-century Renaissance has had remarkable and lasting impact on the field, enabling the more balanced accounts of the later twentieth century that helped to inspire the following chapters. Chapter 8, in particular, will attempt to show that many elements of the so-called Renaissance can be interpreted more productively from the perspective of modern historical discourse analysis.

… Instructive Parables

Setting aside such temporal boundaries, two French medievalists, both important intellectuals, also drew connections between the academic worlds of the Middle Ages and the present. Their approaches were more playful, and probably for that reason also exceptionally innovative. The first was Jacques Le Goff, whose early work Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge (1957) has undergone numerous reprints. The second is the philosopher Alain De Libera, who contributed a postmodern reflection on the medieval practice of thinking in Penser au Moyen Âge (1991).²⁸ Like the present book, Le Goff’s epoch-making work relies on a productive anachronism, in his case by setting out in search of medieval intellectuals, which for him meant a particular kind of figure characteristic of mid-twentieth-century French media and politics. Since the 1890s, the French public had been polarized over the case of the convicted Captain Dreyfus and subsequent debates about the roles of Jews and intellectuels in the public sphere. Through medieval intellectuals, Le Goff crafted a narrative intended to provoke readers to reflect on the present. To understand it, one must read it as a parable of the culture of the late 1950s; of music, art, and philosophy in the turbulent times just before the student revolts of the 1960s. Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge reflected the era’s rapid social change every bit as much as Boris Vian’s chanson Le Déserteur, the melancholic films of Louis Malle, or the playful, ironic features of Jacques Tati. Le Goff’s work should be placed on the bookshelf right next to the philosophical sketches of Jean-Paul Sartre that emerged in the exact same context.

Le Goff presented his book as an instructive metaphor for how his society assigned roles to intellectuals. At the heart of his story are the social mechanisms that have inspired intellectuals to great feats of the mind, but also corrupted them, turning them from critics of society into its very pillars. This idea of an organic process he owed to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.²⁹ First, Le Goff recounted the heroic beginnings of the twelfth-century scholastic intellectuals—mostly Parisian—who rebelled against authority and clashed with the guardians of secular and spiritual order. A second phase saw the universities of the next century offer some institutional protection but also produce ambiguous results. Inner contradictions in their structure, he argues, spurred scholars to admirable productivity but also led to their exhaustion. The third and final phase, lasting from the late Middle Ages to the dawn of Renaissance humanism, saw the intellectuals decline as they became rich and powerful in the service of princes and tyrants, and their revolutionary impulses faded away. For centuries, Le Goff wrote in reference to the lavishly paid late medieval jurists, there was no longer an intellectual worker in the Latin West.³⁰ He left it to his readers to determine if the long slumber of that time—and of the present day—had indeed ended. It was also left to them to ponder whether or not the modern masterminds of a better and more just world would prove any better at resisting the corruption of titles, income, and influence than their medieval predecessors.

Le Goff did not draw parallels between this bygone epoch and the twentieth century as a mere distancing effect. On the contrary, he was truly convinced that the historical metaphor he used was accurate. He believed that the spirit of intellectual optimism he found in the Quartier Latin in Peter Abelard’s era was the very same one that animated the Left Bank in his own day. His book, which supposedly treated all of Europe, was essentially a celebration of high medieval Parisian scholars. Born as it was out of a thirty-three-year-old historian’s exuberance for historical narrative, it seemed young, fresh, and left wing. He set the stage by playfully mixing biblical mythography with a dash of materialism. In the beginning, he wrote, were the towns.³¹ The mainstream progressive social historians of Le Goff’s Europe—including the French greats—generally avoided historical narrative (historia ad narrandum), calling instead for analysis and discourse. Le Goff cared little for their opinions: he freely recounted tales of medieval intellectuals even as he addressed present-day urban culture, the bohemian lifestyle, and the power-hungry elites of contemporary French universities. We will see in the third and fourth chapters of this book that he was wrong in at least one respect—cities played less of a role in the beginning than did groups of hermits and recluses.

While Le Goff’s book dealt with the greatness and tragic nature of modern intellectuals, Alain De Libera’s Penser au Moyen Âge (1991) provided a postmodern counterpart. This philosophical essay has attracted a good deal of attention since its appearance, but it never became a true best seller like Le Goff’s racy narrative.³² Given the author’s philosophical aversion to naive linearity, this is not really surprising. De Libera preferred to circle around his subject: his chapters contain a clear chronological thread but can be read in any order.

De Libera also focused on intellectuals, and more precisely on the emergence of an intellectual ideal through intrascholastic conflicts around 1300.³³ By ideal, he meant the lifestyle that ancient and medieval authors associated with the philosophus. Driven by an irresistible will to comprehend the nature of things, the philosophus dedicated his whole life to knowledge and relinquished all other pursuits. This ideal could be pursued for a while at the schools and universities, but it required that one be willing at some point to leave behind the business of higher education. For De Libera, this de-professionalization of philosophy played a far more important role in the emergence of European intellectualism than did Le Goff’s professionalization processes. The decisive moment came around 1300, when the first thinkers began to recognize philosophizing as a way of life and left the universities to pursue it.³⁴

Far from Le Goff’s bloated privy councilors in the service of the French king, De Libera’s intellectuals were the representatives of a free-floating intelligentsia (Karl Mannheim). They drew their importance not from consulting contracts and social roles but from philosophical practice and works explicitly directed at an audience outside the universities. According to De Libera, the first intellectuals of this type were Dante and Meister Eckhart. The former’s Convivio (The Banquet) was the first truly genuine and great manifesto for medieval intellectuals.³⁵

De Libera’s essay is guided by a profound skepticism of institutions and by the question of whether the emergence of intellectualism was a purely European product or the result of cultural contact between Latin Christendom and its neighbors, especially the Islamic world. While the possibility of outside influence seems obvious today in the context of globalization, it was not so clear a few decades ago. Historians of philosophy sometimes weighed in on the question. One view, mostly conservative and Catholic, tended to emphasize the unity of knowledge and the faithful mind. But another approach, one more concerned with the broader history of secular philosophy, proved more willing to acknowledge influences beyond the Christian and ancient traditions. A prominent representative of the first view was Wolfgang Kluxen, who underscored the intellectual independence of Europe and insisted that everything necessary for the development of a principle of rationality was already present in its native traditions.³⁶ Quite differently, the second perspective maintained in the tradition of the Enlightenment that the transfer of ancient texts and genuine Arabic commentaries from the Islamic world played a decisive role in the scientific Renaissance of the Latin West.

De Libera falls into the second group. He was convinced that it was precisely this contact and exchange that enabled an intellectual way of life to develop around 1300. For him, the Muslim philosophers of the dar al-islam were the medieval heirs of Greek wisdom. But since they did not have universities, they developed a philosophical lifestyle independent of institutions. Passed on to Latin Europe, this lifestyle caught on in the time between the anti-Averroist condemnations of 1277 and the judgment of the Avignonese court against Meister Eckhart in 1327.

De Libera’s book is postmodern in the sense that it decenters the Western intellectual tradition, treating it as part of a global history of philosophy. Unlike many of his predecessors, including Le Goff, he credited the Arabic philosophers with far more than just providing a repository for ancient Greek texts before they made their way to the schools of Latin Europe.³⁷

Other indications of postmodernism appear too, for example his focus on processes of deprofessionalization. He also emphasized the plurality of medieval concepts of academic inquiry without relying on the traditional trope of a battle between philosophical schools.³⁸ According to him, a colorful variety of positions existed together: the real history of medieval logic is a "world of discourses, of ‘puzzles’ (sophismata) and ‘role-playing games’ (obligationes). From the modern perspective, what at first seems foreign about the Middle Ages becomes indispensable when more extensive knowledge of the period is gained. De Libera explains: From it, we see that thoughts are not the product of individuals but are able to travel through them and survive intact as the dark outlines of a future life. We thus discover that we are not self-made men shaped out of nothing but rather beneficiaries and debtors of a subjectless discourse.… To understand the history of thought as an anonymous story: that, in our opinion, is the main task of the medievalist.³⁹ Our fourth chapter will put this position to the test. Finally, De Libera saw present and scholastic philosophy as connected insofar as both employed intense reflection on the ontological status of language and its symbolic characters—that is, on their forms of conventionality. Working during the linguistic turn," a major trend in cultural studies, he saw basic compatibility between twentieth-century linguistic analysis and the scholastic tradition.⁴⁰

De Libera was not the only medievalist to make use of analytic philosophy, discourse theory, and poststructuralism. The first earned him allies in the English-speaking world, and the second and third in France. He pointed out, along with others, that scholasticism was postmodern in its thought experiments, its contrafactual thinking, and its pondering of possible worlds that God could have created. According to Marcia Colish, scholasticism is defined not by the sum of its contents but by a set of intellectual methods whose use and development cut across other categories and informed all players in the game.⁴¹ Like postmodern philosophy, medieval thinking also called into question concepts of author and work. The seemingly anarchic texts produced by nameless glossators and commentators, as we will see, had no use for such labels. By studying these anonymous works of the two generations before Abelard, the wikis of our day begin to make more sense.

Scholasticism: Learned Knowledge Begins to Reflect on Itself

Scholarly Willfulness

We are finally approaching our period of examination after progressing through the heroic master narrative of the scientific revolution, through Duhem’s and Maier’s searches for Galileo’s medieval forerunners, through Haskins’s retrospective humanistic utopia, through Le Goff’s ballad of the corrupting of the first intellectuals, and through De Libera’s liberation narrative of the emerging intellectual lifestyle. What makes the years between about 1050 and 1250 so attractive for our undertaking is that they form the first era since antiquity in which European science took on a self-referential quality (the Islamic parts of Europe were ahead in this regard).⁴² In other words, medieval science developed an internal dialogue that enabled it to define itself without constantly seeking outside approval from religion or sovereign, and to avoid wasting valuable energy communicating with these external agents. The primary purpose of this kind of science was to produce intellectual results, not to contribute to the common good, to full employment, to international competitiveness, or to the accuracy of the faith.

The point here is not that this science existed independently of its external environment, like some ivory tower in the traditional sense. On the contrary, when science is organized self-referentially and understood as a social system, it is actually oriented quite strongly toward the outside world, even if in some cases only for the sake of maintaining its own form and boundaries.⁴³ Such a science must be able to sustain its own internal logic, to persist in its reliance on its own theories and methods, and to conceive of its questions and projects as targeted at real intellectual problems. These conditions allow it to set its own goals—to become willful.

Use of the terms self- or externally referential is not meant to sound judgmental. The point is not to praise or criticize certain forms of communication, but to shed light on how a small but industrious milieu of studious men rediscovered a self-referential—and therefore, willful—attitude toward science during the second half of the eleventh century. This attitude was rediscovered in the sense that ideas about the lives and activities of the ancient philosophers contributed significantly to the establishment of this new scholastic identity. The previous centuries had produced plenty of impressive intellectual accomplishments, including major advancements in the seven liberal arts (septem artes liberales) during the Carolingian era.⁴⁴ But these efforts in the verbal and mathematical arts (the trivium and the quadrivium, as we will explore later) were motivated primarily by goals irrelevant to the state of knowledge. Their purpose was to help people attain salvation through better understanding of sacra scriptura, through quality liturgical performance, and by correctly calculating the church holidays (computus). According to one monk from Arras during the eleventh century, every letter, every line, and every point that he wrote down earned him forgiveness for one sin.⁴⁵

This way of thinking obviously did not simply disappear in the following century. In fact, it continued to dominate the intellectual life of the monasteries. But new schools gradually emerged where the study of letters, lines, and texts aimed at something new: at achieving a better understanding of the texts themselves and, by extension, of the nature of things and of truth itself. This movement was motivated primarily by a will to truth that contributed to an entirely new discourse and was realized through academic inquiry free to define its own goals.

This new fixation on the philosophical ideal of truth resulted in a decline in the trust hitherto placed in the consistency of the intellectual tradition. Regarding Christ’s statement that I am the truth and the life (John 14:6), the combative papal reformer Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) pointed out that he did not say ‘I am the custom’ but ‘I am the truth.’ ⁴⁶ This same line of argumentation was used by Peter Abelard, the most famous of the early scholastics, against overreliance on the intellectual tradition (consuetudo). Concerns had arisen at the schools that some beliefs were accepted as true only because they were backed by received teaching, and thus by tradition and custom. With this new doubt came also suspicion that the convictions of the older generations and of authorities in general were not entirely consistent. In scholastic circles, it became a joke that authorities had waxen noses that could be bent in any direction.⁴⁷

But how could one reach the truth if not through the doctrine of teachers and the Church Fathers? The schools took a major step in a new direction by gradually setting aside the stipulations of the seven liberal arts, which—by definition—were not self-referential since they aimed at achieving external, higher purposes. In time, the arts were replaced by an idea of philosophy based on both the teaching of wisdom and a doctrine of proper conduct worthy of dedicating one’s life to. According to Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard was the first representative of this new ideal, which ultimately allowed one to be a scholar for scholarship’s sake.⁴⁸

As the arts faced down this new, competing idea of philosophy, one of their number, dialectic, emerged as a leading science and a fast lane on the quest for the truth. Through its highly technical language, dialectic offered a promising way to treat questions about real-world things symbolically, by transposing them into language that seemed to enable scholars to reach viable solutions. Before long, dialectical technique was being applied to other areas of knowledge, most spectacularly and controversially to questions of theology. This methodological transfer across the range of arts and sciences, as we will see, had the unintended consequence of exposing these activities and methods to the critical and often resentful gaze of outsiders.

Ideas about truth are, of course, thousands of years old. Our purpose is not to claim that Abelard and his contemporaries reinvented the wheel. Advancing from a different angle, the following will describe how truth, in competition with other variables (above all correctness and utility), emerged as the dominant organizing scheme of scientific communication. By way of this, we will compare and contrast this new kind of scientific communication with other forms of social interaction. We will see that the processes that enabled and shaped it were by no means slow and steady. In the time frame of this book, they picked up pace rapidly (Chapters 4–6), embedded the new science as a discourse in various social contexts (Chapter 7), and led to great confusion as the new discourse interacted with other contemporary discourses (Chapters 8–10).

Scholasticism as the Culture of Schools

These processes, which we have so far only briefly outlined and will discuss in greater detail later, have already been treated with great care by historians and scholars of philosophy such as John Marenbon, Yukio Iwakuma, and Constant Mews. Their works have shed a great deal of light on the emerging episteme of medieval philosophy. In doing so, they have also challenged major disciplinary currents, namely the older, dominant notion that the core purpose and nature of scholastic science was to harmonize faith and wisdom, to synthesize theology and philosophy within the framework of Christian philosophy (Étienne Gilson).⁴⁹ In this context, scholasticism was praised for its reputed ability to integrate belief and intellect. This view ignores the fact that scholarly communication usually resulted in heated conflict even before the first great battles between the University of Paris and the young mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. Students of philosophy must resist the urge to treat the beginnings of self-referential science in the long twelfth century as the mere back story to the later grand designs of Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) or Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). As impressive as their achievements were, the scholars of the preceding century were far more than just their forerunners.

The following outline owes much to the scholars who have managed to avoid these pitfalls, but it deviates from them insofar as it claims that the scholastic form (and, hence, scholasticism itself) must be understood as a social phenomenon emanating from social groups. The new science of the twelfth century will still, of course, be viewed in part through its episteme. But we will be guided by the insight that how it organized knowledge directly corresponded to and depended on its sociocultural forms. We will, therefore, take the main categories of the new science and subject them to the analysis of social history.⁵⁰ Sociocultural refers here to the idea that the schools and their culture—their knowledge, habits, and life paths—were thoroughly interconnected with the social forms of interaction that also formed their institutional basis. To put it differently, along with the knowledge of the scholars, we will convey as scholastic culture other broad and tangible aspects: the way they formed into and developed groups; how they operated within them; and their lifestyles, paths, and habits. In sum, we will examine the culture that sustained the schools and, in turn, was sustained by them.

Contemporary advocates and critics alike were well aware that the scholastic milieu cultivated a particular lifestyle as well as specialized knowledge. Those dedicated to it even adopted a specific worldview: they shared ideas about how the rest of society thought; about time, the rhythm of life, and aging; about their bodies and sexuality; about the value of the new relative to the old; and about the merits of authority, loyalty, and their self-assigned obligations. Far from being mere accessories to the new episteme, these elements actually constituted it.

Outside critics, but also internal ones as well, leveled a wide range of objections against scholastic beliefs and practices. It is helpful here to distinguish between internal and external criticism. The former was driven by a desire for self-improvement and self-enlightenment, and according to Karen Gloy, it sought to strengthen the consensus regarding standards of rationality. From within, internal critics could draw productive attention to aberrations and abuses. Such criticism was more or less inevitable in a community so devoted to reason. Totally different, in Gloy’s opinion, was the external criticism of those outside the milieu. Sharing no such standards of rationality, they aimed at a complete refutation of the enterprise.⁵¹ Scholars such as Stephen Ferruolo have identified many such critics from the monastic realm. But we should also keep our eye out for disingenuous defectors, for writers who tried to pass off external criticism as the logical consequence of serious internal criticism grown out of control. The goal of these critics was to make it seem as if the internal consensus was beginning to break down.⁵²

Monks had described the monastery as a schola Christi since the time of Saint Benedict. But in general, they did not apply the adjectival derivation of schola or its substantive form scholasticus to themselves, using it instead for outside contexts that they neither belonged to nor wished to associate with.⁵³ When monks wanted to suggest to readers that a controversy should be laid to rest, they might say (as did Godfrey of St. Victor in this case): However that may be, this question does not concern us very much, so we leave it to scholastic disputation (scolasticis disputationibus relinquimus).⁵⁴ Rupert of Deutz, one of the most learned monks of his day, insisted that an author who might disagree with him about the eucharist would be a monk and yet a scholastic (scholastico licet monacho). The paradox was intended as polemic against the new intellectuals who were known to pride themselves too much on their own knowledge.⁵⁵

The scolastici soon acquired a stereotype based on their use of dialectic