Medieval Worldview Research Articles

NATURAL HISTORIES: LEARNING FROM ANIMALS IN T.H. WHITE'S ARTHURIAN SEQUENCE

AbstractThis paper examines the changes T.H. White made to The Sword in the Stone between its first publication in 1938 and subsequent appearance as the first part of the Once and Future King in 1958. These changes are related to the immediate historical context of World War II, and also to the wider context of children's literature dealing with the relationship between the child and the ''natural world''. Rather than seeing White's texts as reflecting a post-Enlightenment idealisation, placing both child and nature beyond the bounds of culture and human limitation, the essay argues that even in the first version White's medieval worldview is constructed from a sophisticated and deliberately anachronistic medley of discourses including medieval codes of hunting and chivalry, Renaissance tragedy and Victorian natural history. These combine to create an exclusively male world, which is analysed as part of the ideological construction of a masculine relationship to the environment based on a ''natural'' nstinct to hunt and kill. White's growing pacifism leads to the insertion in the later version of episodes replacing this relationship with models of cooperative animal behaviour, and even introducing a female mentor for the hero.

The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant, Thirteenth-Century Parisian Philosopher: An Examination of His Views on the Relationship of Philosophy and Theology by Tony Dodd

666 BOOK REVIEWS prayer for things to have already happened) is in no way to diminish the praise that is due for a fine book, well-researched historically and cogently argued philosophically. Fordham University Bronx, New York JOSEPH W. KOTERSKI, S.J. The Life and Thought of Siger of Brabant, Thirteenth-Century Parisian Philosopher: An Examination of His Views on the Relationship of Philosophy and Theology. By TONY DODD. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Pp. 531. $119.95 (doth). ISBN 0-7734-8477-9. The standard full-length studiesofthe foremost thirteenth-centuryAverroist philosopher, Siger of Brabant, have been, faute de mieux, those of Pierre Mandonnet, O.P. (1898; 1908, 1911) and of le feu Chanoine Fernand van Steenberghen (1939, 1942). Now we have a new full-length study, by Professor Tony Dodd of the University of Exeter. It is practically no less flawed, unfortunately, than its predecessors. Nevertheless, it contains extensive, nearly complete bibliographies and other useful information about Siger. Dodd covers four well-chosen, specific subjects in Siger: the intellect, determinism and free will, divine providence, and the {past) eternity of the world. Before attacking those four, however, Dodd makes a number of general observations about Siger and his times. Some of these contain factual errors. For example, he mentions the "flatness of the world" as part of the medieval world view. In fact, medieval scientists knew very well, primarily from observation of lunar eclipses, that our earth is "round." He speaks of "Alexander of Hales' own Summa theologiae" as if it had been written by Alexander (it was not). In a most serious error, he confuses the Golden Age of Scholasticism (the time of Siger and Thomas Aquinas) with the baroque Scholasticism of recent centuries: he says, "All formal argument and discussion were officially undertaken in syllogistic form." The typical form of thirteenthcentury philosophico-theological writing or discourse was not the syllogism but the question (quaestio). Amore solid knowledge of the background of medieval thought might have helped Dodd in an important respect: namely, to show how and why Siger is a thoroughly medieval man. His book fails to do that, and thereby fails to give a complete portrait of Siger as philosopher. In general, Dodd's treatment of the intellect in Siger is accurate and helpful, drawing on many pertinent texts and providing good translations (with very infrequent errors; e.g., rendering a "cum clause" as causal where it must be BOOK REVIEWS 667 concessive). He provides useful information about Siger's being influenced by St. Thomas, and emphasizes, quite rightly, that Siger disagreed with Averroes on the intellect by the time he wrote what is probably his last surviving work, the Commentary on the Liberde causis. Nevertheless, on certain points Dodd's presentation distorts Siger's relation both to Aristotle and to Thomas. Not far into his treatment of Siger and the human intellect Dodd writes, "Aristotle's metaphysics ... demands that, since matter is the principle of individuation, there can ... be [only] one unique intellect if it is truly spiritual." Agrave problem: how has he failed to consider Aristotle's "separate movers"? According to Aristotle there are either more than forty or more than fifty of them (depending on how many celestial motions the astronomers will decide that there are). Of course they are distinct from each other, individuated. Yet they have no matter at all; they are pure intellect, or we may say, purely spiritual. Missing that last point leads implicitly to the conclusion that Aristotle must not have believed that individual humans have their own intellect. Averroes did believe that Aristotle actually taught that there is only one intellect, a separate being after the manner of the separate movers, for all mankind; however, this is not because of an idea that matter is indispensable for individuation, but because of his interpretation of a famous, difficult passage at the beginning of book 3, chapter 4 of Aristotle's De anima (a mysterious question on the kind of separateness of the human intellect). Dodd speculates that Siger's change of his view on the oneness of the intellect was influenced by fear of the censors. The simpler explanation is that Siger has been...

Bernhard von Clairvaux und der Beginn der Moderne ed. by Dieter R. Bauer and Gotthard Fuchs.

Bernhard von Clairvaux und der Beginn der Moderne. Edited by Dieter R. Bauer and Gotthard Fuchs. (Innsbruck:Tyrolia-Verlag. 1996. Pp. 345.) A conference held in the monastery of Schontal in March, 1990, to celebrate the nonacentenary of the birth of Saint Bernard is the source for this valuable collection of papers. Unlike the celebrations at Kalamazoo and Rome that year, both of which brought together scholars from many nations and continents, all but one of the papers here collected are by German or Austrian scholars. The sole exception is a paper by the late and deservedly renowned master Bernardine scholar Jean Leclercq, whose presence at, and participation in, all the celebrations was, of course, both mandatory and acclaimed. Space limitations prevent a detailed report on all of the papers. And so I offer my reading of a few of the papers, chosen to represent the wide range of topics treated in this valuable volume. Peter Dinzelbacher provides the justification for the perhaps surprising title of the collection with his Die 'Bernhardinische Epoche' als Achsenzeit der europiischen Geschichte(pp. 9-53). He offers an inescapably broad and general sketch (p. 15) of the transition from the late antique/early medieval world view to the early modern (through the first half of the seventeenth century). He sees the century 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal period in the birth of the modernThat crucial century was characterized by the birth of cultural pluralism, an acceptance of the new class of townsmen as an integral part of society and as a time of greater social interaction. The period saw a revolutionary distinction between the sacred and the profane, a rationalizing of every aspect of intellectual inquiry. It exhibited a new approach to institutional reform and personal piety and the development of a sense of the individual (the ascendancy of interior motivation and individual conscience). In a survey encompassing a range of topics from climatology to vernacular literature, the specialist is bound to discover specific views with which he or she will disagree, but few, I think, would dispute the general lines of an argument which is truly a tour de force. The title of Arnold Angenendt's paper,Die Zisterzienser im religiosen Umbruch des hohen Mittelalters (pp. 54-69), is misleading, for the Cistercians occupy only a small place in his survey of that religious transformation. Nevertheless. the article is an excellent summary of the change in the notion of religious perfection from the death of Hugh of Cluny (1109) to the century-later emergence of the mendicant orders. Angenendt's thesis is that the traditional view of perfection as a monastic life of unremitting prayer and absolute obedience in community was slowly but surely altered by the new orders. Endless community prayer was replaced with a new sense of social responsibility; an individual's conscience became more important than unquestioning obedience; the focus of religious activity became less the desert than the teeming towns. The humiliati even attempted to transform the married state into an apostolic life style. …

Riquier's Letras : An Epistemology of Self

RIQUTERS LETRAS: AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF SELF While some critics might argue that Western selfhood dates from a post-Cartesian era when authors first had a clear sense of the "universal subject" (Smith 5), a good many others acknowledge evidence of a much earlier self-awareness or authorial inwardness. In spite of the so-called "death of the self" of modern social constructivism (Levine 3), few students deny the genuine "psychological interiority" (Witz 82-83), "self-reflection" (Huot 23), or all-pervasive interest in "self-knowledge" (Morris 65) documented in the works ofsuch authors as Saint Augustine, Guibert ofNogent, or Peter Abelard, to mention but the most conspicuous examples. At first glance, much of this introspection seems inescapably linked with "values" (Witz 91), "moral vision" (Taylor 3), and the medieval theoreticians' examination of some invisible, inner space, some unavoidable "center of individual consciousness" (Howe 249). But that discounts another type of more secular self-reflection evinced in the laments of lyric poets (Huot 2), to say nothing of the allegorical search for human qualities in works like the Roman de la Rose, whose enormous popularity stands as proofofthe medieval fascination with defining the inner person. Paradoxically, much of the recent discussion of the medieval literary "self has come out of Zumthor's assertion that the lyric voice of the Middle Ages owes more to convention (registres) than to any individualization of the speaking subject. A first important rebuttal ofthe Zumthorian principle is Zink's recognition ofa more self-conscious medieval artist than Zumthor seems ready to acknowledge. While Zink strongly suggests that the medieval world view had forever engaged in an "exaltation de l'individu" (13), he argues that it was thirteenth-century urbanity which engendered a literature of "voix individuelles," thus turning Saint Louis' age into what he calls "l'époque de la subjectivité" (10). More recently Kay has expanded upon Zink's theory by pointing to the numerous, complicated factors that "overdetermine" the subject of the troubadour text. Her analysis has underscored the importance of defining subjectivity in terms of a wider range of ROUBEN CHOLAKIAN contexts. To the issue of historical considerations, she adds gender and status, asserting thus the genuine awareness of a discursive "ontological entity" (213). In this essay I wish to examine the Letras of Guiraut Riquier in light of this recent debate on the medieval concept of self. Fifteen poetic epistles have come down to us from the pen ofGuiraut Riquier, composed somewhere between 1260 and 1280. There seems to be some question, however, about the exact genre to which these Letras belong. On the one hand many critics have recognized their debt to the didactic classical tradition. Like the Church fathers the persona here shows a marked proclivity for moralizing, employing expressions like "valors" (VI, 120) (merit), "de ben far" (VII. 9) (to do good), "vergönn" (VIII, 364) (shame). His language often points to that unseen, internal space containing "conoisens" (VI, 222) (discernment), "coratje" (VIII, 90) (heart), and "cossirars, sens, sabers . . . entens" (IX, 52) (understanding, reflection, knowledge, judgment). He often represents himself thinking: "can m'o cocir" (X, 31) (when I think about it) and assumes the existence of some immaterial inner nature for each human being (XII, 250 375): per que d'esser negu d'autre non vei semblan, come vos ai dig denan tan pauc com de faisos (XII, 426- 29) (Because I see that no being resembles another, as I have already said, no more than in outward appearance). Commentators have also seen the undeniable "subjective" elements in these letters which clearly link them to a more lyrical style. Anglade notes that the Letras "par le fond peuvent se rattacher à la poésie lyrique" (189). But whether this prolific poet-composer's subject-matter is the flattery of the courtesan (Letra I), social satire (Letras XI. XII, XJV), philosophy (LetraV), general moralizing (Letra IV), or advice on good political leadership (Letras VI, VII, VIII, IX. X, XV), there are two common denominators. All these letters are (1) pleas for financial support and (2) involuted, ifnot ambiguous efforts to prove that the poet-correspondent deserves it. Consequently, all these letters 130 EPISTEMOLOGY OF SELF invariably construct a talking persona defining...

Cristoforo Landino and Coluccio Salutati on the Best Life

An Important Issue in the study of fifteenth-century Florentine humanism is whether or not later Quattrocento humanists advocate a withdrawal from public life and abandon the “civic” humanism of Salutati, Bruni, and the early Quattrocento humanists. There is no lack of studies on this question using the categories of vita activa and vita contemplativa. In broad terms, the early fifteenthcentury Florentine humanists, reacting against the medieval scholastic world view, are seen as advocating the supremacy of the vita activa though still valuing the vita contemplativa, while the midfifteenth- century humanists, under the influence of the Medici and Marsilio Ficino's Platonic studies, are considered to have reversed the earlier emphasis on the “civic” outlook for the supremacy of the contemplative life and a withdrawal from public affairs.

El <i>Decameró</i> català en la versió de 1429: la novel·la de Bernat d'Ast (II, 2)

In 1429, a complete edition of the Decameron was published in Catalan. Using the example of the artistically constructed erotic novel by Rinaldo d'Esti (II 2), which is also of some relevance to ecclesiastic history, a comparison of this Catalan version with the Italian version by Boccaccio clearly shows that Casellas' judgment is appropriate, according to which it is not only a translation, but also an interpretation and a creation. The translator has a very free conception of his task. It is not simply ignorance or carelessness that causes him to omit or add detail, to simplify or expand the text he is working on, to round off a characterization, and to uncover the more or less obscure connections of the narrative framework. Rather, he understands Boccaccio's critical stance on the medieval worldview as expressed in his perceptive incorporation of contemporary psychology and takes this approach with great freedom. In doing so, however, he consistently remains true to Boccaccio's intention, which he unreservedly adopts in its deeply human and sceptical humour.

English Society and the Crusade 1216-1307 (review)

160 Reviews masses'), and generalizes on class conflict (as on p. 304: 'Confrontation between classes, which was a basic feature of life in the countryside, soon [date unspecified] reappeared in the towns.'). The ultimate in bathos is a comment on p. 359: 'Like gastronomy, the triumph of underwear was linked to theriseof the bourgeoisie'. There are no footnotes to help one pursue such a claim. To be fair, such lines do not illustrate what Le Goff does best, the interpenetration of material and imaginative culture in the Middle Ages. In the retrospective introduction to The Medieval Imagination (p. 13) Le Goff detaches himself from a 'reductionist' Marxist theory of base and superstructure, and says that in Medieval Civilization he described the medieval world view in terms of 'interlocking but causdly distinct spatiotemporal structures'. Whether Le Goff actudly avoided a reductionist tinge in 1964 is another matter. Since then he has become more concerned with imaginative than economic redities (a personal evolution not unlike that of Duby). Nonetheless, the book still stands as a stimulating introduction to anyone vaguely interested in how people both lived and thought in the Middle Ages, even if some assertions provoke thought rather than agreement. Julia Barrow's translation generally reads well, although the rhetorical flavour of Le Goff's language is never totally natural in an English medium. Handsomely illustrated and with many useful maps (as well as an updated bibliography), Medieval Civilization is still as readable and as provocative as when itfirstappeared. Constant M e w s Department of History Monash University Lloyd, S., English Society and the Crusade 1216-1307, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988; pp. xiv, 329; R.R.P. $105.00. The subject of this monograph is that of a dissertation submitted by Lloyd for a D.Phil, at Oxford in 1983. The very large number of notes, and their frequent citation of variant versions of the same text, bespeak the thoroughness of a firstclass dissertation. One of the major appeals of the work is caused by the relative lack of prior scholarly interest regarding England and the Crusades of the thirteenth century. The main focus is on the response to the crusading appeds made by the Papacy during the years 1216-1307. The impact of the Crusades on English society is measured and explored in considerable detdl. The choice of these dates is explained by the fact that they cover the period from the Third Crusade beyond the last great English effort of 1270-1272. The period is rich in primary sources: royal and ecclesiastical records, and a considerable number of private letters, chronicles and other contemporary documents. The author often indicates areas in which further research is needed. Some of his findings may surprise; for example, the fact that papal appeals to England differed greatiy from Reviews 161 those sent to neighbouring kingdoms. The English, it would seem, could be enticed to participate in crusades to the Holy Land only, not agdnst the Albigensians or the rebellious German kings. Any student of crusading history will appreciate not only the completeness of the footnotes but dso the six exemplary appendices, each accompanied by its own references to all relevant primary sources: 1) Calendar of Letters to English correspondents from the Latin East and its Allies, 1216-1307; 2) Embassies sent to Henry III and Edward I from the Latin East and its dlies 1216-1307; 3.1) Letters sent directiy to English correspondents by Crusaders on campdgn; 3.2) Letters sent from or forwarded by the Papacy; 3.3) Letters from other western correspondents; 3.4) Letters from diplomatic representatives and intelligence gatherers; 4) The English crusading force of 1270-1272; 5) Notification of agreement between John de Neville and Philip Basset; 6) Some dynastic connections (simplified) of Henry III, Edward I, and the rulers of the Latin East. The extensive bibliography includes twenty-two primary source manuscripts, references to several hundred printed editions of primary sources, and a long list of secondary material, complemented by a list of unpublished dissertations consdted. Considering the excellent qualitites of this work, its lucid and elegant writing style, its exhaustive notes, its careful and objective judgement, one hesitates to mention any possible shortcomings. However...

La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Carol Marie Bensick (review)

Book Reviews85 of the power structure, within the eighteenth century, thanks to the few women who had written and the many who had nurtured, women were finally installed as liberal humanist — if unequal — subjects with all the dubious benefits pertaining thereto. One benefit, however, is genuine: the voice given women with which to interrogate humanism and to press for universal equality. Belsey states that her work is "mildly polemical" (10), and indeed there were occasions when I wished I could argue back. For example, I am not convinced that we can legitimately extrapolate as much as she does about social history from the instructions for staging The Castle ofPerseverance as opposed to perspective staging; that The Canterbury Tales would support her representation of the medieval world view; or that any social formation can restore Lacanian "lost presence" (53). Notwithstanding , the reader who believes that the most important function of literary criticism is to help make a better world will find The Subject of Tragedy thoughtprovoking , challenging, and illuminating. DOROTHEA KEHLER San Diego State University CAROL MARIE BENSICK. La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in "Rappaccini's Daughter". New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985. 167 p. A reader with a middling interest in Hawthorne but without a professional imperative to keep up with everything that comes out on him might be inclined to avoid this book after hearing, probably from a review such as this one, that the author puts forward the thesis that the mysterious problem confronting Beatrice Rappaccini and Giovanni Guasconti, and which moreover affects the latter prior to his ever having laid eyes upon the former, is nothing other than syphilis. To be honest, I know I would have been reluctant to open such a book. I would have told myself, if the conclusion is wrong or at best irrelevant, why go to the bother of learning how it is arrived at? That the conclusion is wrong or irrelevant I would have decided a priori on the basis of the honored though unexamined and probably indefensible dogma that any simple "explanation" for a complex literary work is automatically suspect, especially when it hinges on a sensational find that is alleged to have heretofore escaped generations of scholars by hiding under their noses. To be blunt, my instinct would have been to attribute any venereal diseases afflicting either of the two characters to Carol Marie Bensick's ingenuity rather than to Hawthorne's. Yet it would have been a pity to have ignored the book, and my loss. I am grateful that I succeeded in resisting my instinct and I hope to win over others who might share it. What Bensick is really saying about "Rappaccini's Daughter" and about Hawthorne is quite relevant and in my opinion basically right; furthermore, her conclusion that Beatrice and Giovanni are syphilitics has in the final analysis little to do with it. Unfortunately, the gimmicky manner in which the book is structured makes the syphilis conclusion seem much more central to her argument than it actually is. (The jacket blurb describes the book as "a literary detective story" and indeed 86Rocky Mountain Review syphilis emerges as the culprit like the butler in a drawing room melodrama.) However, the syphilis conclusion is not at all insisted upon, the author explicitly acknowledging that it is not essential to her overall interpretation. A reader could even dismiss it out of hand and still find the remainder of the book convincing. Bensick has two important points to make about Hawthorne. Both have been made before, but she makes them especially well. The first point is that when Hawthorne places a tale in a. historical setting, whether seventeenth-century Boston or sixteenthcentury Padua, it would be a mistake to conclude in haste that the setting was chosen gratuitously, arbitrarily, or merely for the sake of atmosphere. Another way to say this is that history is by no means ancillary in Hawthorne's fiction. Of course it is now fashionable to study literature in terms of history, taking history in an extraliterary sense, and Hawthorne's exploitation of the New England past has already been ably treated in this manner, most notably by Michael Colacurcio. (Curiously, Bensick's...

An Early Stuart Critique of Machiavelli as Historiographer: Thomas Jackson and the Discorsi

As historians have long recognized, the “perfidious Machiavel” of the stage was by no means the only image of Machiavelli in the minds of English intellectuals before 1640. Besides frequent denunciations of the Florentine as a devious, amoral politician and an atheist (most of them sincerel a few pro forma), one encounters in English works of theology, moral and political philosophy, and history two other approaches to Machiavelli the political scientist. Some writers, with or without acknowledging their source, mined II Principe and the Discorsi for detailed information. Slowly, tentatively, and sometimes surreptitiously, others worked toward a partial appropriation of Machiavelli's political analysis. The scholarly consensus, however, is that before Machiavelli's new paradigm could be fully accepted in England, a major shift in the political situation had to occur. Only with the coming of the Civil War would writers like James Harrington unreservedly endorse Machiavelli's rejection of the medieval world view in favor of classical political wisdom, which they held to be directly applicable to modern English circumstances.

Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View

Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View

Calderon's Los cabellos de Absalon : A Metatheater of Unbridled Passion

his story, occurring in the scene at the beginning of the second act in which Roca is unable to paint the portrait, underlines the connection between the two. The parallel is fully realized at the end of the third act, however, when Juanete completes his story and is rewarded by the Prince. In the scene immediately following, and in close physical proximity, Juan Roca, who is also under the patronage of the Prince, manages at last to complete his "portrait" of Serafina —by murdering her. Alan K. G. Paterson has argued persuasively that central to the play's meaning is the failure of art in the face of beauty, and, by extension, its inability to capture the vitality of human life.8 Both Juanete's and his master's artworks are successful according to the conventions within which they operate. Both achieve, as it were, the desired effects: Juanete's story gets its laugh, Juan Roca's revenge restores his honor. But both works succeed by compromising the truths they purport to encompass. By the conventions of honor, Serafina's death was long since foretold, and it is unlikely that honor's demands would have been satisfied even by the fact of her relative guiltlessness . But in human terms, Roca's "painting" is disturbingly incomplete, his art still inadequate to the complex reality— subjective as well as external — which confronts him. His intuition of this failure gives his final speech and subsequent withdrawal their special poignancy. Juanete, whose art and failure are of less consequence, has no such awareness. He steps forward to utter the conventional platitudes which close the play. But he remains a point of contrast , not a moral norm.9 NOTES ' Susan L. Fischer, "The Functioned Significance of the Gracioso in Calderón's El pintor de su deshrona," Romance Notes, 14 (1972), 334-40 and Edward M. Wilson, "Hacia una interpretación de El pintor de su deshonra," Abaco, 3 (1970), 49-85. 2 Act III, lines 862-4 in the Clasicos Castellanos edition of Angel Valbuena Briones ( Madrid , 1956). All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 3 Wilson, p. 83. * 1972 MLA Abstracts II, 48. 5 Roca blames his failure on his wife's excessive beauty (II, 89). Alan K. G. Paterson anticipates my reading of the line in his "The Comic and Tragic Melancholy of Juan Roca: A Study of Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra ," FMLS 5 (1969), 244-61, 252-3. My own view of the play has been considerably influenced by Paterson's essay. 6 Paterson, p. 252. 7 See III, 871-6. Fischer (p. 336) draws attention to this point. 8 Op. cit. and in a later article, "Juan Roca's Northern Ancestry: A Study of Art Theory in Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra," FMLS, 7 (1971), 195-210. 9 For a fuller discussion of the play, especially the function of subsidiary roles like "painter" and "story-teller," see my "Diversion in Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra," MLN, 91 (1976), 247-63. CALDERÓN'S LOS CABELLOS DE ABSALON: A METATHEATER OF UNBRIDLED PASSION Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University Thomas A. O'Connor's essay, "Is the Spanish Comedia a Metatheater," is another chapter in the reigning controversy over the uniqueness or universality of Golden Age theater. ' O'Connor 's argument in its totality is difficult 103 to accept because it is based on an a priori view of the comedia as (in his own words ) "an expression of fixed and preconceived philosophical, theological and dramatic notions" (p. 275). Moreover , O'Connor arrives at his "uniquely Spanish view" by invoking a pastiche of philosophical, theological, and ethical thought which he then lumps in two broad categories: on the one hand there is all that is Christian, Aristotelian, Platonic, Neoplatonic, theocentric, Spanish, moral; and on the other there is all that is anthropocentric, metatheatrical , amoral — and — everything else. This plethora of terminological distinctions merely obfuscates his basic premise, namely, that the Spanish comedia has an essentially medieval world view. While the comedia was obviously conceived against the backdrop of seventeenth-century Spain, with its medieval legacy and its Catholic responses, and while several...

Cloistral scriptoria and medieval Cistercian legislation on the book

The earliest books in the early Piast state in the second half of the 10th century were likely imported from the Benedictine scriptoria in Bavaria, Saxony, Rhineland, and Lorraine. These manuscripts contained Biblical texts and liturgical books indispensible for celebrating the Mass. The 12th-century precepts determining the establishment of new Cistercian cloisters necessitated the parent monastery to provide the monks delegated to the new coenobium with at least nine basic and indispensible books: the Missal, the Epistolary, the Gospels, the Gradual, the Antiphonary, the Hymnal, the Psalter, the Lectionary, and the Calendar. The said regulations rendered the work of copyists particularly important. One testament to the weight of the Cistercian cloister scribes was their exemption by the General Chapter from other monastic duties performed for their respective monasteries, coupled with dispensation from prescribed rest in favor of additional work (if so required). Apart from the reproduction of liturgical texts and memorative libri vivorum et mortuorum, the Cistercian scriptoria also saw the edition of the running administrative and economic records of a given monastery. Working in the silence of the scriptorium, monks would edit the cloistral yearbooks, obituaries, monastery chronicles, and rhymed epitaphs. They contained notes of daily life outside the enclosure, the names and functions of individual friars, notes of watershed events taking place away from the monastery, and mentions of natural disasters (floods, fires, epidemics) in the surrounding areas, along with the incurred losses. The surviving monastery chronicles provide invaluable insight to the sensibilities and interpersonal relations of cloistered communities, as well as their relations with the immediate surroundings, and manifestations of medieval worldviews.