University of Sydney

Centre for Medieval Studies talk

30-3-00

RHETORIC, THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES AND THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES IN THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

John Ward

Are there links between these themes or are they separate stories?

Two preliminary remarks:

(1) the decline of the humanities today gives my theme some interest, and the factors that seem to be responsible for this decline today and in twelfth century Europe are not unconnected. Robert Manne has written recently in the Sydney Morning Herald:

You might therefore be interested to know that the factor to which the decline of the humanities in the twelfth century has been traditionally ascribed, was the growth of theology and its essential pre-requisite, dialectical disputation and its techniques! The idea of the market, then, which has today dealt the humanities their coup-de-grace, is the equivalent of theology, which dealt the medieval humanities their coup de grace at the end of the twelfth century!

(2) Why the twelfth century? Ever since the time of Ch.H.Haskins this period has been seen to occupy a special place in European history, whether because of the innovative cultural forms that originated at the time - Léonin and Pérotin's polyphonic musical innovations, French and German vernacular compositional genres, Gothic architectural patterns, scholasticism for example - or because of the incorporation and development of Greek and Arab science into western intellectual development, or of giant steps taken in the study and formulation of Roman and Canon law, or in the articulation of theological and philosophical ideas, or in the development of new subjects, such as dictamen, or in the devising of new institutional structures, such as the institutions of the university. All this, the studies of Georges Duby and Robert Bartlett have shown, took place against a backdrop, of economic expansion with relatively large-scale investments being made by the laity into cultural life. In 1972, Bryce Lyon wrote:

Recently even larger claims have been made, and scholars such as Brian Stock, M.T.Clanchy, Charles Radding, R.I.Moore have attempted to show that during the twelfth century Europe crossed a great cultural divide and was transformed from a largely oral society run by the laity to an importantly literate society run by a tertiary trained elite whose influence was felt in every quarter, from the bedroom to the inner recesses of the human mentality. During the twelfth century the foundations were laid for the most ambitious attempt to control human emotions and thought-patterns in European history, the movement that culminated in the inquisition, the centralised papacy, the penitentiary system, the mendicant movement and the construction of the panoply of medieval saints, male and female, who guided religious thought and emotions through a carefully engineered and massive preaching movement that began in the late twelfth century.

Others, such as M.D.Chenu and R.W. Southern have claimed that the period c.1050-1325 saw a great moment in religious humanism, capped by such towering masterpieces as the Divine Comedy of Dante and the Summae of Thomas Aquinas.

Humanism. Running through all these claims is the notion of the twelfth century as a high point in the history of Humanism. What sort of humanism is usually meant here? Humanism as the system of taught 'humanities' (mainly Graeco-Roman belles-lettres) familiar to us from the Italian Renaissance, or humanism of the non-utilitarian, idealist political sort recently explored by Andrew Fitzmaurice in my own former-department, in the unlikely setting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America, where Ciceronian optimism and Tacitean irony provided point and counter-point for the construction of a new world across the Atlantic?

Possible patterns have been much complicated by recent discussions, for example that of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton in their From Humanism to the Humanities (1986), in which they claim that Italian Renaissance humanism was courtly and subservient, in sharp contrast with the earthy and tough democratic pragmatism of medieval scholastic culture. Writers such as John Caroll (Humanism, the wreck of western culture, 1993) have sought to outdate the Renaissance high humanist project of western culture, by linking it with a form of cultural elitism and the modernist project of the Enlightenment that have in our own day been so thoroughly discredited by deconstruction and post-modern forms of discourse.

Most recently, Peter Godman, whose From Poliziano to Macchiavelli: Florentine humanism in the high Renaissance (1998) revealed Renaissance humanism to be but the plaything of craven academics and political pressures, has produced a book on twelfth century culture called The Silent Masters: Latin literature and its censors in the High Middle Ages (2000). In it he writes of that phase in Renaissance scholarship which considered the middle ages to be a hiatus between two major periods of classicism and humanism:

This polemic against R.W.Southern calls for us to abandon completely any attempt to fit twelfth-century culture into the old debate about humanism and classicism, renaissance and medieval. I am not sure that I am personally ready to abandon a critical framework that has sustained much of my thinking over an academic lifetime, nor am I sure that we can approach the twelfth century, as Godman counsels, 'in its own terms': neither at the time nor ever since has anyone been able to do with the culture of an epoch anything other than to reconstruct it in his or her own image, and Godman is probably no exception. For the moment then, I persist with the notion of humanism in considering the 'Twelfth-Century Renaissance'.

The recent pressure to dismantle the traditional humanist, elitist university and to replace it with an institution devoted to the ritualisation of popular culture may well have had its counterpart in the pragmatic pressures that transformed the humanist twelfth century cultural project into the specialised scholastic project of the medieval universities. This movement, which made of the Carmina Burana an isolated and nostalgic peak of literary humanism in the midst of the scholastic age, suggests our first attempt to define twelfth-century humanism, as the cultural ideal of Henri d'Andeli's thirteenth-century Battle of the Arts, of the twelfth-century goliardic poets who protested violently at the supersession of Homer, Vergil and the literary authors by the professional study of law and medicine, of such writers as John of Salisbury, William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres, who decried the tendency of their age to choose narrow profitable vocational specialisation against a broad programme of non-vocational education in the humanities, seasoned by the best of Graeco-Roman literary classics and a broad-based ethical programme based on scripture and poetry. Much of the flavour, indeed, of twelfth century learned cultural ambitions is provided by the fact that the initial training institutions - the cathedral schools - were geared either to a career in the church, itself a basically humanist and non-vocation al institution, or else to a general educational programme that sat ill against the growing need for rapidly trained clerks and technical specialists in the expanding economy of the day.

If we search through such texts as Stephen Ferruolo's The Origins of the University: the schools of Paris and their critics 1100-1215 (1985), Father Joseph de Ghellinck's L'Essor de la Littérature Latine au XIIe Siècle (1954), G.Paré, A.Brunet and P.Tremblay's La Renaissance du XIIe siècle (1933) or Max Manitius's Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, III from the outbreak of the Investiture Controversy to the end of the Twelfth Century (1931), we find two patterns: Manitius and Ghellinck do not admit any category called 'the humanists', adopting a classification into theological and philosophical writers, treachers of the arts, historians, poets, those on the margins of the schools etc. Paré, Brunet and Tremblay and Ferruolo, however, have a category of 'humanists' and it includes Hugh of St.Victor and John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Bernard Silvestris and Gerald of Wales.

The claims of these figures to the description 'humanist' is unclear, except that they believed in:

However, the categorisation of these figures thus is rather arbitrary: others could well be placed in the category, and the message of the group - that learning must have to do with life not the cloister - is controversial in some cases, for example, Hugh of St. Victor, whose activities relate to the scriptural and theological teaching available at the school of regular canons at St. Victor, Paris, together with appropriate propaedeutic studies - in other words the cloister, at least initially, rather than life as such.

To me, the scholars traditionally associated with the so-called 'school of Chartres' have a better claim to the title 'humanist', and this is because they set up a didactic scholastic programme based firmly on the arts and the great classical auctores that underwrote them. The most eloquent testimony to this programme is the massive two-volume Heptateuchon which Thierry of Chartres left unfinished at his death and bequeathed, with 45 other volumes to the Cathedral library of Chartres. The Heptateuchon originally contained some 1400 double-columned pages (1170 have survived) and within these pages are to be found the texts of some 50 original primarily classsical texts in the arts.

As the prologue to Thierry's Heptateuch indicates, scholars of his persuasion arranged their curriculum in the arts around the twin notions, vouched for in the preface to Cicero's De inventione, of wisdom joined with eloquence, that is learning joined with effective communication of it. Their concentration upon the arts of the trivium and those of the quadrivium led them into adventurous arenas, not only the language arts and their classical foundations, but also the sciences of the day and their relation to theology and scripture. Using all these sources, and others such as Plato's Timaeus, a creation myth of vast and comprehensive force, they developed a unified approach to learning and life based on:

(i) poetic language as the essential creative medium for deep cosmological insights;

(ii) an understanding of the arts of language as an essential pre-requisite for accurate and critical thinking about knowledge;

(iii) a view of the nature of the universe, creation and the reasons that lay behind them, based on the Timaeus, the scientific arts of the quadrivium and the bible.

This approach cannot be located in Paris during the first half of the twelfth century, for there theology and its dialectical and technical grammatical pre-requisites formed a dominating approach. The various centres of learning in the late eleventh century and early twelfth centuries depended vitally on the currency of certain fashionable approaches to learning and contemporary intellectual issues, and the influence of key charismatic intellectual figures, such as Anselm of Laon or Manegold of Lautenbach. They were not uniform centres of similar didactic effort, despite R.W.Southern's attempt to show that they were in his Reading lecture on the Study of the Timaeus and the School of Chartres in the twelfth century. The institutional structures were approximately comparable: Chartres was the richest diocese, but Paris was the temporary location of the crown and the centre of a rich agricultural region. Laon was well defended and sat above a rich terrain, whilst Rheims was the centre of an archbishopric. In these and other centres, the willingness of the local churches and their aristocratic patrons to invest in the wherewithal for beneficed scholars, created the foundations of schools that were as fashionable and as comprehensive as resources, available scholarly personel and potential students allowed. Since fame attended the didactic success of a cathedral-school, there was, at least initially, a willingness to encourage learning in whatever form seemed likely to succeed. That competition was strong and tensions rife is clear from the evidence of the Historia Calamitatum of Abelard, and recent work has shown that the initial response of ecclesiastical institutions to the challenge of hosting competing lecturers was to license them all and hope for the best. In all this, the emphases of the school at Chartres is clear enough and the attentions of generations of scholars, from the Abbé Clerval to Andrew Burns is sufficient evidence of the prominence during the first six decades of the twelfth century of a succession of scholars who, wherever they taught, carried with them the emphases that I have associated above with the 'School of Chartres', and there can be no doubt that the motivating charisma of the two brothers, if that's what they were, Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, was decisive here.

I have said that central to the so-called Chartrain approach to life and learning, was eloquence, combined with wisdom. This is not only a Ciceronian idea, but the essential discipline behind it was, of course, the Graeco-Roman art of rhetoric, whereby eloquence was inculcated and controlled. There were, from at least the late eleventh century onwards, in the west, subsidiary arts of rhetoric (composition, poetic etc.), but no art could pretend to so wide a communication compass as rhetoric. As nurtured in classical times it covered sustained oral delivery in judicial, deliberative and epideictic situations, making use of systems of invention for arguments, arrangement, memory, gesture and elocution, as well as providing the wherewithal for sustained eloquence on paper - or parchment! - elocutio. It stressed active participation in the political life of the community because its greatest practitioner (Cicero) defined it as a major part of political science (civilis scientia) and assigned it the crucial role of introducing humankind to the concept of civilization. Eleventh- and twelfth-century glossators on the De inventione made much of this and their lucubrations on the subject fill several columns of their prefaces as well as good portions of their ad litteram commentaries.

Because Graeco-Roman rhetoric survived by way of texts written in Roman times, a willingness to deal with a terrifying apparatus of knowledge about the remote Roman republican past was an essential element in any understanding of the fundamentals of the art: 'humanism' - in the Renaissance sense - was thus part and parcel of the study of this art, rendered all the more daring by the fact that even in antiquity rivals and opponents had attempted to deny either rhetoric's status as an art or its utility, or both. For this reason, rhetoric stood out from the other liberal arts: it was a potentially dangerous art because it taught one to persuade others that the not-true might indeed be true, and it was closely associated with a cultural world - that of late Republican Rome - that many contemporaries felt had disappeared.

Despite these attendant circumstances, between c. 1025 and c. 1215 A.D. we have some twenty-one 'catena' commentaries on either the Ad Herennium or De inventione, surviving whole or in parts, in a little over 100 MSS, not all, of course, written in the period under consideration here today. These are the first catena commentaries to survive on these texts since late antiquity.

We have no accurate way of knowing how the surviving rhetorical manuscripts relate either in number or in format with the surviving manuscripts of grammatical or dialectical or quadrivial work from the same period. No reliable guides or lists have been published and the material is extremely scattered. The total of surviving grammatical and dialectical glosses for the period of this paper is doubtless more extensive than the 100 or so MSS of rhetoric and its fragments, but, a few points may, however be made in favour of the rhetorical texts:

(1) 'presque tous les autres texts sur la logique écrits au XIIe siècle sont ordinairement conservés dans un seul manuscrit, très rarement dans deux, et jamais dans plus de trois'. By contrast, most of the twelfth-century rhetorical catena commentaries survive in many more manuscripts than this. They survive in numbers that exceed many grammatical treatises, but not the Summa super Priscianum of Petrus Helias, which survives in some 24 manuscripts, an exceptional number for twelfth-century didactic materials in the trivium. By contrast, the glosses of William of Conches (for whom a rhetorical commentary has not yet been identified) survive only in three manuscripts, and the anonymous commentary on Priscian's Institutes known from its incipit as 'Promisimus' survives from a single manuscript from the second half of the twelfth century.

(2) 'Tous les manuscrits du même commentaire donnent les versions très différentes les unes des autres. Cela veut dire que les commentaires faisaient l'object d'additions et de révisions radicales'. By contrast the twelfth-century commentaries, where they survive in twelfth-century manuscripts, almost always present a firm text - the only exceptions are those commentaries that survive in only one manuscript and commentaries such as that by 'Alanus' which do not survive in twelfth-century manuscripts. This circumstance suggests, perhaps, that lecturing on the rhetorical texts was a stabler and more specialised thing than lecturing on fast-moving and competitive dialectical topics, with lecturers working carefully and establishing a reputation which guided the copying of their lectures.

(3) The authors of the rhetorical commentaries were often leading intellectual figures in their day - Manegold of Lautenbach, William of Champeaux, Thierry of Chartres, Petrus Helias, Alan, perhaps of Lille. In each case, it is their rhetorical teaching that has survived more fully than their teaching of any of the other of the liberal arts, with the exception, as we have seen, of Petrus Helias, whose major surviving works relate to the art of grammar. His commentary on the De inventione, however, survives in a relative large number of manuscripts copied throughout the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and is an innovative work, written, it seems, during the 1130's - or in the 1140's if one denies the dating evidence put forward by Fredborg.

Given the high profile of its teachers, then, the number of surviving catena commentaries, the factors that one would think might have militated in favour of the classical art being forgotten in twelfth-century Christian society, and given the peculiar currency of other and related arts of rhetoric at the time - dictamen in both its compositional and letter-writing manifestations, ecclesiastical, preaching and poetic rhetoric - we must, I think, in the first place admit an unusual centrality for the art of rhetoric in the 'twelfth- century Renaissance'.

In the second place, we must attempt to explain the currency of the classical art of rhetoric in the 11th and 12th centuries. We must ask (I) whether it is all the same rhetoric, (II) why it was seen as central, and (III) why it disappeared (as such) from the curriculum at the beginning of the 13th c.

Are the answers to these questions connnected, or do they relate to several stories?

In connection with (I) and (II) the experience of St. Augustine is a fundamental aperçue, recently revealed in Stock's Augustine the Reader (1996) - the importance of which was suggested to me by a Ph.D student, Andrew Burns - which all goes to show why we must all continue to be and have students....

According to Stock (p.18) Augustine

It is hard for us - unwitting adherents of the views here ascribed to HStV and Erasmus - to grasp the Augustinian approach, the

Today we believe in literary Pelagianism, that the texts and their proper study are entities in themselves, which, properly pursued, lead to 'education' as an objective marketable commodity. In my own [former] department there is to be found an ignorance of the Augustinian approach and a blind faith in rules, which transform a student's approach to texts away from a study of the student's self, in to a 'best-practice' 'education' in an objective sense. It is odd to realise that had Augustine's age developed and persisted with this 'best-practice' belief, we would all still be pagans living in the ancient world! I call this latter view of texts and reading the 'best-practice' view.

It is tempting to believe - with Jaeger - that the peculiar emphasis of learning and texts in the 11th century was Augustinian, in that both were absorbed into a project of self-education designed to produce not an elaborate series of further texts, but the 'compleat' Christian charismatic figure who would act as a leader in and model for society - necessarily at this stage through courts and cloister schools:

This circumstance explains why eleventh-century texts, as Jaeger stresses, do not speak to us as written texts should: they are not 'compleat' in themselves, but scrappy aids to an oral, charismatic and behavioural process.

The true heirs to this view of education were women, and the first 'compleat' women in this sense revealed to us is Heloise, who, unlike her immediate predecessors, operated outside the confines of the cloister, in the same social and intellectual environment as men. Yet in her very own lifetime, texts and reading were transformed from a meditative act, 'a plausible narrative [as] a precondition to the building of a bounded and believable self' (Stock p.16) into a 'best-practice' system, from which women were excluded, and which began a never-ending process of book accumulation that has reached crisis proportions in our own day; and in a sense, though governments today are entrenching the 'best-practice' view of education, they are also in an unrecognised way, recalling learning from the ivory tower into the market-place. Constant Mews in a valuable article has shown how in Abelard's own lifetime learning passed from the oral and charismatic to the literate and writing-based, from the Augustinian to the 'best-practice' mode. If you want to go into this read the paper I wrote with Neville Chiavaroli in the forthcoming Listening to Heloise ed. Bonnie Wheeler (St. Martin's Press, N.Y.). Beyond Heloise we have only Hildegard, firmly within the cloister, though using the cloister as a springboard from which to reform the world, the very range and originality of whose writings is a hint at what women might have achieved in the arena of humanism, had they been allowed to pursue it. I maintain that women were the only class who could have carried on the Augustinian view, because they were free from the attitudinal, competitive and vocational constraints that produced the patriarchal 'best-practice' view out of the Augustinian - and I recognise that there is a paradox here because St. Augustine's own view of the intellectual capacity of women was limited (Stock 18 and Vita Brevis).

We have only to review Abelard's own account of what lead him to intellectual life, to observe the almost paranoid Paris fixation upon disputation and dialectic (versus the more traditional provincial concentration upon rhetoric), or to review what Stock said of Hugh of St. Victor, to see what a precious cultural flower Heloise represented. Indeed, one is reminded of the line in Catullus:

Which we might translate as

 

the plough in this case being the engine of scholasticism, and the flower being the flower of Heloise's approach to Latin humanism and learning....

Men - as Heloise may be said to have thus indicated - in the meantime had undergone a vital transformation: somewhere along the line men had been roped into what I call the 'best-practice' view of texts and reading, texts and reading as generators of further texts and readings, as part of an absolute process called 'world's best-practice education', or, in its medieval guise, scholasticism.

When did the Augustinian view become transformed into the 'best-practice' view? Perhaps the answer lies in rhetoric itself, a central discipline in the eleventh century because it was central to Augustine, who not only taught the ancient art which the eleventh century revived - and don't forget that in the most recent view it was none other than Augustine himself who brought the fundamental texts of medieval and Renaissance rhetoric into circulation as a work of Cicero (the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium) - but himself came in later life to the view that speech, memory, reading and writing were fundamental modes by which the self constructed itself and established a flawed communication with God - a communication that, as Marguerite Porete argued - would be replaced by direct communication (as before the fall) when the human beings passed back into God's realm after life, or emptied themselves from the trappings of this life to admit God into their soul:

But essential to this programme - which otherwise looks like an abridgement of Hugh of St.Victor's Didascalicon - is speech, writing and reading and ethics: the programme of Christian rhetoric which Augustine became committed to as time passed.

This programme of Christian rhetoric was not 'an independent theory of communication' (Stock p.9) that might have operated like 'best-practice' education, but a set of clues to what Augustine conceived of as 'God's eloquence ... divinely inspired eloquence' revealed in the 'beauty of the universe' (Stock p.9). That is why books 2 and 3 of the De doctrina Christiana are concerned with the way that all instruction, doctrina, concerns things (res) or signs (signa) (Stock pp.8-9): 'words and images play a fundamental role in mediating perceptions of reality' (Stock p.1). Rhetoric, as the art of understanding the nature and limits of written speech and ornamented discourse, thus plays a key role in the process by which words signify, and this, rather than the 'rigid curriculum of set texts, [the ] academic attitude towards speaking and writing correctly, and [the] commitment to the dated ideal of the learned orator' (Stock p.4), was what Augustine felt was important - and to it the De doctrina Christiana is a guide.

Nevertheless, it is immediately apparent that in the twelfth century it was the art of dialectic that had primacy, not the art of rhetoric - John of Salisbury, whose Metalogikon is all about the Augustinian versus the 'best-practice', is still primarily concerned with establishing worth-while discourse about life and learning among the elite, and here it is attention to Aristotelian dialectic that seems more important than the canons of Ciceronian rhetorical humanism. And Aristotle, you remember, was the one who robbed rhetoric of its Gorgianic verbal glitter and dynamism and replaced it with arid proto-Hellenistic 'techne'. What had gone wrong?

I think the answer can be found in the history of the study of classical rhetoric in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In the first half of the century, we have only a clue to the nature of the subject and that clue is an interesting one. It concerns the use made by Lawrence of Amalfi, the teacher of Pope Greogry VII, in his teaching of Cicero's De inventione. The details are quite unclear, and the remaining text is puzzlingly unsystematic. It seems, however, that the classical text had come into its own partly as a guide to speech and ethics and partly as an adjunct to the discussion of certain controversiae, ancient problem situations used as a basis for grammatical, rhetorical and legal education. But whatever we say of this, the text is vastly subservient to oral behaviour and usages.

It is not until the fabled and obscure figure of master Menegaldus comes onto the scene that we can date the birth of rhetoric as a 'best-practice' system.

Menegaldus is an interesting man - remembered by Master Alanus a century or so later as the great founder of formal study of rhetoric - Alanus' describes his predecessors in a famous passage as 'Menegaldus et eius seguaces'.

The latest theory is that all the 'magistri menegaldi' of the 11th century are in fact one man and that one man is the famous investiture controversialist (on the papal side) Manegold of Lautenbach, a learned teacher of the arts [1030/40-1103/08] who was dragged away from them into the polemic about papal power in the world, came to contemn the arts as in themselves meaningless and later in life converted to a Regular Canon ('noch vor 1084'). The theatre of his activities was the Rhineland and eastern France, not Paris itself.

In a celebrated passage in the first-half-of-the-twelfth-century chronicle of Richard of Poitiers, Manegold is said to have had a wife and daughters who had wide knowledge of the scriptures and either helped him with his pupils or had pupils of their own. This passage is linked up with a Germanic tradition of learned canonesses, evident still in Hildegard's own day, who taught suitable learning inside the schools of the regular canons and canonesses, from the second half of the eleventh century through into the twelfth. Manegold was therefore not unassociated with the notion of learned women, a notion that was flourishing elsewhere in his day, in the monasteries that lay between the Loire and the Seine, the very monasteries in which Heloise gained her initial education.

The substance of this education, which is brought beautifully to a kind of fruition in the so-called lost love-letters between Abelard and Heloise, which Constant Mews has recently brought anew in discussion and which were written in the second half of the second decade of the twelfth century, had to do with Latin as the language of self-exploration and poetic creativity, and women appear, briefly, to have excelled in it. It is well discussed in a recent book by Gerald Bond: The Loving Subject: desire, eloquence, and power in Romanesque France (1995) - and you will find much of interest in Dronke's older book on Women Writers in the Middle Ages. Ovidian and classical Latin poetic discourse play an important role here, but not in the nineteenth-century modernist philological 'best-practice' sense, but rather in the Augustinian sense, as allowing a process of self-location, identity and discovery. Essential to this process was the unity of life, language, text and body and this was a unity that male scholastics of the day could progressively not accept, partly because they could never come to terms with a linkage between the female body and the ancient tradition of the written text - even as Augustine himself could not - and partly because, as that written tradition was developing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it was highly competitive, and the exclusion of women made the field a little more manageable.

What then does the story of the academic study of rhetoric reveal? You will recall that urgent problems of discourse analysis and construction together with what was remembered of the Augustinian tradition, put rhetoric firmly onto the curriculum in the mid-eleventh century. Its apparent utility as a guide to life and action made it a momentarily central study and the surviving manuscripts of Manegald's own lectures are sufficient evidence of a scramble for this kind of learning and doctrina in the second half of the eleventh century - indeed I have elsewhere proposed that the development of the Catena commentary was the key to this process of institutionalising and academizing of the formal study of rhetoric. Gradually, however, the formal study of rhetoric moved closer to Paris, from provincial centres such as Chartres, Rheims and Laon (where we know it to have flourished). The crucial moment took place around 1094 when William of Champeaux, later to become the Count-Bishop of Chalons and the founder of the school of regular canons at St. Victor in Paris which Hugh of St. Victor helped to make famous (d.1141), moved from Laon where he had been much involved in the study and teaching of the classical system of rhetorical theory, to Paris, where you will recall he was joined a little later by Abelard who was in search, as he himself claims, of the fields where dialectical disputation and jousting about the nature of universals and similar topics was to be found. Abelard was, as Mews has show, fresh from teaching by and combats in this arena with Roscelin the arch nominalist of the day.

There is extant a pair of fine commentaries on the De inventione and Ad Herennium which are said to be the work of WofCh. Now they may well reflect his teaching, but seem in fact to have been written at Laon and not Paris and were therefore written either by W when he was at Laon before 1094, or were written by a disciple at Laon after William's removal to Paris. They are closely connected with the teaching of Master Manegold, but this does not mean that Manegold taught either at Laon or Paris (which he does not seem to have done) because manuscripts of his key catena rhetorical writings were in circulation at the time.

These two commentaries reveal an interest in realist neoplatonism (the 'forms' of rhetoric become embodied in raw tegma or 'matter'), and a primarily oral classroom debate technique. Yet already the subject has become professionalised and academised: rhetoric has ceased (at least in the hands of these masters) to be a guide to self-improvement or to permit via close meditation upon the text a sharpening of the self-image. Instead, it has come to represent a textual tradition: text and commentary exist to effect improvement to / education for the self, on a best-practice take-it-or-leave-it basis. The text and commentary have become a portable, copiable, replicateable, commodified learning. We can see from the form that rhetoric took in the fast-moving dialectical / theological scene at Paris (Abelard's Historia Calamitatum references to the 'rhetorical teaching of William of Ch., and William's 'Epilogue'), that the kind of rhetoric to be found in the Laon commentaries simply lost its place in the contemporary curriculum: pushed into a a new status as a 'commodified humanity', it was washed up into a back-water. Such was the first end of the revolution that Master Manegold introduced into the study of the art.

Some thirty years later, Thierry of Chartres sought to revive the art as an academic humanity. For it he constructed a new kind of preface that sought to show the relationship between all the arts as parts of a common unified project of self-enlightenment. He developed a series of key texts (the Heptateuchon), wrote a programmatic preface to these texts expressing again an integrated view of the arts and humanism, and delivered abbreviated, highly intelligent and novel lectures on the two major classical rhetorical treatises, the De inventione and the Ad Herennium, written copies of which still exist today and have been finely edited in classisicing form by KMF of Copenhagen.

He thus inaugurated a new glossing tradition, which flourished under his pupil Petrus Helias and lasted on for a generation or two. In the end, however, it grew so academic and recherché that all of a sudden at about the turn of the century it died, and was replaced, or overtaken, by the main streams of (1) dialectic, (2) sprachlogik (logicised grammar), (3) theology, (4) dictamen, and, a poor fifth, (5) classical Latin literature, compositional manuals (artes poetriae) and some medieval classics in the same genre (e.g. Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia, the Architrenius of John de Hantville, the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille etc.).

The history of this development has not yet been written. We do not know who were the last masters in the art of rhetoric, or where they taught. We have only manuscripts of their work, and we can place them only in the vaguest chronological order. To give you some idea of this last phase, however, I have prepared a set of illustrations, based on one interesting passage in the Ad Herennium: Lucius Saturninus and the pontes.

At Ad Herennium 1.12.21 the anonymous late Roman republican author illustrates one of the constitutiones upon which cases at law depend - the 'issues' (status). That of 'definition', when the name by which an offence is described is called into question ('theft / sacrilege' is the example given in De inventione 1.8.11 and 2.18.55: i.e, not 'did he do it? [conjectural issue]' but 'was it theft or sacrilege?" [definitional issue, because the item was stolen from a temple]).

The Ad Herennium illustration is strongly practical, relevant [to its presumed contemporary audience] and recent: it refers to the second plebeian tribunate (100B.C.) of L.Appuleius Saturninus in which he proposed a law fixing the fee for grain at 5/6ths of an as (per modius) - eight times less than the lex Sempronia frumentaria of 123 B.C. Quintus Caepio, city Quaestor (in charge of the public treasury) was the son of the consul Q.Servilius Caepio who had in 105 been defeated by the Cimbri and Teutones, and as the result of a tribunician charge, lost his senatorial rank and imperium - Saturninus, it is said, was associated actively with the disgrace of Caepio consul.

The text of the passage, as found in Thierry of Chartres' Heptateuchon, is as follows:

Now our immediate question is what a passage like this is doing in a twelfth-century manuscript: it describes in highly specialised and unexplained terms a voting procedure that was current among a pre-Christian and therefore pagan people some 1200 years before the time of writing (c.1140 A.D.).

One could argue that as an item of antiquarian interest about the Roman past, illustrated by ancient texts and coins, it is an item of humanist interest and that the environment in which it was studied might be called a 'humanist' one. One could also argue that as a perfectly useless detail in a Christian society far-removed in time and custom from late republican Rome, and in a school of would-be professors of salvation, it had no place.

Yet, not only was this text, with the rest of the Ad Herennium copied so often in the twelfth century that some two or three hundred manuscripts survive, but it was commented upon vigorously, and the first major commentator was Master Manegold himself!

This is at least a fairly extensive comment, and makes an explanation of sorts, without having to rely upon any specialised antiquarian knowledge, other than the supposed notions relating to stipendium and pontes, both of which in the present case are incorrect. The marvel, however, is that the passage was thought worthy of teaching and explaining at all. One could just as easily have invented an illustration of the definitive issue, perhaps one drawn from the daily life of a canon, priest or monk, as many of the examples in the De inventione commentary supposedly by William of Champeaux. The example of theft / sacrilege, mentioned by both the De inventione and by Menegaldus in the passage cited above, would surely have been adequate for the purpose.

The next cab off the rank, so to speak, is the Rheims lecturer Odalricus, who seems to have ceased teaching rhetoric around 1107 as a result of an imbroglio concerning the election of the archbishop of Rheims, from which Odalricus emerged a cardinal ....

His comment, which is clearly dependent upon that of Menegaldus, is:

This is all. No special information and no special zeal to discover any. The text is simply interpreted in a common-sense sort of way to enable the barest comprehension. The effort of understanding it at all is humanistic, but the results are in the weakest philological sense.

The so-called William of Champeaux Ad Herennium gloss is a little fuller, and while showing the odd common ground with Manegold, the author is advancing substantially his own interpretation:

The scribe has had some difficulty with all this, but at least it seems that the lecturer was trying to recover something of an ancient situation and decided upon the notion of paying troops annona. We may take this as the master version at Laon that was circulating somewhat defectively also at Rheims.

There must have been a longish gap between Etsi Cum Tullius and the next commentator on the Ad Herennium whose work has survived, Thierry of Chartres, lecturing perhaps in the 1130's or 1140's. While carrying the odd notion over from his predecessors, his gloss is intelligent and really attempts to explain the language of the original. He thus explains quo nomine as 'quid sit'; intercedere as 'intercedebant, id est ibant cum eo; vel intercedebant, id est impediebant eum, ne legem ferret'; quo setius as 'ut non'. His explanation of the technical terms is often correct (semis, triens) often intelligently fanciful: 'cistella vocatur scrinium, in quo lex contenta ferebatur ad recitandum', and 'pontes disturbat, id est scalam, per quam fiebat ascensus ad pulpitum, in quo leges recitabantur'.

Thierry's common-sense approach to the text of the Ad Herennium seems to have had few imitators. We have no identifiable commentary on the ancient text by Petrus Helias, so that our first post-Thierry witness is in fact Etsi Ea, the proto-Alanus gloss, preserved in a single manuscript in the Marciana Library, Venice. We have no way of knowing by how much it post-dates Thierry's work, but, as will be seen from the following extract, the difference of approach is considerable:

This set of explanations has the merit of being the fullest we have so far come across, combining the two traditions (Manegold and Thierry), adding new errors, but attempting to make as much sense of the passage as the limited philological resources and attitudinal disinclinations of the time permitted. The emphasis is still upon a faithful literal reading of the text, with only so much philology - real or fictive - as might be necessary to permit this. That the entire nature of the ancient situation is mistaken (Saturninus being made into a consul!) is to be noted in passing. The individual elements in this gloss seem to have been gathered in part from possible written copies of previous glosses, in part from an oral tradition of teaching. It is difficult to imagine that a written copy of Thierry's gloss was in front of the Etsi ea commentator, for otherwise he would have defined triens correctly and perhaps included the word 'scrinium' in his definition of cistas.

The climax of the Etsi ea tradition is to be found in the Harley MS of the gloss by Alanus (of Lille?). As the following text shows, the coincidence between Etsi ea and Alanus is so close as to suggest that 'Alanus' is simply a later version of Etsi ea, i.e. we have here two sets of reportationes from the same lecturer at different times:

Our picture of the tradition of glossing at this point is not complete without some consideration of a curious gloss, contained for most of books I and II of the Ad Herennium in MS Oxford CCC 250, with an excerpt from the first page also to be found in a Barberini MS in the Vatican. The following transcription has been made from a typed copy kindly placed in my hands by Rev. N. Häring, who supervised many years ago my doctoral work on these glosses. I have had the opportunity of comparing Rev, Häring's transcription against the original in the Bodleian library.

That, whatever we think of it, represents the sum of twelfth-century scholarship on the passage from the Ad Herennium in question. It is both less than we would expect from a humanistic age, and more. On the one hand, the ancient text is taken as absolutely authoritative and relevant, even to the extent of debating apparent conflicts with the De inventione (the last paragraph). All previous commenting resources and traditions have been applied to construct a gloss that is - so far as we know - relatively original, and inventive in an earnest attempt to make clear what the ancient situation reflected in the Ad Herennium seems to have been. On the other hand, however, this extensive gloss is no nearer the truth of the matter than Manegold's: the actual details that lay behind the Ad Herennium were not to be penetrated by the relatively weak philological armoury of the twelfth century. Further, the intelligent common sense of Thierry of Chartres has been for the most part abandoned. Thierry realised that his contemporaries had neither the interest in, nor the need for, nor an ability to construct, an accurate philological apparatus for this passage. He felt the passage had to be clarified, because the text in which it was contained was felt to have continued relevance in his day, but he believed no great philological project was to be constructed about it. Subsequent decades, funded by we know not what, ignored this advice and piled Ossa upon Pelion, reaching in the end an impasse that was too far removed from the needs of the day, yet insufficiently authoritative in itself. Thus the cycle of flourishing and obsolescence found earlier in the rhetorical commenting tradition that spanned Manegold and William of Champeaux (?), was repeated.

There are no further 'high-medieval' attempts to gloss the Ad Herennium that have come down to us - until the very different circumstances of Italy in Brunetto Latini and Dante's day. The institutional development of the university scene in early thirteenth-century Paris seems to have coincided with an abandonment of the high humanist project of glossing the Ad Herennium. Why? And why had it seemed worth persevering with up to that point?

Tentative answers only can be advanced. However, two points can be made. In the first place, glossing the Ad Herennium had become too formidable a project per se. 'Humanism' had turned rhetoric into a professional 'humanity', the continued teaching of which had come to require much time and many resources. The oral aim of that training, however, had been overtaken by two things: the development of the study of Roman law in its own right, and the movement of medieval academic society away from the kind of sustained judicial, deliberative and epideictic oral discourse envisaged in Roman society and therefore in its surviving rhetorical treatises, in favour of the kind of heavily formal and technical training in disputation offerred in the mature northern French medieval cathedral school and proto-university. The curriculum of those schools had shifted in favour of written poetic and dictaminal (compositional) rhetoric on the one hand, and in favour of dialectical disputation as a training for further theological studies on the other. We know that many students at Paris and similar places in the period did not bother to graduate: they simply enrolled for a few courses in easily marketable subjects, such as dictamen, and then left to seek employment. Relatively few stayed the distance of the entire arts curriculum with its heavy emphasis upon dialectic and Aristotle's physical writings, to major in law, theology or medicine, and those who did became the intellectual leaders of their day. In short, changing market needs, over-professionalisation and the lack of systematic institutional support killed off the humanities in twelfth-century Europe. My last point here leads into the second factor of the two announced above.

The medieval university was a lean and mean institution. It was run by masters who had more or less to supply their own livings, pay for their own rooms and other teaching materials. They were, it may be argued, in the position that the present Liberal Government is seeking to achieve for all academics; having to put on courses with mass appeal and low failure rates, or else retire from the teaching business. So closely were the arts masters of the day having to trim their sails to the market that the papacy was called upon early in the thirteenth century to step in and apply minimum standards of self-rule, dress, course content and structure, and conduct towards peers among them. University courses were becoming very popular in a relative sense, but the supply of would-be arts teachers always outran the supply of well-heeled students prepared to take their courses extensively and to pay well. In these circumstances, despite the lofty ideals behind the full formal study of classical Roman rhetoric, the art could not survive, and seems to have endured in the northern university curricula only as a nominal subject, known to exist, required to be known about in outline, but not lectured upon in detail. This situation changed within a few decades south of the Alps, but only because the nature of society there after 1250 A.D. revealed new market niches for practical oral discourse of a type that was thought by some to be able to benefit from the full study of classical Roman rhetorical theory and practice.

Ironically, then, to return to our earlier themes, 'best-practice' rhetorical education won out and then was itself trumped by other didactic needs and socio-educational situations. In the circumstances, though a form of rhetorical instruction itself - in a compositional sense - survived at Paris and elsewhere into the thirteenth century, it and the auctores that sustained it were clearly on the run, and one is tempted to observe that the males of the later twelfth century, by excluding women from tertiary education in Latin, had done themselves out of a major non-vocational market for this kind of rhetorical, author-based humanism - women. There is a certain irony in the fact that when Jean de Meun almost a century later, used the emerging French vernacular as a vehicle for some biting attacks on the intellectual structures of his day, he had occasion to stumble upon, read, and include in his Roman de la Rose, a version of the second set of letters exchanged by Abelard and Heloise. Unwittingly he touched upon a moment in time when humanist education in Europe might well have taken another course, and had it, the strictures of the Roman de la Rose, its biting misogyny and its inclusion of the letters of Heloise and Abelard, might all have been unnecessary!

 

JO Ward History, Usyd 29-3-00