Life in a Medieval City (19 page)

The finished panel is wrapped in cloth and carried to the cathedral. Measurements do not always prove exact. If the panel turns out to be too large, it is cut down. If it is too small, it is built up with a border. As it is fastened into place, the glazier sees it against the light for the first time. Until that moment of truth he must rely on past experience and observation of other windows for his effects.

Once the panel is made, the design is rubbed off the table and vanishes forever. Occasionally a design may be copied on parchment and used elsewhere, but this is rare. The master glazier is not aiming at immortality or even fame, though he is agreeably aware that his name is well known among glassmakers, masons, prelates, and even the general public. Yet he puts something into his work that is not merely talent and knowledge. Neither is it religious zeal. It is pride, and he can find ample justification for it in religion, for the priests say that God was a craftsman who looked on his work and found it good.

Although he is aware of the dazzling brilliance of his windows when they are in place, as the builder is of the soaring majesty of his completed masonry, neither of them regards his work as art, or himself as an artist. They are not necessary geniuses, but all of them are intelligent men with expert skill, standing historically at the end of a remarkable series of accidents—the cross-rib vault, which led to the flying buttress and the expansion of window space, and the imperfect glazing techniques that dictated colored glass.

Thirteenth-century bishops are delighted with the technology that gives them their incomparable cathedrals. Interestingly enough, clerical opinion in the past was not always so favorable. St.-Bernard
⁹
wrote angrily to William, abbot of St.-Thierry, about the great Cluniac churches: “Why this excessive height, this enormous length, this unnecessary width, these sumptuous ornaments and curious paintings that draw the eyes and distract the attention from meditation?…We, the monks, who have forsaken ordinary life and who have renounced the riches and ostentation of the world…in whom do we hope to awaken devotion with these ornaments?…One could spend a whole day gaping instead of meditating on God. What ineptitude, and what expense!”

But St.-Bernard is dead, and even his Cistercians have grown less puritanical. Few object today to the new style. Besides, St.-Bernard notwithstanding, the cathedrals’ success in creating an atmosphere of mystery and awe is of incontestable value to religion. No man, burgher or baron, can enter a Gothic cathedral without experiencing a sense of human insignificance in the presence of such majesty.

11.

School and Scholars

He would dispense his instructions to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation…. In view of the fact that exercise both strengthens and sharpens the mind, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing. In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging….

—
JOHN OF SALISBURY
,
describing the teaching
methods of Bernard of Chartres, twelfth century

A
long with workmen, housewives, priests, cows, horses, and pigs, the stream of morning traffic includes a scattering of boys with close-cropped hair, carrying hand-copied Latin grammars under their arms. They are on their way to school. As they trudge along, kicking stones and horse manure and calling greetings to each other, they are only faintly conscious of the novelty of their position.

There are no public schools in Troyes. But having taken primary instruction from a parish priest, these boys are now enrolled in the cathedral school. They are the elite of the city’s youth—mostly the sons of the well-to-do. To their inherited station in life they are adding the advantage of education, and they are placing themselves permanently above the level of weavers, peasants, and ignorant tradesmen.

The cathedral school was not originally conceived as a secondary school. Founded in the seventh century by Bishop Ragnegisile, it remained for centuries merely a training school, turning out clerks for the diocese. The bishop himself did the teaching. Today’s boys still wear the tonsure, as a sign of what is called “a disposition toward an order.” The chancellor of the cathedral teaches theology and confers teaching licenses, but most of the instruction is in the hands of the schoolmaster and his assistant canons, who teach a distinctly secular course.

In the schoolroom the pupils sit on the floor, all ages together. Instruction is predominantly oral and in Latin, though beginners are allowed to lapse into the vernacular. The schoolmaster lectures, and students take notes on oblong wooden tablets coated with black or green wax, using a stylus of bone, ivory, or metal. The whitish scratches it makes can be erased by rubbing with its rounded end. The scholars soon acquire a Latin shorthand:
Sic hic e fal sm qd ad simlr a e pducible a do, g a e et silr hic, a n e g a n e pducible a do
means
Sicut hic est fallacia secundum quid ad simpliciter, A est producibile a Deo, ergo A esi. Et similiter hic, A non est, ergo A non est producibile a Deo
(“Thus here is the second fallacy, which is simply, A is created by God, therefore A exists; and similarly this, A does not exist, therefore A is not created by God”). In drill, pupils repeat in chorus after the teacher and go on repeating an exercise until they have learned it by heart. Since books have to be copied by hand and writing materials are expensive, memory and oral exercises are indispensable.

The schoolmaster reads aloud, explaining and underlining as he goes, pointing out figures of speech, rhetorical devices, well-chosen words, adjectives that suit the nouns they modify, metaphors that give speech a beyond-the-ordinary meaning. Though discipline may be mild, the attention of the students does not wander, for each of them must recite tomorrow part of what he has heard today.

The lecture, the main teaching session of the day, takes place in the early afternoon. Following it, there is a period of free discussion, then drill, and finally a lesson chosen for moral and religious edification, closing with the Sixth Penitential Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. The next morning is devoted to the “repetition,” recalling and committing to writing things learned the previous day. At this time the pupils are also required to imitate the Latin masters they are studying by writing compositions of their own, in verse and prose. They are expected to commit to memory every day a selection from Ovid or Vergil, or another Latin author. These will be helpful in writing letters or compositions, which are traditionally crammed with quotations.

A letter from Gerald of Wales to the archbishop of Canterbury quotes in five pages three times from the Book of Wisdom, twice from St. Jerome, once each from Proverbs, Psalms, Vergil, and Ovid, and seven times from Horace. A letter written by Nicolas of Clairvaux
¹
to the bishop of Auxerre, whose see was renowned for its wines, runs:

In the words of the Gospel,
they have no more wine
. (John 2:3). Do not send me
the wine of sorrow
(Psalm 59:5), but
the wine which rejoices the heart of man
(Psalm 103:15), whose color is excellent, the savor very fine, and whose
agreeable odor
(Exodus 29:18) testifies to its quality. It is in these three elements that it manifests its perfection, and
the cord with three strands does not easily break
(Eccl. 4:12).

The wines of our region are turbid and do not come from those plants which grow in your region in a state of blessedness; their juice has not passed
from one nation to another, and from one kingdom to another people
(Psalm 104:13)…. Send separately to the abbot and to me;
the Jews do not deal with the Samaritans
(John 4:9).

Theoretically, the curriculum consists of the “seven liberal arts.”
²
But schools rarely teach all seven of the arts, and the emphasis is very unequal. These “arts” are “liberal” because their purpose is not moneymaking and because they are worthy of a free man. There are seven mainly because people are fond of the number seven, one of the keys to a numerologically ordered universe. In the sixth century Boethius divided the liberal arts into the
trivium
and
quadrivium
(“three roads” and “four roads”). The trivium comprises the literary subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the quadrivium the scientific: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

The bishops’ schools of the sixth to ninth centuries offered little more than what was indispensable for clerks—Latin, enough arithmetic and astronomy for the computation of Easter and other movable feasts, and music for the chant. Monastic schools taught a similar curriculum. Like the episcopal schools, they were internal—that is, they trained their own personnel. When they occasionally received children of princes and nobles, it was rather as pages than as regular pupils. Parish priests, too, trained their own successors.

“Music,”
one of the Seven Liberal Arts, is among the sculptured figures of the Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral. She holds a psaltery in her lap, has a vielle, an early version of the violin, beside her, and plays a set of bells.

After Charlemagne’s time the bishops’ schools began to expand and to take outside pupils, boys from the town and boarding scholars. Gradually they came to eclipse the monastic schools. This urbanization and secularization created an educational revolution during the eleventh century. In the hundred years that followed, the cathedral schools became international centers of adult scholarship as well as training schools for the diocesan clergy. The emphasis was on grammar and rhetoric, with theology, philosophy, and canon law as added disciplines. The most famous school was at Chartres, where, under the direction of the great schoolmaster Bernard (not to be confused with St.-Bernard of Clairvaux) there was a revival of classical literary humanism.

Now, in the thirteenth century, the function of higher education has been largely absorbed by the universities. Where universities are within easy reach, the cathedral schools restrict themselves chiefly to grammar, rhetoric and the rudiments of logic. In remote districts, cathedral schools teach a curriculum similar to that of the universities.

The grammar of the cathedral school embraces not only linguistics but writing, spelling, composition, speech, and general literature, including poetry and history. Pupils must master the elements of Latin by memorizing the
Ars Minor
of Donatus, a fourth-century authority. Ten pages of question-and-answer supply a knowledge of the eight parts of speech. From this the student proceeds to the same author’s
Ars Grammatica
, and then to Priscian’s
Grammatical Commentary
, a sixth-century work. Donatus and Priscian wrote for pupils to whom Latin was a native language, and are not ideally suited for northwest Europe in 1250. Two new manuals in verse are beginning to replace them, Alexander of Villedieu’s
Doctrinale
³
and the
Grecismus
of Eberhard of Bethune (so-called because it includes some Greek etymology).

Twelfth-and thirteenth-century writers have developed an extraordinary fondness for versifying, and almost every species of literary production appears at one time or another in verse. Historical chronicles are often written in verse. There are verse formularies for letter writing. Sermons sometimes lapse into poetry or rhythmic prose. There is a versified Bible (the
Aurora
of Peter Riga). Even legal documents are sometimes rhymed.

In grammar, the student is exposed to a series of authors, pagan and Christian, with little critical evaluation or regard for chronological order. Anything written in a book has a certain sacredness, all the established authors are authorities, and all are timeless, from Aesop to Horace. Some, like the late Roman elegiac poet Maximianus, are surprisingly profane and even erotic, but they are nevertheless studied for their rhetorical artifices. Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into “certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency,” before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures. St.-Bernard himself wrote verse in his youth at Cîteaux, and was guilty of great proficiency. By the end of the twelfth century, verse writing was forbidden to members of the austere Cistercian order, but many abbots and bishops continue to write love poetry.