heptagrammaton’s Reviews > The Making of the Middle Ages > Status Update

[I]n the middle of the twelfth century, the quoting of authorities was the opening of a debate, not the end of it

The painstaking plodding exhaustiveness of monastic scholarship, the all-encompassing nature of the florilegia—which RSW takes to prefigure the full development of scholasticism in the twelfth-thirteenth century—make me reflect of Ancient Mesopotamian scribes' lexical list—whose exhaustive word-construct could represent things that did nor could exist, which Moudhy Al-Rashid takes as a kind of scientific impulse.

Satire [...] implies a certain inevitability in the thing satirised, a lack of any constructive alternative. The attitude to Rome in the twelfth century, the jokes and cynicism it inspired, may be compared with current jibes at bureaucracy—they are a relief to the feelings rather than the symptoms of practical oppositions.

In his careful training for Greek dimplomacy [Liudprand of Cremona] had no successors, but there were many inheritors of his petulance.

The failure, if it was one, lay in the fact that, having too much to hold on to, they [i.e. the Holy Roman emperors through the HIgh Medieval Ages] slowly lost what they had. On the whole, it was those who had least who were able to move most freely to the new world which was coming into existence.