French Schools During the “Long 12th Century”. Outside Paris: Lan, Tourney and Saint Omer

Abstract

The study of masters and schools of the “long 12th century” seems to be a common topic for medieval studies. Throughout the 20th century, the history of medieval education has been the subject of research for such famous medievalists as Jacques Le Goff, Richard William Southern, Jacques Verger and many others. However, these were the ideas of the famous medieval masters that usually attracted the attention of researchers. Less successful medieval schools were mostly deprived of the attention of the medievalists, although the mere proof of their existence would allow a little deeper understanding of the 12th century French school world. The current article aims to fill this gap by proposing a methodology for studying medieval schools that takes into account the extent to which sources document their existence. For this purpose, examples of schools of different degrees of fame were analyzed: the popular school is represented by the Anselm of Laon’s one, the school of Odon of Tournai was chosen as a representative of a small pedagogical center, and the case of a little-known school was analyzed on the basis of the one at the church of St. Julia and Victor in Saint Omer. This main section of the current article is preceded by an analysis of the historiographic and source problems. From the point of view of historiography, the lack of reflection on the concept of “school” characteristic even for the specialized studies presents the greatest difficulty. From the source point of view, the difficulty is caused by the lack of special school terminology in the sources which is inevitable for medieval schools that lacked autonomy up to university period. In addition, the study of schools of the 12th century requires taking into account the distinctive feature of them which is personalization. The practical expression of this feature is the source references to specific masters, but not to schools. The main part of the article demonstrates that by taking into account the aforementioned historiographic and source study features, it becomes possible to add to the geographical map of the 12th century France not only the schools of famous masters, but also small pedagogical centers.