PAUL FREEDMAN: I've
put these names on the board because today we're talking about the so-called
Carolingian Renaissance, the revival of learning, under
Charlemagne and his successors. But the figures of this
Renaissance, the intellectuals of Charlemagne's court, of the
court of Louis the Pious, the court of Charles the Bald
are not household names. And I just want to give you a
sample-- and it is no more than a sample-- of these men. And I'm afraid they
all were men. And most of them monks or
other kinds of clerics. And what I want to do today is
remind you for the first, to start, we said last time that
Charlemagne's rule was based on a combination of traditional
war leadership, similar to that Merovingians;
an alliance with the Church, similar to the Merovingians, but
much closer - Much closer in the sense of seeing the
legitimation of rule, up to the point of emperor, as a
product of what later would be called "sacred monarchy". In other words, that the
kingship was not just rulership over the populace,
or over warriors-- it was that-- but it was
also a responsibility-- a ministry is the word
that's used-- to see to the salvation
of the public good. Not just the secular benefit
of the public good, as in a modern state, but to the
salvation of the people that God would hold the emperor,
the king, responsible for this. And then the third element was
to revive the Roman Empire. And not just as a political
entity, but the Roman Empire as a state. As a form of rulership for
the benefit of a diverse population, not just one nation,
like the Franks or the Lombards or the Saxons, but
of a kind of imperial confederation. The Carolingian Renaissance is
a planned one, unlike the regular old Italian Renaissance,
which is a spontaneous revival of learning
in several different cities on the parts
of intellectuals. The Italian Renaissance, like
most revivals of learning, might have been patronized by
secular rulers, but its impetus was not the state. In this case, however, we have
a program of reviving Latin, reviving the classical
literature and texts, teaching these subjects. And all of this not in aid of
what we would call a purely educational program, but to help
the state and to help its mission, which as we've just
said, is both a Christian and a Roman one. The revival of letters was
intended, then, to restore and deepen the piety of the
population, the understanding of Christianity, the restoration
of the Church as an intellectual force, the
preservation of learning from both Roman secular and
religious texts. So that Charlemagne's cultural
program is the culmination of a longer period of trying to
save something from the wreckage of classical
civilization. And thus, as a Christian ruler
and as a Roman emperor, Charlemagne surrounded himself
with these and other intellectuals, monks,
and scholars. In order to understand this
mission, however, beyond just saying oh, Christianity or
classical culture, we have to go back to some topics we
touched on very lightly when we were talking about
monasticism. And that have cropped
up now and then. So I want to start out with the
preservation of learning up to the point that Charlemagne
really starts putting together this program
around 780 AD. You'll remember, and you will
have seen from Augustine's Confessions, among other things,
that the ideal of Roman culture at the time of
the Empire was cultivated leisure on the part of wealthy, well-educated lay people. That is to say, even after
Constantine's conversion, the intellectuals of the Empire
tended to be not clergy, but wealthy people who could afford
the leisure, the time, and the expense of procuring
books, and of discussing them. These were the people who
represented the continuation of the literary and
philosophical traditions of classical Greece and Rome. And this also had a practical
benefit just as, rather in a different way, it does now. In order to enter Roman
governmental service, which was the most successful career
path of the time of Saint Augustine and had been for some
centuries, you needed to have an education of a certain
rather rarefied higher sort. And this is not unique to the
Roman Empire, it was true of Imperial China, most
obviously. In China, you had to pass a
very tough exam, a very selective exam, in order to be a
part of the highest level of the imperial service. And the exam was not a political
science exam or a business decisions
kind of exam. It wasn't like you have a
certain kind of budget and you've got to allocate
resources. It's not a problem set. It was poetry. It was ancient culture. And the same thing is true of
the British Empire in the nineteenth century. In order to enter its highest
levels, you needed to know Greek and Latin. Not because you were going to
use them governing some colony in Southeast Asia,
for example. But because that was what made
you an educated person. So the centers of learning in
the ancient world included Athens, the Platonic and
Athenian academies; Pergamum in Asia Minor, the name of which
city gave its name to parchment; Alexandria, which
had an entity called the Museum, which was not what we
now call a museum, but rather kind of library and research
center; Constantinople, later. Alexandria is the most famous
because it had this magnificent library as part of
the museum, and the mystery of what happened to this library,
allegedly burned by the Muslims in the eighth century on
the grounds that you didn't need to know anything except
what's in the Koran. And this is not true. The library had disappeared long
before the eighth century and probably was the victim of
the kinds of disorders that began in the third century, when
we began the course, the kind of disruptions of local
society, opportunities for plunder, neglect. And the Museum was actually
closed by the emperor Caracalla in the
third century. So the major problem of the
Roman Empire in terms of the diminution of learning is not
the burning of Alexandria or such dramatic events, it's a
much more gradual process. And this gradual process
involved what we have at various times, using Wickham's
language, called "the radical simplification of material
culture". Which means not only a lack of
imported goods, more primitive accommodations, less trade and
commerce, but also much less in the way of books
and learning. This is also related to the
disappearance of lay literacy. The people who were capable of
reading and writing in Latin, as of, let's say, the
sixth century, are overwhelmingly clerics. And not all that many
of them, either. The last grand figures of Roman
classical culture are Boethius and Cassiodorus. And we've mentioned them
already, but they bear [clarification: bear
repeating]-- Boethius, 480-524. And Cassiodorus, 490-585. Cassiodorus was a monk. And it is his accomplishment
to join monasticism to the preservation of learning. And he had a very long life
to do it as well. Reminding us that not everybody
just kicked off of the age of thirty-five in the
pre-industrial world. Boethius didn't have a
particularly long life, because he was executed by the
Ostrogothic king, Theodoric, suspected of treason and
plotting with Byzantium. Boethius could still work in his
personal library in Rome, where the light filtered in
through alabaster windows-- the Beinecke Library idea-- Onto cupboards stacked with
Greek and Roman papyrus books. But Boethius was among the last
secular intellectuals in the west, and particularly one
of the last to know Greek as well as Latin. He conceived a project of
translating the great works of Greek philosophy into Latin,
which would have included all of Plato and Aristotle. But he was cut off by his
arrest, torture, and execution after just having done some
introductory textbooks and just a smattering of Plato
and Aristotle. After him and the Justinianic
invasion of Italy, Italy was devastated. And even though it will remain
a repository of manuscripts, its learning was preserved as
a guttering flame by monks like Cassiodorus and, almost
accidentally, by the monks who followed the rule of
Saint Benedict. Saint Benedict does, as you'll
recall, require reading. But it's usually during Lent
and it's a kind of penance. The contribution of
Cassiodorus is the organization of a more library-like kind of monastery. And the notion that classical
culture is not just a collection of text about a
discredited religion, but necessary for Christian
interpretation of the Bible and Christian learning. At his monastery of Vivarium in
southern Italy, Cassiodorus developed a notion of the
liberal arts as an aid to religious truth. The liberal arts is not his
invention, but the notion of the liberal arts culminating
in a program that has a purpose in which classical
culture is fused with Christian culture
is his doing. He was not so much interested
in the aesthetic pleasure of these classical texts
as in their use for interpreting the Bible. The Bible, according to his,
Augustine's, and virtually everybody's understanding of the
time, is not a text that makes perfect sense in every
respect literally. It is the book of life that God
has set up for us, but it requires interpretation. It is not just a literal text,
it is a figurative and prophetic one as well. And in order to get at what it
really means, what its real messages are, you have to know
things like mathematics, astronomy, geometry, even music,
and certainly grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These are the seven liberal
arts of Cassiodorus's curriculum. They're arranged in
the three basic-- the trivium, as it came
to be called. The three, not because of
trivial, although that's where the word comes from,
The trivium. I-U-M. T-R-I-V-I-U-M. Logic,
grammar, rhetoric. Now, I'm in this sort of
Rick Perry moment. The quadrivium, there
are four of them. OK? Arithmetic, astronomy,
geometry, and music. OK. So I got all of them. The quadrivium are
the sciences. You don't think music
is a science? In the late Roman medieval
imagination, it was the science of intervals and of
pleasing forms and of modes. The replication of this plan
of Cassiodorus is the accomplishment of this period
in which classical learning and its texts were endangered. The Benedictine monks
of Italy-- question? Something I missed? STUDENT: I'm sorry. What was the four? PROFESSOR: The
four-- the quadrivium. Quad, Q-U-A-D-R-I-V-I-U-M.
Sorry, what were they? STUDENT: Yeah. PROFESSOR:
Oh, you're putting me on the spot again? Geometry-- geometry, music, arithmetic,
and astronomy. Right? This is the period in which the
Irish are critical to the preservation of learning. There was a book that was
popular a few years ago called How the Irish Saved
Civilization. Like many popular books, this
is a little bit reducing things to a kind of
easy formula. But it is Irish as well as
Italian and very much English monasticism, under the influence
of both Italy and Ireland, that has a program of
establishing monasteries, correcting and preserving
Latin, which has become increasingly distant from what
people actually speak. And of course, in Ireland, not
part of the Roman Empire, they had no tradition of
speaking Latin. The monks had to learn Latin as
an artificial or completely foreign language. And in a way, that made their
Latin better, because they didn't think that kind of
on-the-way-to-French or on-the-way-to-Spanish language
that was being spoken in general could be confused
with Latin. In the critical period, 550,
end of the Gothic wars in Italy, devastation in Italy,
to 750, beginning of the Carolingian ascent, there are
only 264 books that survive. That is 264 manuscripts. And all but twenty-six of them
deal with religious subjects. Of this twenty-six of them,
eight deal with law, eight with medicine, six
with grammar. Now, one reason that very little
survives is that these were mostly written on
papyrus scrolls, which is not very durable. Though there is a change
underway from about 400 AD to writing on parchment, which
is very durable. And accordingly, along with this
change to parchment is a change from the scroll
to the codex. So the triumph of the codex
is roughly 400 AD to 2010. We're going back to the
scroll, actually. We even use the word for the
process of going through a document on a computer
or a Kindle. How big are these libraries? How many texts do they have? The largest library before
Charlemagne's ascent would have been the two libraries
associated with the-- in the north of England. And perhaps one hundred
books, 120. But it's at this setting, the
England of Bede, the early eighth century, that we start
to have the monasteries that really conform to our image of
monks diligently copying manuscripts. The invention of what's called
the monastic scriptorium, a place for writing. So there are monks who not
only read, but copy other books, maybe borrowed from
other monasteries, too. This is a laborious process and
one that we can follow, because we tend to know where
our texts of classical learning come from, and by
how slender a thread they arrive for us. The monks would copy
these documents. They would be preserved
in the library. But again, these monasteries
close, are plundered. The wanderings of these
manuscripts then increase the fragility of what exists
and what we now. Yeah? STUDENT: How do monks in
Northumbria get a hold of texts that's mainly from
libraries and external... PROFESSOR: The
question is how do these monks in far off Northeastern England
get a hold of the classical texts? They're brought up with
the missionaries. There are evidence of constant
communication with Italy, which is probably the source
of most of them. And they'd learned very
quickly-- remember, I said that there is this magnificent
codex of the Bible that's now in Florence, that was a gift of
the English to the Pope in the eighth century. So there is traffic in these
extremely precious objects. But it's very small scale and
very fragile, as I've said, until Charlemagne. What Charlemagne does is not so
much innovate or invent a program, as make it into
something that's not just in artisanal enterprise dependent
on a few monks in a few monasteries. And it's part of what we've said
is a campaign to salvage classical learning. This is encapsulated in one
of Charlemagne's governing instructions to his
administrative cadres. He says, "we are concerned to
restore with diligent zeal the workshops of knowledge, which,
through the negligence of our ancestors, have been
well-nigh deserted. We invite others by our own
example as much as lies within our power to learn to practice
the liberal arts." As Wickham points out, this
is an unusual period of intellectuals participating in,
and even to some extent, directing government. It's always necessary for
governments to have some economists or foreign
policy specialists. But intellectuals in the sense
of promoting a program of liberal arts is unusual. Or intellectuals who are not
just decorators, ornamentors, people who do nice, illuminated
manuscripts, or beautiful fountains out of
silver with chirping birds. The court of Charlemagne
is a moment of intense intellectual effort. And Charlemagne and his
successors were rulers who gave tremendous power,
privileges, even wealth, to people who knew something about
classical learning. The purpose of this is to
standardize education in the Church and to make sure
that the Church ran in an effective manner. And also to make sure that
the government ran in an effective manner. By effective, I mean uniformity
and discipline. So that you could go into a
church in Barcelona, the southwestern corner of
Charlemagne's realm, or in Aachen at the court of
Charlemagne, or in Rome itself, and hear the same
kind of liturgy or ceremony or ritual. That from one corner the Empire
to the other, the church laws would be the same. That the discipline meted out
to misbehaving priests would be the same. That preaching and missionary
work would be coordinated and uniform. Even that spelling and the shape
of the letters might be standardized. It is to Charlemagne and these
intellectuals that we owe the very beautiful way
that we write. As you can see, my minuscule
print is the product of a monastic education. These little letters, right? These minuscule letters
are Carolingian. This is how they write. In the Roman era, they tend to
write in a different fashion. And in the Merovingian court,
Visigothic courts, in a still different and quite difficult
to read-- at least for us now-- fashion. The spelling of Latin is
regularized at this time. The notion is that the people
would receive basic education. And of course, there's some
debate as to how wide a spectrum of the populace
this involved. How much education ordinary
people were to receive. But from the point of view of
the intellectuals fashioning this, what was really important
was that the clergy receive a good Latin
education. The problem of clerical literacy
is a persistent problem of the Middle Ages. Clergy, who may know some
formula to recite, who don't actually know how to read, or
who don't actually know what the Latin words mean. So this is a program not just
to save texts, but to use them, to apply them. And also to apply them to
a level below that of intellectuals sitting
around and discussing the ancient world. At the highest level, monastic
centers collected and copied Latin classical manuscripts. Collected, commented,
collated. This is not an intellectual
program that aims at entrepreneurship or
intellectuality in the sense of innovation. Wickham talks about Amalarius
of Metz, one of the people I didn't put on here. Amalarius, remember, is
condemned for certain liturgical innovations. And he's astounded at being
accused of innovating. He acknowledges that this is not
his job, although he makes it worse by saying that
he had found truth within his own spirit. Saying "I've found truth within
my own spirit" in 840 AD is not a proper answer,
because that makes it sound as if your spirit determines
what truth is. Whereas truth is determined by
a much longer, biblical, classical tradition. And that's what orthodoxy is. So he sort of had to accept
his not incredibly severe punishment, but punishment
nonetheless. The Carolingian Renaissance was
organized by a group of people who are from all
over the place. Theodulph of Orleans is
probably a Visigoth. Paul the Deacon is probably
a Lombard. Einhard is a Frank. The greatest of these figures,
Alcuin, who was more specifically commissioned
by Charlemagne to-- and Alcuin's dates
are 730-804. Alcuin is from Northumbria. Alcuin is from the school
established by Bede. These scholars, as you can see,
have different areas of specialization. Their enterprises, or their
duties, were to regularize liturgy, to revive rhetoric,
moral theology, logical argumentation, poetry, and to
argue against theological unorthodoxy. The two theological problems of
the Carolingian Empire were iconoclasm-- debates about that, which we've
already seen in the Byzantine Empire-- and a heresy called
"Adoptionism". Adoptionism is the notion that
Christ was a human who was essentially adopted by God
to become his son. It's a heresy that, at the
time of Charlemagne, was strong in Spain, or at
least defined as a heresy and wiped out. We said that there are
twenty-six non-religious manuscripts from between
550 and 750. For the ninth century, there are
290 classical manuscripts; 150 for the tenth century. So you can see that the ninth
century is kind of a golden age of this. Although again, we're not
talking about an incredible number of things. Not an incredible number, but
they're very, very important. Many of you have taken
Directed Studies-- first year, freshman liberal
arts, great books program. Well of course, DS doesn't like
the Middle Ages for a number of reasons. So it's not as if DS decided
that Lupus of Ferrieres is up there with Plato and Thucydides,
but the things that you do read in DS include
Polybius's history of the Roman Empire, Livy's
history of the Roman Republic, Tacitus. Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus
are authors who depend basically on one manuscript. And that manuscript is a
Carolingian manuscript. For Livy, for example, there's
a lot of his incredibly long history that we don't
have. The so-called lost decades of Livy. Livy's work is divided into
books called decades. The fact that we have as much of
Livy as we do is due to the Carolingian copying program. The fact that we have Tacitus at
all is due basically to one manuscript. Cicero's Republic, rediscovered
in the nineteenth century, is a palimpsest. And
you'll have heard in section-- and in the Beinecke tour, a
palimpsest is a manuscript that has been scraped of its old
text, a new text put on. But the old text is usually more
interesting to us than the new one and can be
restored and read. Most of these are regarded
as discoveries of the Renaissance. But where the Renaissance
scholars found them was in northern monasteries, where they
had been copied and kept since Carolingian times. Where then, did the Carolingians
get their manuscripts? Where did they get the
things to copy? Which is really a version of the
very perceptive question that was asked before. Italy, for the most part
especially Ravenna, Monte Casino, and Rome itself. So, for example, the German
Monastery of Lorsch obtained from Italy an ancient
manuscript of Virgil and copied it. They also have, or copied,
Livy's fifth decade-- that is part of Livy's Roman history-- the unique manuscript of the
fifth decade, found in the Renaissance at Lorsch. Copied at Lorsch in the ninth
century from some papyrus Italian original,
long since lost. In addition to Lorsch, the
centers of learning include Aachen itself, the court of
Charlemagne, Corbie,-- C-O-R-B-I-E-- Tours,-- T-O-U-R-S-- St. Gall,-- Saint-- S-T Gall, G-A-L-L. And these
libraries, we can see their growth during this period. So, for example, the Monastery
of Reichenau, on an island in Lake Constance. In 800, the year that
Charlemagne was crowned as emperor, Reichenau
had fifty books. In 846, it had 1,000. Well, all of this emphasis on
education and classical learning is extremely
important. And indeed, it merits those
kinds of "How blank saved blank". "How the Carolingians
saved classical civilization", in this case. But it does not mark a break
with the piety and spirituality of the era. and. That's part of the point
of the Einhard reading. Einhard is a critical figure in
the court of Charlemagne, and of his son, Louis the Pious,
about whom you'll be reading shortly, or
have been reading. And in Einhard, we see an
example of an intellectual of this period and of this place. Einhard is active in the
court of Charlemagne. He would be one of Charlemagne's
biographers, as we know, having read him. He's also a monastic
entrepreneur. I did say that this society
doesn't encourage intellectual entrepreneurship in the sense
of coming up with new ideas, but it's a very entrepreneurial
society in the sense of getting saints, getting
relics, establishing monasteries, becoming popular. It's a very competitive
business environment. And Einhard, as you've seen,
was very good at this. He had several monasteries
and churches under his jurisdiction. But his pet project, not that
far from Frankfurt on the Main River, is Seligenstadt. And it's at Seligenstadt that
eventually those relics of Saints Marcellinus and Peter
come to rest. Note that the saints, Marcellinus and Peter,
were acquired from Italy, just like the manuscripts. Because Italy is where there
are an awful lot of saints from the Roman martyr period. There are even more saints,
actually, in places like North Africa or Egypt, but they're
tough to get at, because it's a long trip and they're
Muslim. Nevertheless, we know that
lots of relics were liberated-- to use a rather 1970s term-- from Muslim captivity. Liberated-- and, of course, it's not as if
Einhard, in talking about what is called the "translation" of
relics, says that he bought them, or that he came by
them, quote, honestly. Translation meaning here, the
movement, the moving of the relics from one place
to another. Marcellinus and Peter
were buried in Rome and in a church. And Einhard's agents negotiate
with this dubious kind of character, who maybe
can get them some relics and maybe not. And maybe it will require more
money, or he's got to talk to a couple of guys. And it's this intrigue. And that's part of the story. The implication is that
Marcellinus and Peter want to move. They let their tombs be found. Remember that in looking for St.
Tiberius, it's too heavy to lift the altar up. They can't do it. On the other hand, with these
saints, no problem. And once they come to
Seligenstadt, they perform all these miracles, which shows
they're happy there. Sure, they were stolen. And in fact, as Wickham remarks,
and as you've read, Hilduin, a competitor of
Einhard's, had stolen some of Saint Marcellinus. And Einhard got him to
return it, pressured him to return it. And eventually, Hilduin
was disgraced. And I can't remember if he's
executed or merely exiled. But this is a tough business. So in 827, these relics
get moved. Let me read you, since this is
in a part of the Einhard book that we didn't assign. Let me just-- Yeah. It begins on page 69,
if you're interested in following this. And they even have the itinerary
of the relics. So "after a fast of three
days, they"-- his emissaries-- "traveled by night to that
place without any Roman citizens noticing them. Once in the Church of St.
Tiburtius, they first tried to open the altar under which it
was believed his holy body was located, but the strenuous
nature of the job they had started foiled their plan, for
the monument was constructed of extremely hard marble and
easily resisted the bare hands of those trying to open it. Therefore, they abandoned the
tomb of that martyr and descended to the tomb of the
blessed Marcellinus and Peter. There, once they had called on
our Lord, Jesus Christ, and adored the holy martyrs, they
were able to lift the tombstone from its place
covering the top of the sepulcher." Then they take it; they wrap
them in a clean linen shroud. They take just St. Marcellinus,
and they wrap him in a shroud. And then they put the tombstone
back in place, quote, "so that no trace of
the body's removal would remain." But then, just as
they're about to make their escape, the deacon, one of this
group, says, "Oh, my God, we can't leave without
Saint Peter. These two were companions
in life. We can't just take one
of these bodies. We have to go back and
take the other one." They go back, and they
get the body. So this is an adventure story. But it's a sacred adventure and
it involves the relics of people who still have some say
in where they want to be. The very special dead, as Peter
Brown refers to them. And what's very special about
them is that they're not exactly what you would
normally call "dead". Their relics are very
much active. Now, we read in the series of
miracles performed by these saints, along with another saint
they picked up, Hermes, various medical cures. Notice that these miracles,
unlike Gregory of Tours, are pretty exclusively
in one category. Gregory of Tours has a lot of
what might be called "scoffers punished" miracles. Somebody either tries to fake
a miracle, and then is the victim of a real one. Or somebody tries to
defy the bishop. Or somebody doubts the efficacy
of the saint. In this case, most of these
miracles, almost all of them, are people with paralysis,
disease of the bowels, horrible sores, blindness. Where to start? How great are these? I know you could not
put this down. And I hope you read it to your
molecular biology roommates just to show how
great this is. I think I have this in
the wrong place. Anyway, remember the curing
of the angry humpback? These guys are carrying the
relics to Seligenstadt and they stop to rest in a field. And this angry peasant with
a pitchfork wants to chase them away. He also has a humpback. And they show him the relics
and say what they're doing. And he falls to his
face in adoration. He is cured of his
afflictions. And the people of the village
insist that the emissaries stay with them, have a kind of
party all night, bring other villagers in. This is an interesting moment. And I mention it because here,
the piety of a person like Einhard is the same as the
piety of the villagers. The Carolingian Renaissance is
mostly about an elite program to try to preserve elite
forms of knowledge. True, it is an effort to educate
the populace, but that is probably the least successful
aspect of it. The literacy rate in 875 was
hardly any greater than it had been in 775, if you could do
a statistical study, and it wasn't very high. But when it comes to the saints,
and to the meaning of the supernatural in regular
life, the most learned people have the same attitude
as the villagers of this little story. OK. So we've reached the height
of the Carolingian Empire in two days. And then, our next discussion
will be about its precipitous and, in many respects,
unfortunate decline. That's what we'll talk
about on Wednesday.
