In Our Time - The 12th Century Renaissance

Episode Date: October 20, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changes in the intellectual world of Western Europe in the 12th Century, and their origins. This was a time of Crusades, the formation of states, the start of Gothic architecture, a reconnection with Roman and Greek learning and their Arabic development and the start of the European universities, and has become known as The 12th Century Renaissance.The image above is part of Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière, Chartres Cathedral, from 1180.WithLaura Ashe Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of Oxford Elisabeth van Houts Honorary Professor of European Medieval History at the University of Cambridge and Giles Gasper Reader in Medieval History at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, the 12th century Renaissance was a term developed by scholars in the 20th century to describe a period of intense and prolonged intellectual, social, creative and technological growth in Western Europe. There was a rebirth in the 1100s in the strict sense of renaissance, as the West rediscovered many classical texts, particularly Greek. Greek ones preserved and translated by Muslim scholars. There were also new births of universities, of cities, of theologies, of Gothic cathedrals, and of ways to tell stories in the ordinary language of the people rather than scholarly Latin. Their legacies are still with us, in buildings and in the embedding of ideas which grew and flourished in the later Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment and down to the present day.

With me to discuss the 12th century Renaissance are Laura Ash, Associate Professor of English at Worcester College University of Oxford, Elizabeth Bannautz, honorary professor of European medieval history at the University of Cambridge and Giles Gaspers, reader in medieval history at Durham University. Laura Ash, why did the 12th century acquire the term as a century of Renaissance? It was a period of really dramatic, accelerated change in all sorts of fields. I think broadly we could divide them into three. We could say there is economic and social change, there is a huge amount of cultural, intellectual, literary change and then there is political and legal change. And just to break those down a little bit,

in economic and social terms, we have the growth of cities and urbanisation in the context of a great increase in population generally across Europe. Areas of Europe that hadn't been under cultivation come under cultivation, this higher population is sustained and cities and towns begin to grow at a great rate. So that already brings about a number of changes. Culturally, it's huge, as you said, there's the rediscovery of lots of classical texts which had been temporarily lost to Western Europe and they were recovered through Greek and often through Arabic scholars. And then with that comes the growth of the universities alongside the cathedral schools, the great cathedral schools of places like Charter and Canterbury.

We're now joined by universities in Bologna and Paris and Oxford and then multiple other cities across Europe. And at this time, then we have the growth of the vernaculars as well. Alongside Latin learning and Latin translation, we now have huge swathes of writing appearing in the vernaculars of Europe, in French first and in German, in Italian, and English. And with that comes new forms of writing as well. They start writing fiction again for the first time since the classical era. So all of these cultural, literary, intellectual changes are dramatic.

And then finally, politically, this is a period of increasing stability, the growing strength of the nation state, the growing strength of the church and the papacy. And interestingly, in legal terms, the development of grand legal systems, the recovery of Roman law as studied in the University of Bologna. And Roman law becomes the form of civil law across most of continental Europe. And in England, meanwhile, we develop our own form of law, the common law system, which has its own particular culture of reasoning and proof and brings about the jury system and things like this. So all of these things are happening in a period of 150, 200 years.

Society is being changed. And I think the reason that we call it a renaissance is partly for the technical reason that you mentioned, you know, Renaissance, rebirth, recovery of things from the classical past. But also it's because this was a term first applied to the early modern period to suggest that the Middle Ages were this dark, benighted era in between the classical world and the new early modern world. And so, in some ways, seizing that term and applying it to the 12th century was a way for medievalists in the 20th century to say no, that's a misrepresentation. Well, that's a brilliant summary. Shall we all go home? Well, we could unpack each other.

People like to think there's one factor. It's very attractive to think there's one factor. I mean, it comes from belief in monotheism, I think, but never mind. Was the one basic value? You mentioned stability, and there had been wars inside, brought to Europe by the Vikings. on one side and the magiaz on the other. The big wars in the 12th century were outside Europe, the Crusades, people pushing, there were squabbles, but that was, was that the factor am I? Is this a shimmer looking for a factor? I think

you could say that that's a necessary condition. You know, it's all very well to have cultural and intellectual change, but you need not to have people at your gates with fire and sword in order to do that. And certainly in this period, things are calming down a great deal. There are no more great

incursions of pagan people into Europe at this point. That's over to a great extent. There's the Christianisation of Northern Europe which takes place during the 10th, 11th centuries, which calms things down. But the growth and of course the Christian Europe begins to push to the south, push into Spain, push into the Middle East in ways rather than it happening the other way. But also the stability, the internal stability, just that the nation states are getting stronger and the church is getting stronger, And although those two forces were often opposed to one another, they tended to combine to calm down a culture of endemic warfare.

Thank you. Elizabeth. Elizabeth Panheuts, where and how were West Europeans coming into contact with other cultures at that time? Well, there were three main areas of southern Europe where those contacts took place. As Laura has already intimated in the Near East, as a result of the Crusades, Sicily and then Spain. Now it's very important to say that before these contexts,

it wasn't as if the Christians in Northern Europe didn't know that there were Muslims in southern Europe or in the areas beyond that. It wasn't as if they didn't know that Arab text had rescued the Greek knowledge from the classical period. But it is the opening up as a result, really of enemy action from the Christians in Southern Europe that allowed scholars from the north to take active part in the knowledge that had been acquired

in Islamic and Arabic scholarship. But you mentioned that the Sun Maris-Raniian, and you have in Sicily where you have Arab, Jewish and Christian cultures together, and there's Cordob, the famous Cordoba in God's of Cordoba. And while you have the same, the three, and you go there now. Within easy, strolling distance of each other, those three centres. Can you tell us a bit about the, were those the hub centres that, from which emanated the scholarship that trickled north? Absolutely.

So in Cordoba, for example, Gerald of Cremona rescued the text of Afincena. And he brought the Afenna text to West of Europe. a great Arab scholar, and particularly a scientist. And then in Sicily, for example, in Palermo, there is an enormous amount of Arab scholarship on medicine, for example, astrology. And it is the medical information that is completely different from the very abstract theoretical knowledge. that's the West called medical medical knowledge,

whereas the Arab scholars used their own observation of what happened to the body, what happened to engagement in sex as a good thing, and that, of course, abhorred the Christian church no end, and was very threatening for the Christian church. Yeah, and there was a book, a text that came in about giving birth, wasn't there were the Arab scholars

were quite detailed about it and said this is what happened and the Christians put a relic on the extended womb of the lady and hope for the best. Absolutely. It's the Trotula

collection of text from Sicily. We're not entirely sure whether it was meant for doctors or midwives, but it is a completely different text with very practical information that disseminated in Western Europe

after the Christians found it in southern Italy. So the range of knowledge that's coming in is that Greek texts, Aristotle's beginning to come in there, and a bit of Plato, but there's also, you say, mathematics, and there's astronomy, and medicine. Anything else? This is gradually, the dam of silence, that doesn't work, does it, is about the worst.

Well, the Greek knowledge, that had got lost and is being rescued by the Arabs, is, for example, the text from Plato, that posited that there was something called a world soul that lay behind the creation of the world. And for Christians, it was very difficult to get your head around because they were told that the nearest thing to a world's soul was the Holy Spirit.

And particularly someone like William of Kange in Chartre, who tries to bring the two in some form of alignment, and the Bishop of Chartre is absolutely horrified. So poor William of Konsh is being exiled from Chartre and then rescued, interestingly, by layman, Duke Geoffrey of, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, who then appoints him as tutor to his three sons, Lone of whom becomes Henry II, King of England.

There is this swirl around going, isn't it? Not only between the Arab, Jews and Christian, learned men, but the swirl intensifies, I'm looking at you now, Jars, because of the development of universities. Italy, then it came to Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Staten, Bologna, and where it went, Leone, and so on and so on. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, it's a dominant feature of the period, as you say,

built on the sort of economic change that Laura was talking about, you need stability in order to fund these places, you need patrons. But what we see happening throughout the 12th century is a great diversity of communities and centres of learning. So we have schools attached to monasteries.

We have schools attached to particular cathedrals. So in the English context, Lincoln Cathedral has a famous set of schools, Hereford Cathedral too. But in some places, for different reasons, we get clustering of scholars. This could be for patronage, it could be for particular topics. So in Bologna, you get a contest between the Holy Roman Empire in the north, the papal powers in the south, and it's in Bologna where these legal tussles are happening. This becomes a great centre for legal learning,

and a university is founded there. In the mid-12th century, we have the Charter of Foundation from Frederick Barbarossa. That's a slightly differently run a university. This is one, where the students are dominant, and they contract the masters to give them their lectures. Why this great surge of universities? I mean, they're great surges of the building of Cistercian abys from one to 160 in less than a century, and so on and so. So this is moving ahead with enormous rapidity in any age or time. So what's a surge university, were the monasteries not thought to be good enough?

Were they not serving their purposes, the ruling people wanted? What was it going on? Monasteries retain a sense, an important place in the intellectual landscape, but really what's happening in the cities, and particularly in Paris and then in Oxford, is larger collections of scholars who then ban together in corporations, and it's that act of incorporation. Bringing the scholars together, they regulate themselves.

This is something then that the lay patrons can really point to as something that they're sponsoring, but you get these autonomous institutions, if you like, and that's the strength then of the institution that continues. Is it a link to the aristocracy and a new sense of how politics should be conducted that things should be written down

that there should be these records and that administering it was a task and not just something you knocked about in a court? Was it anything to do that? Yeah. If so, why? Michael Clanchi, a great historian of the period,

talks about this change from memory to written record, which we can see in a number of different fields in social fields. It's something that does happen in the intellectual field too. They're rather different. If you look at a monastic author, they have time. We have a lot of texts from monastic authors. From scholastic authors, those in the university system,

we have texts that are notes from students. This is a faster moving world, but it's still one where the written word, although delivered orally initially, it's the written word that's then copied and passed around. So we do see this change into a greater emphasis on writing. One of the things we see in Michael Lynch's great book in Ambalad, is how past they moved around these scholars.

I mean, Abelard is moving around, let's call it France, but it was Brittany as well as France. John O'Souls were moving from England to France, back to England, down to Chart. And they're wonderful, the sort of interchange of scholars going on there. Can you develop that? Yeah, I mean, these are genuine communities of learning, and they do exchange ideas very quickly.

So Abelan's ideas, we have in Durham Cathedral Library, we evidence that the cathedral priory in the late 1120s, 1130s, it's collecting the latest cutting-edge work from Abelard. So this is moving, I don't think we have cause and peripheries, I think we have communities of scholars moving around. Can we come to the...

It can't be more than one call, can't be, oh, it's terrible this morning, and what's going on. But the church in the 12th century, there's a wonderful dynamic going on, the church is becoming, as I understand it, tell me when I'm wrong, the church has become more controlling, more demanding, more intrusive, at the same time as there is, we are told as more individualism, more liberty, more movement. Now then, where's the church? Let's

start with them. Okay. So we have to, we have to go back slightly to say that there are two reform movements that the church undertakes. First, there's a monastic reform movement to the 10th century when the church takes itself out of quite a chaotic society. So this is before the period we're talking about. And the church establishes itself as a moral authority separate from society. And then from that moral basis, that asserted moral basis, the papal reform movement of the 11th century, fully embroiled in these developments we're talking about, begins to say, well, we are the moral authority over all of Europe and we must speak to all of Europe about how they should live and how countries should be run. and this manifests itself in ongoing conflicts, most notably the investiture conflict, where kings want to appoint their own bishops, the church wants to appoint the bishops.

But in theoretical terms, what you're talking about, this sense in which how can it be that the church is asserting ever greater control over individuals' lives? Which it is. Which it is. And yet individuals are finding modes of self-expression. I think it's partly because the way in which the church attempted to, reach into the lives of individuals was by envisaging them as individual souls. And so the idea of confession emerges, the idea that... And the idea that it's not simply a matter of if you've sinned, you do some public penance,

and then when you've paid your price, you're fine. I mean, in the 11th century it was stated, we don't know what's going on in your soul, and that's not our concern, that's God's concern. If you sin, do your penance, you're fine. And then in the 12th century, people start to think this can't be enough. We need to know what's happening inside people, inside their minds. But in practical ways, they're demanding confession, they're being much stricter with their clergy as the century goes on.

Very strict indeed about celibacy, about marriage, concubines are out, and they've been all over the place till then, and so on and so forth. And how did the scholars of the church, Elizabeth Vanhoots, how did they respond to the classical textbook? They would call them pagan. They would call them pagan text. And we mustn't forget that the texts from the classical period, the Greek and the Roman text had originated in a society that was pagan.

And not only were they pagan societies, they were polytheistic societies. So societies where people federated more than one god. So from the Christian perspective, reading the text from the classical period, was an absolute horror because how can you deal with a Christian audience that has been taught from the moment they're baptized that there is only one God? When you then read text that celebrate a society that is in awe of multiple gods. Now Christianity, I should say, survived the early history. history of its belief by having a very clever concept incorporated in this belief, and that is the concept of the Trinity. Because if you have one God, who is also three gods, it's much easier

to explain your belief to societies that are pagan and are very, very cautious of leaving behind the God for illness and the God for fertility, etc., etc. So to come back to your question, why in the 12th century is the church so cautious about these pagan texts? It's precisely because they see it as a threat. Here is Western Christianity that is trying to convert the rest of the world to its own belief. And they cannot be absolutely sure that there might be

alternative belief systems that might take over from Christianity because they offer something that is more acceptable. And the Trinity lands everybody who are the most difficult problem they ever face, three in one and one in three, and you want to come in. Well, yes, just to take Elizabeth's point on, there's a lovely phrase from an early 13th century author Robert Grossertest, where you have to, he says, be very careful not to labour and make Aristotle into a Catholic, because in so doing you'll make yourself a heretic. And that was something that was interesting. I'd like you to talk more about that. And just explain a little bit.

People were getting around. The scholars were getting around because they loved Aristotle, but he was pre-Christian, so he couldn't be a Christian, but they thought he had Christianity in him. So they wanted him to be a pre-Christian Christian. How did they get out of that? Well, you can recognise him as... Pre-Christ Christian is what I mean, yeah.

You can recognise him as an authority, and it also depends which area of the curriculum you're looking at. So if you're looking at the liberal arts, the mathematical arts as well as the logical arts, then you can have certain discussions that don't necessarily involve talking about doctrine. If you want to talk about theology, then you have more of a problem

in having to be quite explicit about Aristotelian problems versus doctrinal problems. And it's different at different times, too, so the University of Paris shuts down all discussion of Aristotle's natural philosophy from 1210, and this is repeated. The fact that it's repeated tells you that people of course reading Aristotle's natural philosophy.

They're also doing it elsewhere too. So if you want to talk about Aristotle, you go to Oxford. So there are other centres where you can talk about this material. Did they have a similar problem, anything like a similar problem, with the Arab world as they had with the pagan, than they had with the Greek Roman world? That's quite interesting. And in a sense, what part of the issue in the 12th and then early 13th century

is distinguishing between Arab and the world. Arabic commentaries on Aristotle and Aristotle's text themselves. So quite a lot of Aristotle is being translated directly from Greek into Latin. The Arabic commentaries are obviously coming from an Arabic tradition, and these get absorbed as almost equal authorities to the other text. Laura, you wanted to come in. Yeah, just to say about the Trinity, that's something dramatic that's happening that also has a bearing on your question about individuality at this time

is a shift in focus from God the Father and quite an osseous. steer figure, punishing, punitive figure. Old Testament led to sum up. Exactly, exactly. To a focus on the suffering Christ. And this came with quite a big theological debate that Anselm kicked off and Abelard took on quite importantly, that the question of why was Christ incarnated, why do we have to kill Christ at all?

And the traditional explanation had been that humanity had given over its rights to the devil and that God had to trick the devil into killing the one innocent human, which would then redeem the rest of us. Whereas Anselm said, the devil never had any rights. This is, this is silly. This is because only Christ can pay the debt that we owe to God. But Abelard pointed out the problem in that, which, I mean, it works brilliantly, but the problem in it is it leaves us with quite an astonishing God,

a God who cruelly, purposefully creates his own son and then has him slaughtered. And Abelard said, and it didn't stick immediately, but it became the most influential thing, I think, of the 12th century about the theology of Christ. Abelard said the only reason for this gesture, this dramatic, outrageous gesture must be to demonstrate love. And it must be so that Christ can show us how much he loves us. And that introduction of the idea of love as central to theology then feeds into the idea of confession, but also. into affective piety, as we call it, the kind of piety which is emotionally driven. Elizabeth,

Elizabeth Fanhads, this has, as Laura said, this change from God to Christ from out there to a man on the cross is to do, associated with the individualism that's been mentioned

two or three times so far in the programme. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how that plays in the changes we're discussing. Well, we talk about a society that is

a very, on the whole, a poor society. We've talked about the wealth of cities and the increasing prosperity, but vast numbers of people, you know, 95% of the population were poor peasants who lived in mud-ridden

huts in the countryside, for whom life was very, very hard. So, what made religion for them easier to absorb is to identify their own hard life and suffering with the suffering of Christ as a human being. And similarly, we have many tracts written specifically for women who suffered, you know, not only in childbirth, but women lost their husbands, women lost children very easily. And for women to express their belief, again, associating that sense of suffering with Christ on the cross is easier than having to deal with abstract notions of dogma that seemed very remote, very far removed from the experience that they themselves had.

One second. Was the idea of moving, this is simplistic, but to the point, I think, from God to the individual Christ, was this the church is doing, Who said let's do that? I think that this is something, that this is a movement coming from below that is picked up by the church because the church realizes that if they want to spread their belief across the Western world

from the top elite right to the bottom and the lowest peasant, they had to come towards what people wanted rather than be this, sort of abstract elitist ivory tower kind of institution that was not connected with individual

believers. I mean I completely agree with that one but it does link with the intellectual movements too as Laura was saying earlier with the medical knowledge and you're in Elizabeth there is a great interest in the body and in the human body and how this works how you differentiate the human body

from animal bodies. So there is a link, I think, between the interest and the new translated literature that's coming from Greco-Arabic medicine that links exactly to these questions of religion and identity. The church, in a sense, we can use the church as a sort of central business, because they're batting hard against what's coming in, but also using it to refine what they're doing and to intensify a grip was probably unparalleled in world history, the grip that that church had over so many people in so many places at one time. That's Dermannick McCulloch, not to me who said that, right?

Okay. But did their actions provoke heresy, or was it in, did the heresy provoke them? I'm still with Charles, Laura. I think it's, and as Elizabeth was saying, it's some, in some senses this must be a bottom-up movement, because we're talking about a pre-modern society, pre-modern communications. You can't impose things on unwitting populations entirely. But the 12th century church's insistence on regulation.

This is what Gert Tannenbach called the struggle for right order in the world. This is a very important facet of the reform movement. You've got to have the right process of doing things, otherwise the church isn't doing its proper job, in which case everybody's got a problem when they die. The more you start regulating, the more you look for order, the more disorder you'll find. It's like, I don't know, the crime standards.

statistics, the more crime you look for, the more you'll find. So in a sense, whilst there are heresies that reject Christianity, for example, the Cathars, although even those are seen through ancient... And they're a little bit later than Cathars. They're 12th century. So Bernard of Clavo is the first person to identify them or to debate with them. I mean, they're identified through ancient lenses. So these are manichies to 12th century clerical authors. There are other sorts of heretic who it's in some senses you can see them as extreme church reformers just at the wrong time they're emphasizing things that in 1,100 might have been all right in 1,200 these definitely are not all right. Laura. Yeah just to continue with that I think it's it's striking

that the church is telling people to search their own souls and I think in lots of ways heretical movements are the direct result of that they're just an unintended consequence if you say to people your personal experience of God is what matters, then they will go away and develop a personal experience of God. But the charges reaction is fierce. I mean, people were meant to, well, Babylon is one example, and throw their manuscripts on the burning fire

and Pope himself burned various one work, certainly that he'd written. They didn't just pretend to put them down. They were after them. Yes, absolutely. And it was brutal, and lots of people were killed in the cause of putting down heresy.

On the other side, what we have, we've got a century where the romances start, the Roman laurels started off, but these nightly, courtly fictional things which still have a pull and still, well, they regurgitated again and again and again. We're still living in that, I suppose, aren't we? Yes. A reinvention of fiction. Yes. I think this too, you can see it as part of a technical renaissance, because it begins when they begin to translate into the vernacular, some classical texts, the stories of Troy and of Rome. You get the French version of the Ineer. and then they begin to invent their own stuff. And this is part of a theory that, you know, Greece and Troy and Rome used to be where culture is and where it matters, but now we have our histories and our culture, and you get the Arthurian legends and the stories of the French kings of old. And it's very clear that this vernacular literature is celebrating a whole new sway of society which suddenly feels very confident of itself, you know, celebrating chivalry,

celebrating courtliness and tournaments and this whole society of conspicuous consumption dedicated to its own continuation. And dedication to women rather than dedics. Sorry, interrupt you. Yes, no, absolutely. So female patrons are vital to this. Female patrons at court

who pay for these poets and troubadours to keep singing their praises literally and figuratively. And it therefore makes for quite a different literary culture. Elizabeth, one has. Yes, I want to pick up on something that Laura says, the importance of women for the development of the quarterly literature because in these romances

and already it starts in the Chances in the Knights' text you find scenarios played out for which scenarios from ordinary life for which we don't have equivalent accounts you know there were no newspapers in the Middle Ages so for instance

how you go about getting married. Do women give consent to marital arrangements put in place by their fathers and their husband? So there is unease amongst women that are forced to do something that they might not really want. And it's the romances that give expression to some of the unease that women, but also men feel, about traditions that perhaps they ought to want to change. And the church is picking up on that. Hence, the arrangement at the end of the 12th century when Alexander III argues that from then onwards,

marriage is allowed on the basis of consent by two individual people. It's not parents who organise marriages anymore. Let's come back to the intellectual drive, the philosophical drive and the idea of modern which came in in the 12th century. I must say Abelard was somewhere near the centre of that, wouldn't you? What does he represent, Peter Abelah?

Peter Abelah represents, I would say, the use of reason to get yourself out of intellectual problems. You don't perhaps go back to the Bible and take the Bible as the first and the last word of God's truth. But you try to understand the Bible, in particular, the contradictory passages in the Bible. And Abelar goes about in a very intellectual manner, trying to work out what one should make of God contradicting himself.

And again, that posed a challenge to the church authorities, because the church authorities wanted their explanation to be accepted without being contradicted. And Abelar made the church authorities think about their interpretations of dogma. It's interesting, I think,

correct me if I'm wrong, that he invented the word theology, so he's using logic at the end of his life is that I've been hated because of my love of logic. He said it rather better than that, but that's a paraphrase.

I think if you talk about theology, then I think Giles is the person. No, Charles, when you talk about theology? Yes. Answer that. He is a popularizer of the term. John of Faycombe, in the 1060s and 70s also uses the word theology,

but it's in the same sort of context where we're thinking about essentially the theology of the second person of the Trinity. But that's the interesting question that what we're seeing in the 12th century is the separation of biblical studies and theology proper. So we're getting a division

from an older way of looking at text as simply authorities. Abiland's yes and no method, the balancing of authorities. So you use. using his logical training because he starts off as an expert in logic. And it's the application of that to theological texts that becomes the area that's most contested.

It does become a real battle, doesn't it? Just to get out of this and sort of huge trials in front of the king and the court and bishops turning up from all over the place and he's supposed to make his case and he either refuses to on principle or loses his nerve and he's almost stoned after one of the things. It's real, it's big stuff. And the stoning is important as well. This is stuff that matters to ordinary people.

people as well as mattering in this isn't just a dry intellectual and arcane matter there's a strong connection drawn by bernard of clervo between ablard and arnold de brescia who's a demagogue leading civil uprisings in rome so this notion of um that there's something really quite socially destructive about wrong thinking is a very interesting phenomenon as well it's not just Dabal 2, Gilbert de la Pore, there are other trials where reason is put on trial, if you like. And we're talking about science? Who are we talking about

there most particularly? Science is interesting. I mean, you've got the whole group of translators from Northern England and Germany, so Northern Europe moving to Toledo in Spain, men like Robert of Ketter and Robert of Chester,

already Gerard of Cremona's there, Dominicus, Scundi Salinas. You've got other translators, Plato, Tivoli active in Barcelona. So these names that are not common, but this is the sort of cutting-edge movement. There's a lovely moment that Daniel of Morley, who's another Englishman moving to Tornado,

talks about where he says that he stopped off in Paris. This is about 1170. Stumped off in Paris. And they were still teaching the wretched old stuff that they've been teaching 20 years before, and he was desperate to get to Tornado, to get to the math. That's what he wanted to go and study. Laura, in this period,

that's 12th century, rather more the second half of the 12th century. I mean, Notre Dame wasn't, that Gothic a theatre they didn't start that by the 1160 today. Anyway, can you tell us how political culture and aristocratic culture was developing and what influence they had? Yeah, so in aristocratic culture,

the key development is this ideology of chivalry and courtliness, which is explored in the literature, and a sense of the sort of ethical code for lay life. I think this is another unintended concept, consequence of the church is austerity, really, that the church has lots of very strict commands for how you're supposed to live your life, but all of them are negative about the lay life. And as a result, I think aristocratic culture ends up developing its own ethical codes, such as chivalry. So the church has turned its back on the way most people live their lives, if they're outside the church.

I think it's a... And the aristocrats are having enough now some money and heft to do it for themselves? Yeah, I don't think this was openly acknowledged. Yeah, this wasn't an open acknowledgement. I mean, aristocrats were always properly pious and they gave money to the church. But I think it's really clear that in general terms, the church didn't give much advice about how you could be a decent human being who wasn't a monk. They effectively said to aristocrats, the way you live is condemned. And if you want to be saved, you're going to have to give it all up before you die.

And a lot of them gave as much up as they could before. Absolutely. And when you have time for a good death, then that's one. But there is, of course, the constant fear that you won't have time to give all your money to the church and make your reparation and perhaps take vows and officially become a monk on your deathbed. And I just think that this is unsustainable. I don't think you can say to the ruling classes of Europe for hundreds of years, you're not going to get the rewards of your own faith. They had a good guide, though, didn't I? Well, yes, Laura is right. When you say that can't be sustained, I mean, it was sustained.

wasn't it? I mean Christianity didn't end because of... No, absolutely, but what I mean is that it reaches an accommodation. I mean, there's a constant negotiation and accommodation so that, you know, chivalric knights in the

12th century are still accepting being told that they're going to hell. Chevalric knights in the 14th century are blithely saying that God loves them and they're going to heaven and the church isn't... Well, some people are in their way to heaven then, no. They're giving about something. And the only one... It's another accommodation.

They pass on their fortunes to their children are going into monasteries for the last lap or so and becoming much and having a very nice time and a very nice bookline monastery. Quite so. And therefore isn't that a negotiation? Christianity survives, but people aren't living in the way

the church officially commands them to live. But it's fascinating watching the way it happens. Yeah, but as little as pointed out, we're talking about a very small percentage. The 95% are men in them are having to do what they're told in terrible trouble. Can you tell us,

Elizabeth, most people listening to this program, I think the Renaissance, Italy, 15th century. Did this have an influence on that? Certainly the 12th century Renaissance is a preparation for the late medieval Renaissance. The big difference is that the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th century takes place in very, very wealthy cities, where the elite of the cities reads, goes back to the pagan text. And you find that instead of following church instruction,

they begin to see that pagan Rome actually might give them a template for living in the city republics, being, enjoying life as a result of the wealth that the elite brought in, provided that wealth was spent for the benefit of the, the Commonwealth. So the massive building programs in the North Italian cities, you know, big piazzas, palazzi, sculpture

is a celebration of life inspired by the happiness of the Romans who led very successful lives during the Republic of Rome. So you see a shift from the penitential life of the Christians in the 12th century, not really very sure whether they can actually enjoy life in the here and now rather than in the hereafter.

So that is the main difference, I would say, between the late medieval Renaissance and the 12th century Renaissance. Charles, where do we see most evidence of the 12th century Renaissance today? Today, I mean, the change in the landscape, so I mean, I think great cathedrals are a good place to. to look, if you look at somewhere like Chartre, this is a product of the 12th century Renaissance. It has windows dedicated to vernacular heroes.

So the Roland sequence, the Charlemagne window. It has statuary of the liberal arts. It really is the 12th century instantiated. And anything else? I think that some of the changes that happened in the 12th century inaugurated what we think of as modernity, The idea that you have a psychology that you search inside yourself for self-knowledge and truth, the idea that your relationships with other people as well as your relationship with God matter.

Well, thank you all very much. That was absolutely fascinating. Thanks to Elizabeth Dunhurtz, Laura Ash, and Jars. Gaspber. And next week we'll be discussing the chemist, John Dalton, a Cumberian, a Quaker. He left school at 12. He ended up as a pioneer of modern atomic theory and Manchester's first cultural hero. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I think it's an interesting point that Laura made about the sense that people are thinking about themselves, individuals are encouraged to contemplate their own actions. But they do that not in a sort of Freudian manner to understand their own psyche or where, where they ended up, given that as a child, they had most terrible experiences. They do it because this contemplation brings them closer to God, and in particular, the God figure of Jesus. So it's a different psychology. So if you use the word psychology, it's not Freud that we're talking about.

But I think it is, in some ways, I think that's what the church intended, and that absolutely happens. And you see it, you see the meditative tradition, the idea of searching inside your soul. soul so that you can connect to Christ, to Mary, to God. But also, I think once you've started that hair running, you can't stop it. People start searching inside themselves for their feelings about their friends, their lovers, that, you know, you get just a greater attention to interiority to what it means to be a person, an individual in the world.

I mean, that changes and is reinforced by the different types of learning that you get. So when you get Avicenna, this gives you a different vocabulary for talking about the various types of soul. What's a different in the other great Arab scholar? Absolutely. And for the first 20 years of the 13th century and the last decade of the 12th century this is even more important than

Navares. This is the first sort of big Arabic hero to be dominant and it's different ways of articulating the properties of the soul. So he has a long discussion about the vegetative soul the animate soul, the rational soul. And that's a slight

different taxonomy to the way that the West has inherited learning. It's striking the way that people, particularly in the romances in the fiction, it's clear that people's understandings of feelings run ahead of their terminology for it. So, like when we discussed Tristan a few months ago, we have an author who describes intensely complex feelings and then says, and I don't know what to say about this, but it seems like he was a bit fickle. And he doesn't have the terminology for accurately describing these feelings that are now being explored. And I think that is where also the female patrons come in of these romances.

One of the things that has always intrigued me to what extent these female patrons have actually discussions with the poets and the authors of the text in order to say to them, listen, can you bring in a little bit about? you know, regret or, you know, whatever emotion they feel is missing from a previous text, or whether these women simply, you know, provided the money and the parchment and the ink. But from that moment on, it was completely withdrew and sat in the chair and waited for a poem to be declared to them. We just don't know. In some cases, so we have Crettiand de Tartre telling us that Marie de Champagne told him what she wanted him to write. And he sounds a bit miffed about this.

But it's clear, I think, that you can see the melding of intellectual and scholastic university culture with court culture. When you have comical texts like the idea of the courts of love and long love debates, following the format of kind of Avalod's Sikh et non. You know, should you, if you are married, is that an excuse to reexecis? refuse and advance from a lover. The answer is no, by the way. But these things being debated in sort of comical ways, but also in ways that just show that intellectual debate is opening up and is happening in courts and certainly women are taking part in it. I mean, it's a slightly different topic, but also that notion of how ideas do move from different circles. So Durham Cathedral Priory, it's an all-male environment. It's collecting the latest

medical texts including lots of medical texts on gynecology. They're adding some comments on this. And you think what's this doing in an all-male institution? Of course, they are men, but they're also dealing with their relations, female, as well as males. So these are repositories of learning for divisions. I suppose you have to hope that they reach out to local doctors and midwives instead. And a lot of the doctors seem attached to the monastery.

So this seems to be a sort of dissemination point. for knowledge to are much broader. Because male monasteries are not devoid of women because there are lots of recluses. Every male monastery had a group of women living in the grounds to pray for the souls of the monks.

Because if the monks pray for the souls of the laity, who is going to pray for the monks? Well, the monks needed to buy in or make available a corner of their grounds for groups of five or six. Hercules. The other reason that the nuns at the parakely pray for him intensive because there are in any of this long discussion of how important women are in the Bible

and that their prayers are more welcomed by God and so on and so forth. I think one thing I wanted to say was that, well, it's absolutely true, as Elizabeth said, that 95% of people are living in pretty grim village conditions. I think particularly in the 13th century, we underestimate, or it's easy to underest, estimate how connected the whole of the country was in terms of, because particularly the structures in England, manorial courts and honor courts and hundreds and the sense that village communities received proclamations from the king that were circulated and read out in the market square. And then things like your hero, Charles Robert Grostas, who writes to great scholars in Paris

and says, stop being a scholar in Paris, that's useless, come back and take up your diocese at your parish in Lincolnshire. And it seems like some of these people did. So you imagine these amazing Paris scholars preaching to his preaching sermons in rural Lincolnshire. I don't know how that went. Well, England, of course, had a reputation of being very wealthy. And, you know, England was a destination for lots of continental scholars already from the 10th century onwards. Because the pay was probably very good, much better.

elsewhere in France or Germany. I mean, Groszest, he uses Aristotle's ethics, in fact, to draw up a plan for how you need to resource clergy, whether are they bad because they've not got enough resources or because they're morally bad? And so this taxonomy works, but he is anxious to resource them properly. But I really like the, it's an episode in the Montayieu story. So this is the village in the Pyrenees,

which is a heresy centre, but there's one shepherd who's interviewed by the Inquisitor who says, well actually I quite like going up into the mountains with the sheep and I contemplate Plato and Aristotle

when I'm up there. And now we're being offered something. I'll offer you to your coffee. There are more than 700 programmes to download and listen to for free from the In Our Time website. We'll also find a reading list for this episode.