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.

. . .They [papal anathemas, in Peter Damian's letters to Alexander II, w. RWS's analysis] were too strong as heavenly, too weak as early punishments. They belonged to an age when government was in the hands of God, and men's hands were too weak or uncertain to guide or control.

The most revealing map of Europe in the [X and XI] centuries would be a map, not of political or commercial capitals, but of the collection of sanctuaries, the point of material contact with the unseen world.

When the machinery of government was simple or non-existent, these tangible agents of spiritual power had an importance in public life which they lost in a more complicated age. The deficiencies in human poet were supplied by the power of the saints. ...