Travellers, Intellectuals, and the World Beyond Medieval Europe

James Muldoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754659747
• eBook ISBN: 9781351877602
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: World History

As the articles reprinted in this volume demonstrate, medieval men and women were curious about the world around them. They wanted to hear about distant lands and the various peoples who inhabited them. Travellers' tales, factual such as that of Marco Polo, and fictional, such as Chaucer's famous pilgrimage, entertained audiences across Europe. Colorful mappaemundi placed in churches illustrated these other lands and peoples for those who could not read. Medieval travel literature was not only entertaining, however, it was also informative, generating proto-ethnological information about the world beyond Latin Christendom that provided useful guidance for those such as merchants and missionaries who intended to travel abroad. Merchants learned about safe travel routes to foreign lands, about dangers to be avoided on the roads and at sea, about cultural practices that might interfere with their attempts at trade, and about products that would be suitable for foreign markets. Churchmen read the reports of missionaries to understand the beliefs of Muslims and other non-believers in order to debate with them and to learn their languages. These articles illustrate how travellers' reports in turn shaped the European response to the world beyond Europe, and are set in context in the editor's introduction.

1
Libertas Inquirendi and the Vitium Curiositatis in Medieval Thought

Edward Peters

Since the eighteenth century the western world has identified the discovery of truth with the unfettered play of the mind, and it has formalized this identification in the terms "intellectual freedom" and "academic freedom". Yet in spite of their idealized value, these freedoms have generally existed, where they have in fact existed, rather as a compromise between contending ideologies and powers than as goods pursued and sustained for their own sake. Much of the academic freedom of the medieval universities was the result of the dangers that popes, kings, and masters perceived from each other and from other institutions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — from bishops, chancellors, and monasteries to heretics and townspeople. Even the famous principles of Lehren — Lern — and Wertfreiheit developed in nineteenth-century German universities and given a liberal philosophical justification by Max Weber, have recently been termed a "hot-house flower", growing precariously between the potentially revolutionary stimuli of philosophical publicism and social science on the one hand, and the powers of the absolute state on the other.¹

For these reasons, most of the history of intellectual and academic freedom has focused upon freedom for the thinker or the academy from external threat.² The interior dimensions of these freedoms, aside from recent studies of professional consciousness, Berufsbewusstsein, have received somewhat less attention.³ But as two recent numbers of Daedalus and a few other publications show, the inner limits upon thought and research have recently become the object of a good deal of discussion and concern.⁴ And so an ancient debate which began with patristic discussions of paradosis and zetesis continues in the twentieth century, and the intrinsic freedom of the thinker is still a matter of debate and challenge.⁵

In the world of medieval thought the corporate entity of the university possessed de facto liberties that nearly equalled the great libertas of kings and clergy.⁶ Yet corporate agreement in defense of particular privileges and liberties did not necessarily entail epistemological agreement about the nature of study and teaching, the divisions within the organization of knowledge, the dividing-line between sapientia and scientia, and the subjects upon which dispute could and could not be entertained. From the eleventh century on, these questions constituted the landmarks of the inner history of the freedom of thought, a history that is at least as interesting as — and somewhat more difficult to trace than — the institutional struggles by which its extrinsic history has customarily been examined. For the new learning of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries successfully challenged the traditional curricular content of monastic and literary schools, criticizing both their theory of knowledge and the place of learning and speculation in the Christian life itself. The history of this process has been extensively studied. More important for the purposes of this paper are the kinds of defense and criticism of the new learning, its claims to — and practical expression of — freedom of inquiry, and the role of the vice of curiositas in the criticism of inquiry, constituting as it were a kind of negative definition of libertas inquirendi on the basis of moral theology.

From St. Paul's observation in 2 Cor. 3. 17: Ubi spiritus Domini, ibi libertas, to later theologians' distinctions between libertas libera = freedom to do evil, and libertas liberata = freedom to do good, Christian discussions of libertas focused upon the libertas of the arbitrium, freedom of the will.⁷ Conventional associations of libertas with study and thought are generaly found in the twelfth century in discussions of the artes liberates and the semantic associations of liberalis and liber, for example in the work of Conrad of Hirsau and John of Salisbury.⁸ But these brief discussions usually refer to libertas in a Ciceronian sense of freedom from the cares of this world or freedom to follow virtue. A second association of libertas with study occurs in a more pragmatic sense of freedom from coercion. This is the better known libertas scholastica, the total of rights and privileges of masters and students as members of corporate groups, not generically different from the privileges and liberties of other corporate groups in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁹

These three different kinds of libertas do not lead very far toward an abstract theory of liberty of thought and expression, for the expression of freedom of inquiry was more a matter of practical experience than of theorizing. In twelfth-and thirteenth-century Europe the scale of organized life was very small, and outside of conventional structures of power which touched relatively few areas of life and thought, there was considerable room for the exercise of freedom in practice, and the schools were the example of such empirical libertas par excellence. Although they seem to have coined no term for their inner freedom distinguishable from other senses of libertas, their critics did. They often designated it curiositas, thus giving a new function to an old and relatively restricted term from moral theology.

Curiositas came down to twelfth-century thinkers from two patristic sources, St. Augustine and John Cassian.¹⁰ In his commentary on 1 John 12, 15-16, Augustine had designated curiositas along with pride and lust, as three broad categories of sin, among which curiositas signified particularly the indulgence of the senses for the corruption of the mind. Augustine saw this character in God's curse upon the serpent, that he shall eat earth, and by the fish in the depths of the sea who see only inania and praeterfluentia.¹¹ Augustine's wide range of meanings for curiositas included both forbidden intellectual inquiry and the more domestic vices of neglect of self and excessive interest in the affairs of neighbours. John Cassian, writing for a different audience, emphasized the latter aspect of curiositas in making the vice a subdivision of sloth and focused upon its place in monastic psychology. Gregory the Great, while preserving some of Augustine's senses, was closer to that of Cassian, as were most monastic commentators from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. Isidore of Seville transmits the two different senses of curiositas in the Etymologiarum Libri XX in two different places.¹² Augustine had also spoken of the moral danger of curiositas in denying the need for salvation, because it forced the curiosus to neglect his own faults and interest himself only in the faults of others. This last aspect permitted Augustine to link curiositas to other groups of vices, as did Cassian, Gregory, and other thinkers.

Although Carolingian writers preserved the Augustinian/Isidorean criticism of excessive zeal for learning (and learning things that were forbidden), the first criticism of the new learning in the eleventh century did not focus primarily upon the curiositas of the dialecticians. The often-cited uses of the term by Peter Damian are not in his major criticisms of the use of learning by monks, and it is likely that Damian's sense of curiositas designates superficial arrogance, in the manner of Papias, rather than exceeding the limits of inquiry.¹³ It is quite otherwise, however, with St. Anselm's De humanis moribus (De similitudinibus). In his discussion of propria voluntas, which, Anselm says, is possible only for God, he remarks that the assumption of propria voluntas by man takes three forms: in delectatione, aut exaltatione aut curiositate. Curiositas est studium perscrutandi ea, quae scire nulla est utititas.¹⁴ Anselm then goes on to identify forty-four genera curiositatis which range from careful study to learn the secrets of others to "numbering, measuring and considering by how much the sun and moon are distant from Earth, or how great the sun and moon are". The De similitudinibus reunited the two strands of curiositas, identified a wide range of behavior as curiositas, and reformulated the Augustinian triad of vices in the language of twelfth century monasticism.

From Anselm on, the vice of curiositas attracted particular monastic attention, particularly in the work of St. Bernard, who orchestrated curiositas into a major force in monastic psychology. In letters, sermons, the Liber de modo bene vivendi, the De considerations, and especially in the De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, Bernard made curiositas the first and most elaborately described step on the monastic ladder of superbia. Even Bernard's criticism of elaborate architecture, dress, ceremony and learning are linked to the theme of curiositas as a distraction from the monk's primary duty.¹⁵ Thus, shaped in a monastic context, curiositas was revived in twelfth-century discourse and reassumed a prominent place in moral theology, from which it was later applied to circumstances outside the monastic world.

For Bernard and others also criticized the new schools. These had not, at first, challenged the meditative theology of monastic learning, but had begun among the grammarians and logicians of Tours, Chartres, Orleans, Laon, and Paris to revise the content and method of the liberal arts and only later to apply the results of their study to the exegesis of scripture and the exposition of theology.¹⁶ Criticism of the intrusion of the new learning upon the province of theology is evident in the complaints of William of Champeaux and William of St. Thierry and in the defense of Peter Abelard. William of Conches ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors' Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Libertas Inquirendi and the Vitium Curiositatis in Medieval Thought
• 2 Ecclesiastical Attitudes to Novelty c. 1100 - c. 1250
• 3 Medieval Christendom's Encounter with the Alien
• 4 The Nature of the Infidel: The Anthropology of the Canon Lawyers
• 5 Moslem-Christian Understanding in Mediaeval Times
• 6 Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam at the Time of the Crusades
• 7 Muhammad and the Muslims in St. Thomas Aquinas
• 8 From Friar Paul to Friar Raymond: The Development of Innovative Missionizing Argumentation
• 9 Talking to Spiritual Others: Ramon Llull, Nicholas of Cusa, Diego Valadés
• 10 Saracen Philosophers Secretly Deride Islam
• 11 Popular Attitudes Towards Islam in Medieval Europe
• 12 William [of Malmesbury] and Some Other Western Writers on Islam
• 13 The Conversion of a Pagan Society in the Middle Ages
• 14 Missionaries and the Marriages of Infidels: The Case of the Mongol Mission
• 15 Tartars, Jews, Saracens and the Jewish-Mongol 'Plot' of 1241
• 16 Cartography in Europe and Islam in the Middle Ages
• 17 Some Medieval Theories about the Nile
• 18 Shifting Alterity: The Mongol in the Visual and Literary Culture of the Late Middle Ages
• 19 Experiencing Strangeness: Monstrous Peoples on the Edge of the Earth as Depicted on Medieval
• Index