The Age of Chivalry (17 page)

Robin has always been a protean figure, and each period has invented the character it wants. Promotion to the aristocracy in the 16th and 17th centuries made him an establishment figure, one whose romantic exile ended with the restoration of a benign ruler. The Victorians were attracted by Robin's philanthropy, and they turned him into a leader of freedom-loving Saxons who are pitted against feudal Norman barons. Warner Bros'
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938) gave a Hollywood sheen to the English tale, with the hero and his band being presented as cheerful exponents of a “can-do” attitude to life's challenges.

Robin's physical beauty is an important feature of the Hood tradition. Recent commentary has speculated on whether there may be a covertly gay dimension to the appeal of the legend. The original corpus of Hood literature, together with its subsequent interpretations, celebrates the intensity of male comradeship and shows how the rejection of convention can lead to the discovery of true identity. Maid Marion's femininity, and passivity, relegated her to the margins in the world of Hood.

A colored woodcut of
c.
1600 depicting Robin Hood, the hero of late medieval English ballads
.

From the late 11th century onward, European culture witnessed a revival of the arts and letters so profound and wide-ranging that it may be compared to the Renaissance that spread from later medieval Italy to the rest of the continent. Romanesque art achieved its fullest development during this period, and Gothic architecture began to evolve. Poetry—both lyric and epic—began to be written in the vernacular, and the Latin language was used innovatively to describe advances in philosophy and theology. Universities were founded across Europe at centers such as Salerno, Paris and Montpellier, Bologna and Salamanca, Oxford and Cambridge. These were the places that pioneered the rediscovery of ancient authors like Euclid, Ptolemy and Aristotle, as well as the revival of Roman law
.

The 12th-century revival was a cosmopolitan movement. Italian centers of learning were particularly important for the advances in Roman and canon law, in medical science and in the new translations from ancient Greek. France's clerical and lay intelligentsia were especially active in philosophical speculation and verse composition. England and Germany followed these French cultural patterns, and Spain linked the European milieu with Islamic culture. The Carolingian period of ninth-century cultural advance had been real enough, but it was centered on the court and on the schools attached to monasteries and cathedrals—and many of these establishments had suffered from the tenth-century anarchy unleashed by Vikings, Saracens and Magyars. A more expansive awakening of the mind and spirit was now being witnessed, and its leading lights sought not just to preserve the legacy of the past but also to revive its content and make that knowledge relevant to their own times.

Universities were not the only centers of this enlightenment. New cathedrals such as Chartres, Rheims, Orléans, Canterbury and Toledo played their part, too. The royal bureaucratic machine was also important: learned clerks employed by rulers like Henry II of England and Frederick II in Sicily worked at courts that rivaled the great monasteries, such as Bec in France and Monte Cassino in Italy, as centers of learning. These were the places where libraries could be found, although collections of manuscripts were still mostly very small. The 340 or so volumes owned by the abbey at Corbie in Picardy and the 546 titles owned by Durham Cathedral marked them out as exceptional places in the year 1200.

R
IGHT
The rose window of Chartres Cathedral, a building which has become synonymous with the revival of the arts and scholarship in 12th-century Europe
.

A
BOVE
In this detail from the
Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
(15th century) a monk is shown working as a copyist in a scriptorium
.

All books were of parchment, since papyrus had passed out of general use in the earlier medieval period and paper had not yet been introduced to the West. Carolingian art excelled in illuminated manuscripts but this tradition had been lost in Europe by the 11th century, and the 12th-century manuscripts whose beautiful initials are painted in red, green and gold represent a sublime recovery. Such books naturally included many copies of the Bible, as well as church service books such as missals and lectionaries. They also included the definitive volumes of Fathers of the early Church such as Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and Gregory the Great. But the libraries also contained more recent works. Commentaries written by Abelard and Anselm mattered greatly, as did those of authors who communicated the learning of the past, such as Boethius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville and Bede. Their textbooks on logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music and etymology became the standard authorities. Archives became more important as administration evolved, and the documentation gathered by the monarchs of England and Sicily rivaled the extensive papal sources in their sophistication.

The 12th-century Church had an ambiguous attitude toward Latin literature. It taught the language—its medium of communication—while condemning the pagan milieu that was the context for the writings of authors such as Cicero, Virgil and Ovid. Nonetheless, the literary style of the past furnished many writers with models of composition. This was especially true of John of Salisbury (
c
.1120–80) whose wide-ranging powers of quotation and graceful literary style were learned when he was a student at the school of Chartres, the most eminent of the 12th-century cathedral schools. Virgil was read and admired at Chartres as well as at many other such schools, for example, Orléans, and he was almost universally seen as the supreme poet and stylistic model. His themes could be allegorized as anticipations of Christian truths, and as a celebrant of ancient Rome's empire Virgil was especially pertinent to the Staufer dynasty's revival of the imperial tradition. But Ovid's love poetry and his
Metamorphoses
also inspired many, and his verses were copied even in the Benedictine monastery at Cluny. Among prose writers Cicero was revered as the chief representative of rhetoric, a subject placed on the medieval curriculum as one of the seven “liberal arts,” and Pliny the Elder's
Natural History
could be plundered for bizarre tales.

Latin was also a living language for contemporary artists, scholars, priests and lawyers, and the standards of grammar and vocabulary were greatly improved. The standard textbook was the
Institutiones
of Priscian of Caesarea, composed in the early sixth century and comprising 16 books. It was being copied vigorously, but there were shorter manuals, too, and the age also produced numerous dictionaries and encyclopedias. Adam du Petit-Pont, a master at Paris in the early 12th century, wrote a descriptive vocabulary in which he put words into sentences that explained their meaning. That genre supplies valuable information about the fabric of daily 12th-century lives. While studying grammar could illuminate the imaginative and literary workings of language, rhetoric fared less well as a subject. Forensic oratory had disappeared with the passing of the Roman political and judicial system, and rhetoric only survived as a model for writing letters.

THE 12TH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE

1080s
The Italian jurist Irnerius establishes, at Bologna, a new school of law whose scholars will produce commentaries on Roman law.

1088
The University of Bologna is founded.

1109
Death of the Italian philosopher Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury since 1093.

1121
Peter Abelard's philosophical views are condemned as heretical by Church authorities.

c
.1159
John of Salisbury, secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, writes
Policraticus
, a work of political philosophy describing monarchs' rights and duties.

1160s
The University of Paris has an institutional identity.

1209
Official date of the foundation of the University of Cambridge, England—possibly due to scholars deciding to leave the University of Oxford.

1218
Spain's first university is established at Salamanca.

1289
Montpellier University is founded by amalgamating earlier centers of study, such as the school of law founded in the 1160s.

There was an appreciative public audience for poetry composed in Latin. In religious verse especially there was a move away from the language's older forms and toward the new intensity of rhymed verse. The most famous of the period's Latin poets were the Goliards, a group of mostly clerical students and authors in France, Germany, Italy and England whose texts in praise of wine, women and song often satirized the official Church hierarchy, and especially the Roman curia. Their collective
Carmina Burana
combine secular impulses with religious inspiration, and the notion of an Order of Goliards, which was a burlesque on the Orders of monks, shows the popularity of parody at this time. Drama had disappeared with the closing of the last Roman theaters, but the Christian liturgy resonated with dramatic power, and it inspired the medieval miracle plays that recreated scenes from the Passion. Other miracle plays described the lives of saints, and these were performed at associated shrines and cult centers. Students at the monastic and cathedral schools played an important role in the development of these plays and their widespread diffusion.

The 12th century saw the arrival of the lawyer at the heart of government, and that meant the Church no longer enjoyed a monopoly on learning. Rulers everywhere needed this new class of educated laymen as counselors and administrators, and an immense intellectual effort went into the revival of Roman law and the advance of jurisprudence in general. The ancient materials were preserved in the
Corpus Juris Civilis
as codified in the sixth century by the emperor Justinian. This consisted of the
Code
or collection of the emperor's legislation; the
Digest
that summarized the conclusions of Roman jurists; the
Institutes
, a textbook used in
teaching law; and the
Novels
, or later legislation of the emperor Justinian. It was jurists teaching at the University of Bologna in the early 12th century, and especially Irnerius (
c
.1055–
c
.1130), who set about producing interpretations of these great texts. They and their successors, termed the “glossators,” purified the original texts and brought out their contemporary relevance. The
Digest
gained a special importance as a model of juristic method which was then applied to the law of the Church and to the feudal customs of Europe.