Introduction
Two rival descriptions have often been used to characterize the intellectual developments in Western Europe during this period. One already mentioned was the notion of a twelfthcentury Renaissance, which was popularized by Charles Homer Haskins in the 1920s. This response to early modernists’ frequent dismissal of the Middle Ages as “Gothic” focused on the twelfth-century revival of the learning of pagan antiquity, particularly in the cathedral schools and urban centers.1 A different description was that introduced by Jean Leclercq in his famous study, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, which stressed an opposition between the twelfth-century innovations of the new urban schools and the more traditional biblical commentary or exegesis of the monasteries.2 What were once predominant characterizations of the period—that of a twelfth-century Renaissance, and that of a clear demarcation between rural/monastic and urban/scholastic learning— have been modified, however, in the latest scholarship on twelfth-century religious and intellectual history, as this part’s selections show.
According to existing scholarship, Christianity came under the control of an increasingly powerful clergy in the late eleventh through thirteenth centuries. What was orthodoxy and what was heresy became more clear than ever before, and there was considerable reorganization within the Church. Since late antiquity two wings of the Church—the clerical (priests who had administered early urban churches with a bishop at their head) and the monastic (those who sought to escape the political fray to live contemplative lives)—had vied for authority and precedence. The process was a contentious one, carrying with it major issues of political power. Both clerics and monastics sought to distinguish themselves from seculars. Particularly after the turn of the first millennium, monastic claims to greater purity and asceticism pulled the clerical branch toward such practices as celibacy At the same time monks were also increasingly ordained as priests and the celebration of anniversary masses for patrons became a more important part of monastic life.3 Monks and clerics moved closer together in their claims to purity and began to see themselves as a “clerical order” superior to those men and women who constituted the “order of the laity.” As Christians began to categorize and define their beliefs and practices more precisely, important issues of doctrine were debated and there were great advances in speculative theology which would culminate in the theological Summae of the thirteenth century. Central to these developments was an intellectual revolution among religious thinkers based on methods borrowed from ancient philosophy, which allowed a systematic clarification of religious doctrine. Using the same tools of logic and reason, scholars also began to systematize Church or canon law. The methods they used, which would come to be called “scholasticism,” were developed primarily in the cathedral schools and came to full flowering in the medieval universities, but were also employed in monastic communities. For instance, among the early leaders in subjecting faith to the methods of reason was Anselm, abbot of the Norman monastery of Bec (d. 1109), whose scholarship had been conducted primarily in that monastic setting before he became archbishop of Canterbury.4
The twelfth century in earlier scholarship was believed to be a period that had a suddenly cultural flourishing with the birth of Gothic cathedrals with their tall slender windows, incredible stained glass, and flying buttresses, with a parallel growth in intellectual life centering on the growing communities of scholars who flocked to Bologna to study law and to Paris to study liberal arts and theology, with the growth of “scholastic methods” (see page) in the urban schools which paralleled in its complexity and structure the intricacies and the sharp distinctions and relief of the ages’ rising cathedrals. The twelfth-century intellectual revival, like that of the fifteenthcentury Renaissance, was seen as a re-energizing of the learning of the ancient world, both in newly enhanced study of the classics of Latin antiquity and a revival, often by way of Arabic, or Hebrew translations, of Greek speculative thinking. It was at the same time the period in which “courtly love” and the songs of the troubadours came to the fore, in which sculptural art had a reawakening, and in which the first murmurings of secular and vernacular literature are found. Recently, however, some scholars, like C.Stephen Jaeger, have suggested that the term “Renaissance” has as much to do with the education in the cathedral schools of the eleventh century as with the period of greater “grandeur” of the twelfth, and that if we look beyond Paris we have a very different view of what and when a medieval “Renaissance” occurred.5
The most important aspect of the twelfth-century “rebirth” was its flowering of interest in the religious life. Its debates about the Christian life and Christian doctrine were aimed at making the entire world into a monastery, and living a Christian life characterized by charitable love, or caritas. As Giles Constable remarks, it constituted a “set of values…at the heart of the movement of reform which can be seen as an effort to monasticize first the clergy, by imposing on them a standard of life previously reserved for monks, and then the entire world.”6 Religious reform was missing in the earlier views of Haskins, and the mixing of monastic and clerical lives, of urban scholastic and monastic Bible-study, are more prominent than Jean Leclercq posited.
It has long been recognized that scholastic methods began to be used in the twelfth century to reorganize medieval religious thought into questions that could be resolved by affirmative propositions or their negatives, but in a new wave of thinking we are realizing that monastic authors used scholasticism and that urban clerics came from or returned to monastic settings. The scholastic method is epitomized in the work of the most famous of the twelfth-century teachers, Peter Abelard (d. 1142), whose textbook for theological reasoning, Yes and No (Sic et Non), laid out the methods of dialectical or systematic reasoning to be used in theological analysis.7 Although Abelard made himself unpopular because of the arrogant ways in which he put such methods to work, much of the scholarly activity of the twelfth century consisted of just such sorting out, categorizing, and defining. By mid-century, several other textbooks had undertaken the same kind of analysis. One was a collection of canon (or Church) law, Gratian’s Decretum, the Concordance of Discordant Canons (c. 1140), which became the standard text from which canon law would be studied. Another was Peter Lombard’s mid-twelfth-century Four Books of Sentences, a highly influential text on the Bible on which new candidates in the study of theology were expected to write commentaries as part of their initial training.8 While today work on theology and intellectual history topics continues on traditional lines, recent work on such authors as Abelard has stressed the ways in which intellectuals’ activities crossed the boundaries between scholastic and monastic concerns, for instance, with regard to women’s religious lives (see Chapter 11).9
Mixing of categories is everywhere apparent, for the intellectual revolution of the twelfth century embraced not only those urban-trained clerics who remained in the schools, but those who had retreated from urban contexts to the rural monastic life, and those who had been brought up from childhood as monastics, including women.10 Heloise (d. 1164), Peter Abelard’s student, lover and wife, whose intellectual efforts were so intertwined with his, retreated to the monastic life after their disastrous marriage. So did Abelard, but, while he returned to his urban teaching, Heloise became the abbess of the new community he had founded, the monastery called the Paraclete in the countryside of Champagne, and Heloise and Abelard would debate at length the form of life which should be lived there (see Chapter 11). This soon became an important reform community of nuns with a number of daughter-houses. Heloise’s training had been in the shadow of the cathedral of Paris, and her education was very similar to that of Peter Lombard (d. c. 1160) or Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141) or Abelard himself.11 Monastic contexts thus often overlapped with urban “scholastic” ones, and not only for nuns.
The most famous monastic counterpart to the urban Peter Abelard was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (d. 1153), an early leader among the Cistercians; his powerful intellect and charisma were responsible for much of the order’s success. Bernard was an early recruit to this group and his life epitomizes the phenomenon of adult religious conversion in the twelfth century. Bernard’s education, like that of many other twelfth-century monks, had not begun in the monastery. Apparently, he had been trained in an urban school before converting as an adult to the religious life. His preaching attracted many individual men to the monastic life at Clairvaux, and caused many independently founded reform communities to seek affiliation with Clairvaux as daughter-houses.12 Bernard preached against heresy in southern France, and in support of the second Crusade, but made efforts to prevent attacks on the Jews by Crusaders. Although often presented by members of his own order as being opposed to religious women, Bernard was an important supporter of the religious community of nearby Jully where many of his female relatives were nuns.13 Throughout his life Bernard seems to have been torn between his abbatial duties at Clairvaux and his role in international affairs; his complaints about the difficulty of combining the active life of preaching against heresy and his own urge to return to the contemplative life of prayer and scriptural study at Clairvaux anticipated the concerns of thirteenth-century mendicants about the active versus the contemplative life. Bernard’s conflict with Peter Abelard, in which Bernard was particularly harsh and uncompromising, suggests an element of personal rivalry between these two charismatic leaders, rather than a great contrast between monastic and scholastic methodologies. Many of Bernard’s positions on doctrine were not far removed from those of Abelard.14
Bernard’s attack on Abelard, indeed, may have reflected not so much Bernard’s fear of Abelard’s theology, as Bernard’s fear of the potentially heretical, anti-clerical leaders of urban revolts against bishops, whom Abelard seemed to support.15 By the second half of the twelfth century the scholastic education propounded by Abelard was rapidly becoming routinized. The community of scholars teaching the liberal arts and studying theology in Paris had organized themselves into a guild of clerical scholars, called a universitas, or university. They sought licenses to teach from the chancellor of the cathedral of Paris from at least the 1160s, and by the early thirteenth century had various statutes and privileges issued by the bishop of Paris, the Pope, and the King of France. Parisian masters and teachers would often advise Kings and Popes on particular doctrinal issues—most famously, almost all the legislation for the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had been crafted by members of the Parisian scholarly community.16 The colleges or studia of the Dominicans and Franciscans would become famous for their teaching and for their resident masters, including among them the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan Bonaventure (both of whom died in 1274). Increasingly monastics came to the urban schools for their education.17
The following chapters consider topics discussed by monastic and clerical thinkers of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries which have tended to be ignored by traditional theological work. Chapter 1, by Caroline Walker Bynum, considers how abbots in the newest and most successful religious group of the twelfth century, the Cistercians, used feminine imagery to describe their roles within the monastic community and their relationships to God. In their monastic humility such writers sought to have the Jesus to whom they prayed act as a mother for them, but that maternal imagery was also transferred to their own activities of authority. Cistercian sermons in particular are filled with images of the Virgin Mary as the merciful mother, of her motherly concern for her children, of Jesus or an abbot described as a mother holding and nursing her children at her breasts. Bynum underlines that the use of maternal language and imagery among the Cistercians is not a proto-feminist one—it in no way necessarily indicates a softening of monastic attitudes toward women. Bynum discusses these views primarily in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, but underlines tha...
