Roots of Western Culture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collections, medieval literature, translations

Pity poor Peter Abelard! The primary logician of his day, famous as a theologian and philosopher, he is hardly known today, nine centuries later. That in itself is no surprise, but among those who might have heard his name, it was in combination: "Heloise and Abelard". The love letters between him and his paramour are more famous than any of his "professional" writings. Much more.

One of Heloise's letters has been collected, in translation from old French, in the omnibus volume The Portable Medieval Reader, and reads in part:

Heaven knows! in all my love it was you, and you only I sought for. I looked for no dowry, no alliances of marriage. I was even insensible to my own pleasures; nor had I a will to gratify. All was absorbed in you.

Pretty steamy stuff for the early 1100's. The full letter is five pages of small type. It is followed by a seven-page semi-biography of Abelard written by Peter the Venerable, the abbot at Cluny where Abelard was cared for in his declining years. Twelve pages out of 687 may seem a small enough amount to devote to one philosopher, but in this Penguin volume, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (both editors translated some of the items) and published in 1949 (I have the 1981 paperback reprint), there is a lot of ground to cover: representative writings from 1050-1500 AD. The editors selected 150 items to survey the 450 years so allocated. All the items are, of course, European.

I decided from the outset to at least categorize the articles. Rather than struggle with an HTML table, here are the results from a spreadsheet:

As you might expect, in the interlocking cultures dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, the largest single category is Religion and Theology. Religion of the Middle Ages is quite foreign to the modern mind, even among Roman Catholics, who are its direct descendants. For the hierarchy of the Church, it was intensely political. The political order of the Roman Church today pales by comparison. For the laity, it was a strange combination of nanny-state and not-so-benign neglect, in which failure to attend Confession and Mass was a punishable offense.

But to me the historical documents hold the most interest, and I suppose I could have made History a secondary category for them all. I was so taken with excerpts from the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor that I wrote of it separately. Education beyond learning to read and add was a serious matter in the 1100's.

Poetry also occupied the literate people of the time, but I confess that none of the translations in this volume do much justice to the originals. It's hard to take a tightly-crafted poem and translate it well; one must sacrifice either the sense or the rhythm and rhyme.

It is no surprise that only three articles explicitly describe science. Prior to Roger Bacon in the 1200's, science cannot be fairly said to exist. It took nearly 400 more years for Galileo to come along and make science a discipline of disciplines. Of course, Tycho, Kepler and Copernicus were scientists, but "science" wasn't a "thing" yet.

Rather than drag on and on, I'll leave it to you, should the matter interest you, to locate a copy of this volume, no doubt quite as bedraggled as mine is; or perhaps someone else has produced a newer volume of equal value and scope. This book given to me by a friend, and sat by my bedside for three years while I went through the articles, one every few days. It isn't something one can settle into an armchair and read for hours. Having finished reading it, I find it worth keeping on hand for reference.