Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and learning 743

Around the time of the death of Boethius, in Italy there were two others

who retreated from the world. Each one is signiﬁcant for the future of culture,

particularly monastic culture. As early as 496,Benedict of Nursia retreated to

Subiaco, and in 537 Cassiodorus retreated to Vivarium. Having come to Rome

to pursue his studies, Benedict abandoned them in order to seek God in the

‘desert’: ‘Seeing many men run to the precipices of vices, he drew back, as it

were, the foot which he had stretched forward to enter the world, fearing that,

if he so much as brushed against the knowledge of this world, he himself would

lose himself in this monstrous gulf.’

Beneath the rhetoric of this narration,

the idea is clear: profane studies of the traditional type seemed to Benedict

unsuitable for satisfying his aspiration to the perfect life, and he abandoned

them without regret for hermetic, and then coenobitic, asceticism.

Starting with the disciples of Jerome in the fourth century, the life of the

Christian ascetics was based entirely around intelligence and the prayerful med-

itation of the Bible, in readings which were sometimes collective, sometimes

personal: in liturgical celebrations and in the solitude of the lectio divina.

was therefore logical that the Rule, drawn up by Benedict for his monks at

Monte Cassino in the middle of the sixth century, gave a primordial place to

this reading in the monastic timetable: that is, collective reading in the eight

ofﬁces of the opus divinum which put rhythm into the daily prayer of the com-

munity. But he also stipulated private reading throughout all the time reserved

for the monk’s individual activities. The last chapter of the Rule enumerates

the authors whom Benedict put on the reading list: not only the Old and New

Testaments but ‘the works of the Holy Catholic Fathers’ (or patristic litera-

ture, as we would say), ‘the Conferences of the Fathers, their Institutions’ (i.e.

probably the two major works of John Cassian), ‘and their Lives’ (doubtless

the Lives of the Fathers of the desert), and ﬁnally ‘the Rule of our Father St

Basil’ (certainly in one of its Latin translations).

Curiously, the Rule of Benedict made no reference to any school or to

any elementary intellectual training; but amongst the monks’ equipment it

Gregory the Great, Dialogues 2,prologue: ‘Sed cum in eis multos ire per abrupta vitiorum cerneret,

eum, quem quasi in ingressum mundi posuerat, retraxit pedem, ne, si quid de scientia eius adtingeret,

ipse quoque postmodum in inmane praecipitium totus iret.’

On the lectio divina, see Dictionnaire de spiritualit

e,Paris (1976), ix, cols. 470–87. The exercise was

described as early as the third century in a famous text by Cyprian, Epist. i.15:‘Sit tibi vel oratio

adsidua vel lectio: nunc cum Deo loquere, nunc Deus tecum.’ It held a very important place in the

monk’s activities: Regula Benedicti 48, ed. de Vog

e(1977), vii,pp.338–49 for commentary.

Reg. Ben. 73, 3s.: ‘sermo divinae auctoritatis Veteris ac Novi Testamenti . . . liber sanctorum catholico-

rumPatrum . . . Collationes Patrum et Instituta et Vitas eorum, sed et Regula sancti Patris nostri

Basilii’. All this made up the doctrinae sanctorum Patrum:tobeunderstood, according to de Vog

La R

egle iv,p.110,inthe sense of ‘the whole of the writings of the Fathers, ecclesiastical as well as

monastic’.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

744 jacques fontaine

mentions a pen and some writing blocks.

The prologue to the Rule does

designate the community as the schola in the service of the Lord, but the

meaning of the term schola seems to be an elite group schooled for spiritual

warfare through the vita communis of the monastery.

The monastic way of

life was about ‘putting oneself in the school’ of Christ, the Magister; and if

in this continual conversion, intellectual culture always remained necessary, it

stayed tightly linked to spiritual progress, that is to say, to an interior quest for

God.

One can see that, for its part, the secular churchfelt very early on the necessity

of organising the intellectual and religious education of those clerics called to

proclaim and explain the word of God, but education was also necessary for the

church to carry out its administrative duties, especially in the cathedral cities.

It was at this training of the teachers that the De Doctrina Christiana aimed

ﬁrst of all. In the second quarter of the sixth century, three texts in succession

prescribed, or projected, the establishment of new institutions, intended to

train future clerics. They appeared respectively in southern Gaul, in Spain

and in Rome. In 529 a council meeting in Provence, at Vaison-la-Romaine,

stipulated that the ‘priests installed in a parish’ should follow the customs,

already old, of Italy, and to ‘bring up religiously, as good fathers, the young

readers’ by teaching them the psalmody, the reading of the sacred texts, and the

Law of the Lord, ‘in order thus to ensure the emergence of worthy successors’.

Tw oyears later in 531, the Second Council of Toledo ordained that children

destined for the church ‘should be taught in the house of the Church in the

presence of the Bishop, by a person appointed to that post’ until the age of 18,

when they would choose between the church and the worldly life.

Finally,

in Rome, in 535, Cassiodorus planned to set up next to the library of Pope

Agapitus a sort of Christian university, on the model ‘of what had been done

formerly in Alexandria and of what was being done now in the Syrian town

of Nisibis’, that is to say of the Didascaleion of Alexandria at the time of

Reg. Ben. 55, 18–19:‘quae sunt necessaria...graﬁum...tabulas’.

Reg. Ben. prologue, 45: ‘Constituenda est ergo nobis dominici scola servitii.’ De Vog

e, La R

egle,

iv,p.63, admits that in this text ‘the scope of scola ...perhaps goes beyond our notion of school’,

meaning that it should have a multiple interpretation: cf. also Illmer (1971), p. 193. The context

invites both the military metaphor (militanda) and that of teaching (magisterio ...doctrinam).

Concilium Vasense c.1:‘Placuit ut omnes presbyteri, qui sunt in parrociis constituti, secundum

consuetudinem quam per totam Italiam satis salubriter teneri cognovimus, iuniores lectores . . .

secum in domo...recipiant, et eos quomodo boni patres spiritaliter nutrientes psalmis parare, divis

lectionibus insistere et in lege Domini erudire contendant, ut et sibi dignos successores provideant.’

Toletana Synodus ii (Second Council of Toledo), 1:‘ut mox cum detonsi vel ministerio electorum

contraditi fuerint, in domo ecclesiae sub episcopali praesentia a praeposito sibi debeant erudiri’. The

reading electorum (Mansi, followed by Vives) should perhaps be corrected to lectorum (reading in

the manuscript in the collection conciliaire of Novara).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and learning 745

Origen, and of the school of exegesis and theology of Nisibis in Asia Minor.

The failure of this plan combined with the desire to carry it through were to

encourage Cassiodorus, in retreat from the world, to bring it about in another

form a few decades later in the lands of Calabria, in the monasteries which he

founded at Vivarium.

New episcopal and parochial institutions came into existence as a result of

the pastoral cares of the bishops: it was in the canons of provincial synods that

they appeared ﬁrst of all.

The church’s awareness of its cultural responsibil-

ities could already be seen quite clearly at the beginning of the sixth century

in the life of one bishop from Provence: a century after Augustine, Caesarius,

bishop of Arles from 503 to 542, played a decisive role in the adaptation of

preaching to the Christian people. Like many bishops of preceding centuries,

he led a communal life with his clerics, he had them celebrate the three daily

ofﬁces in his presence, he instructed them, made them read and questioned

them on their readings. At the same time, he addressed to his lay listeners,

country folk in the main, a preaching adapted to their level of language, in

order to ensure a good reception. And he justiﬁed this use of a down-to-earth

language (sermo humilis)asareﬂection of Christ’s own humility.

This ideal of

clerical life and of clerical training, and the practice of a language intelligently

appropriate to the new conditions of the exercise of preaching, were to exert a

lasting inﬂuence on the culture of the clergy, and on the oral teaching dispensed

to Christian people by sermons and by the private reading of the Bible. The

historical and ethnic duality of the Roman civilisation, between ‘hairy Gaul’

and the ‘Province’, was intensifying during the late Empire, at which time Gaul

was divided into two civil dioceses.

The density of the Frankish occupation

in the north of the former ‘hairy Gaul’ had only accentuated the opposition

between the south, more deeply Romanised, and the north where a better-

balanced, mutual cross-culturalisation between Franks and Gallo-Romans was

developing. Germanic education, essentially oral, physical and military, came

into contact there with the Roman traditions of a written culture, which was

indispensable to the good administration of the kingdoms. In this new edu-

cation, given and received in the Germanic courts, the theoretical knowledge

of the ‘seven arts’ gave way to the acquisition of empirical and utilitarian

Cassiodorus, Institutiones, praef.: ‘ut, sicut apud Alexandriam multo tempore fuisse traditur institu-

tum, nunc etiam in Nisibi civitate. Syrorum Hebreis sedulo fertur exponi’.

For the details, see Scheibelreiter, chapter 25 above.

On Caesarius’ pastoral letter, and his desire to instruct the people and even to make them read the

Scriptures, see Delage (1971), pp. 143ff. On his theory and practice of the sermo humilis,Auerbach

(1958), pp. 25–53.

This can be seen at the beginning of the ﬁfth century in Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues i.27 and ii.1.

On this text, Fontaine (1983b), pp. 189–91 and (1994), pp. 17–32.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

746 jacques fontaine

techniques: surveying and architecture, medicine and law. But if one could

consider the court as a ‘management school’

one must observe that this

metaphor could already have been applied, as early as the end of the third cen-

tury, to the ‘Menian schools’ of Autun, restored by the emperors of the Tetrar-

chy with a view to training the managers whose number the new regime had

multiplied.

Whilst northern Gaul in the sixth century enjoyed a certain artistic and

cultural awakening, a Christian Latinity and culture of another style were

developing in the insular lands of the north-west. It was between 525 and 540

that the monk Gildas probably wrote in southern England his curious work

On the Ruin of Britain.Asthe ﬁrst literary witness to an insular Latin culture,

which was still (or already) most estimable, this book linked ‘lofty (affected)

vigour and baroque elegance’.

This strange mixture heralded the originality

of the insular Latin culture that would develop over the next century.

The stagnation or the ﬂowering of culture, in the different areas of Romania

which were engaged in distinct political evolutions, were accentuated in the

course of the decades which preceded and followed the year 600.Itwas during

this half-century (575–626), after the death of Justinian in 565, that the decline

of the Empire in the East grew worse, sorely tried by successive assaults that

came from the east and the north. Byzantine Africa withered into a growing

insecurity in the face of attacks from the Berbers in the interior. Italy was

colonised by the Lombards, whose invasion, starting in 568, plunged it yet

again, and for decades to come, into disorder and insecurity. In 590, when the

future Gregory the Great acceded to the pontiﬁcate, Rome was prey to the

ravages of ﬂooding, plague and famine.

In Gaul, in spite of political instability and civil wars caused by the divid-

ing up of kingdoms and the bloody rivalry of the magnates, written culture

spread amongst the Frankish nobility; it even attracted literate princes such

as Chilperic; and above all, it held together and developed in the 200 or so

monasteries which covered the Merovingian lands. At the same time a deter-

mined desire to reform (itself) was manifest in the whole church. This we see

through the Acts, written in a still worthy Latin, of almost thirty Councils held

in Gaul between 560 and 637.

Then, in a few years, Spain brought about

a political, religious and cultural recovery, which was unique in the West of

that time. Between 567 and 586 the peninsula was almost totally reuniﬁed by

Rich

e’s formula (1962), p. 284.

Panegyrici Latini 5 (= 9): ‘Eumenis pro instaurandis scholis oratio’; and more precisely ch. 5, which

evokes the future careers in high administration which await students from these schools.

Kerlou

egan’s phrase (1993), p. 9.

Edition, with an excellent French translation, by Gaudemet and Basdevant (1989). Study: Pontal

(1989).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and learning 747

the Arian king of Toledo, Leovigild, and the authorisation of mixed marriages

agreed to by this king hastened the Romanisation of the Visigoths and thus the

formation of a Hispano-Gothic nation.

Religious uniﬁcation then followed,

thanks to the conversion of his son and heir Reccared in 587, then of all the

Visigoths in Spain at the Council of Toledo in 589. The conditions necessary

for a restoration of culture and its transmission were present even before the

end of the sixth century. During a good third of the next century, until his

death in 636,Isidore, bishop of Seville, would devote his pen and his action to

these, both through the church and alongside literate monarchs such as King

Sisebut.

It is a sign of Italy’s distress in the middle of the sixth century that the most

innovative cultural effort took refuge in the shelter of a large estate, behind the

walls of two private monasteries, almost at the southern tip of the peninsula.

This was Vivarium, near what is now Squillace (Calabria), the family property

of Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, to which he ﬁnally withdrew

towards 550. There he brought to fruition his project of 535, but in another

form, more appropriate to the misfortunes of the times. In fact he organised a

monastic community there and set up a library, with a scriptorium where Greek

works were also translated; and he made it an intellectual and editorial cen-

tre that was exceptionally active. From Vivarium the instruments of a culture

which was both ancient and Christian would be transmitted across Europe.

In the open spirit of the Augustinian tradition, Cassiodorus thus taught to

western monasticism the art of reconciling the love of letters and the desire

for God.

His two books of Institutions bear a title inherited from Quintil-

ian, from Lactantius and from Roman legal literature, and whose meaning is

clearly pedagogical. The ﬁrst book, the Divine Institutions,isdevoted to sacred

reading and to the logical sequence of the different books of the Bible; the

second, the Human Institutions,toprofane culture, that is, in the main, to an

abridged version of the seven liberal arts which fourth-century Neoplatonism

had organised into an introduction to philosophy.

The pedagogical interest in this double aide-m

emoire is considerable, because

of its inﬂuence on the future of culture rather than its already considerably

reduced content. The collected presentation of each piece of knowledge is

in fact accompanied by a methodical bibliography and commentary, which

leads one to suppose that there was an exceptional concentration of

See further Barbero and Loring, chapters 7 and 13 above.

On Cassiodorus, O’Donnell (1979), and the Colloquium published by Leanza (1986).

In a philosophical education, this function was devolved into the seven arts by Porphyrius (234–

304?), as Hadot has shown (1984). This study plan was then Christianised by Augustine, who gave a

place to these arts in the initial programme of a Christian culture arranged around the understanding

of the Bible.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

748 jacques fontaine

manuscripts – biblical, patristic, ‘technical’, Latin and Greek – in the library

at Vivarium. The later diffusion of these, and also copies of translations by

Cassiodorus which got as far as Northumbria and the court of Charlemagne,

bears material witness to the profound impact that the work of Cassiodorus

was to leave on medieval culture.

Isidore was to reproduce (without saying

so) a large part of Book ii of Cassiodorus’ Institutions at the beginning of his

Etymologies, but he would do it in a spirit of direct and global return to the

past, whereas Cassiodorus made much clearer reference to the intermediary

authority of Augustine and of the De Doctrina Christiana.

The most modest

but perhaps most effective aspect of Cassiodorus’ teaching concerns the works

of his copyists. He saw to their material needs as well as to all the intellectual

and religious aspects of their work, and it was for them that he composed,

at the age of 90,atreatise On Orthography, which was a sort of Appendix to

his Institutions.

Retaining the taste that literate men of late antiquity had for

the copying and correction of manuscripts, Cassiodorus thus laid the foun-

dations for the practice and theory of the medieval monks. Their respect for

the nobility of the ars antiquaria,ofall the monastic works, resulted from the

understanding of preaching and of spiritual combat, which Cassiodorus gave

explicitly to that activity.

Having become pope in 590, some ﬁfteen years after the death of

Cassiodorus, Gregory displayed many points in common with him. He too

came from a great family, and he too had received an antique-style education;

he had also had a worldly career that had taken him as far as the Prefec-

ture of the City before he entered the Roman monastery of St Andrews.

But his profound monastic vocation inspired in him a more distant atti-

tude towards profane culture. As the biographer of St Benedict in the sec-

ond book of his Dialogues,Gregory was aware of and retained a longing

for the contemplative life of the cloisters. However, having become ‘God’s

Consul’, he managed the Roman papacy efﬁciently in a dramatic conjunc-

ture of cultures. It was in his commentaries on the Books of Kings that he

deﬁned, in an expressive metaphor, his considered and strongly Augustinian

position with regard to profane culture: one must cross the plain of liberal arts

See Courcelle (1948), pp. 342–88; and Holtz in Leanza (1986), pp. 281–301.

In Institutiones i.16.41, Cassiodorus recommended in a warm and explicit manner the reading of the

De Doctrina Christiana.But Isidore presented the content of these borrowings from Cassiodorus

without any reference, thus giving the reader the illusion of a direct access to the ancient wisdoms,

which he was offering. See Fontaine, in Leanza (1986), pp. 72–91.

See also Institutiones i.30, De arte antiquaria et de commemoratione orthographiae.

The copying of scriptural texts was for the monk a sort of ‘manual’ for preaching: ‘manu hominibus

praedicare, digitis linguas aperire’, and a ﬁght against Satan: ‘tot enim vulnera Satanas excipit, quot

antiquarius Domini verba describit’.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and learning 749

before climbing the mountain in order to raise oneself to the contemplative

life.

The quality of his language and of his style demonstrated that Gregory the

Great had used his time well whilst crossing this plain during his adolescence.

With a ﬁnely tuned awareness of the diversity of his public, their needs and

their levels of culture, Gregory never ceased to vary his precepts to preachers.

Attention to the diversity of listeners, of their status in life and of their capacity

to listen is a primordial theme of the advice that his Pastoral Care proposed.

He even gave some moderated examples of the stilus humilis in the Dialogues

where he dared to address himself to very different audiences, educated as well

as illiterate.

From a documentary point of view, these Livesofthe Fathers of

Italy offer, as it were, an instructive slice through the different levels of culture

of urban and rural populations of the beginning of the seventh century. The

letters and the sermons of Gregory attest not only to his literary talents, but

also to the still-living use of Latin in the Italy of his time. This puriﬁed culture,

which was still faithful to the ancient and patristic lessons, this language which

still knew how, with skill, to ‘make itself everything to everyone in order to save

them all’ (i Corinthians 9:22) would not cease to bear fruit amongst Gregory’s

readers, particularly amongst the shepherds of souls for whom he would remain

a model, including his severe but balanced attitude towards the culture which

was necessary and sufﬁcient for the Christian preacher.

Within the framework of a provincial bishopric, but also of a famous centre

for pilgrimages to the tomb of St Martin, Gregory, bishop of Tours from 572

to 594 (and thus scarcely any older than his contemporary Gregory the Great),

was a good example of the evolution of culture in south-central Gaul at the

end of the sixth century. He too was the son of a ‘senator’; he had received

an education, which was both familial and clerical, in the domus ecclesiae of

his uncle Gallus, bishop of Clermont-Ferrand. Having become Bishop of

Tours, he wrote the ten books of his History (for a long time known as the

History of the Franks). His initial r

esum

eofuniversal history is less original than

his portrayal, in Books vi–x,ofthe often violent vicissitudes of Merovingian

society between 580 and 591.Inthe preface of his History Gregory of Tours

deplored the decline of Gallo-Roman culture in severe terms; one would be

wrong to see in that only a form of locus humilitatis propriae,recommended

by the ancient rhetoricians and becoming a ritual clich

einthe prefaces of late

antiquity. This sense of deterioration, which his sometimes laborious, but so

picturesque and personal Latin communicates to the reader, comes from a still

Gregory, In Reges v.30:‘Hanc quippe saecularem scientiam omnipotens Deus in plano anteposuit,

ut nobis ascendendi gradum faceret, qui nos ad divinae Scripturae altitudinem levare debuisset.’

Commentaries: Rich

e(1972), pp. 197–200, and Dagens (1977), pp. 37ff.

Cf. Banniard (1992a), pp. 112–27.

750 jacques fontaine

lucid knowledge of what must have been a more correct language and thus

from a fairly ample and direct reading of ancient and patristic literary works.

His numerous hagiographical works, on the lives and miracles of Martin of

Tours and Julian of Brioude, of the Desert Fathers, of confessors and martyrs

of yesteryear, answered an increasing demand from uneducated listeners. Such

works bore witness to the increasing place which the production and the more

or less liturgical reading of these hagiographical texts was taking and would

take in the seventh century in the living culture of Christianity among the

Gauls. Gaul/Francia would produce more hagiographical texts than any other

area of Romania.

In the ﬁrst third of the seventh century, the sixteen still extant works of

Isidore of Seville, reorganiser of the church in Spain and friend of the princes

of Toledo, gave full expression to a rebirth of the Hispanic Latin culture which

had been heralded in the sixth century by the phenomena of peripheral cultural

revivals, from Justus of Urgel to Apringius of B

eja. Such had been above all the

reforming action and the rich and varied literary works of Martin of Braga, in

aGalicia which was still under Sueve rule.

The Isidorian renaissance was the result of an exceptional historical

conjuncture: the uniﬁcation of the kingdom, the conversion of the Visigoths,

and the birth of a Hispano-Gothic ideology. The craftsmen of this religious,

social and, in the widest sense, cultural change were Leander, the elder brother

of Isidore, the instigator of the Third Council of Toledo in 589, then Isidore

himself, organiser in 633 of the Fourth Council of Toledo, in respect of which

it has been possible to talk of a ‘constituent work’.

Both wrote in order to

support and develop their action: Leander by polemicising against Arianism,

Isidore by dedicating to different members of the new society which had sprung

from these changes – princes, bishops and clerics, monks and laity, Goths and

Romans – works that transmitted a new culture which was intellectual, moral,

historical and religious.

It is within the breadth of such a project that one must situate, without iso-

lating it, Isidore’s encyclopaedia of Etymologies ‘on the origin of certain things’.

This sort of ‘data bank’ in twenty books held in stock knowledge borrowed

On the last page of his Historiae,heinsisted upon excusing himself for the ‘rusticity’ of his style.

These declarations should not be taken literally nor considered as purely conventional protestations:

the truth no doubt lies somewhere between the two. See Heinzelmann (1994), especially pp. 7–10.

Martin, abbot then bishop of Braga from 561 to 580, extended his pastoral care from the still

half-pagan Galician peasants to the Sueve princes, for whom he wrote small manuals of practical

morals/ethics inspired by the works of Seneca. Other Hispanic writers of the second half of the

sixth century made the Mediterranean regions and the south-west of the peninsula illustrious: see

Fontaine (1997), vii,pp.774ff.

Orlandis and Ramos Liss

on (1986), ch. 4,p.261: La obra constituyente del IV Concilio de Toledo.

Education and learning 751

from ancient and patristic sources. The work took the form of entries of ety-

mologies and synonyms, but also of ‘differences’ and of simple glosses. But

this manual of education of erudite reference was also a dictionary which ﬁxed

the meaning of words, thus contributing to the defence and propagation of a

correct use of Latin vocabulary, and of a grammatical knowledge whose cate-

gories of thought and methods of work went back to Hellenistic culture.

The

Etymologies served, in short, as a cultural memory bank to which westernised

Latin intelligence and language would come constantly to stock up. Proof of

this lies in a diffusion of a work which was as exceptional by its rapidity and

its duration, as by its geographical spread and the number of its manuscript

copies.

Isidore joined to this manuals of sacred exegesis, historical works,

disciplinary and moral treatises for use by clerics and laity and even a monastic

Rule.

He was very careful to endow the new Hispanic nation, the beneﬁciary

of both Rome and the Gothic people, with a sort of historical and spiritual

charter. This ideology inspired the imagery of the Praise of Spain,aworkin a

lyrical tone which acts as a prologue to his History of the Goths: having espoused

Rome, Spain had just celebrated her second wedding with the people of the

Goths who had ‘seized’ her.

Hisnew vision of Hispanic history, however,

did not make Isidore in any way neglect universal history, literary history or

that of the institutions and rites of the church.

The rebuilding of Spain

and of her new culture culminated in a sort of manifesto for a new Christian

society, contemporary with and complementary to the provisions of the Fourth

Council of Toledo: that is, the three books of Sentences in which are formulated

the doctrine, spirituality and morality which should guide those responsible

for the new society.

But none is prophet in his own country: in the seventh

century Visigothic Spain would barely keep the promises of this great Isidorian

plan. Its realisation was to come up against the egoisms of a nobility incapable

of a new civic order, against the anarchy of a frustrated society, and against the

disorders sparked off by an ever more ferocious intolerance towards the Jews.

It was later, outside of Spain, that the ideas and the culture of Isidore would

Comprehensive study by Fontaine (1983a), including an important bibliography in the 2nd edition,

vol. iii.See also Fontaine (1996), and D

ıazyD

ıaz (1982).

A fundamental, comprehensive view, starting from codicological data, by Bischoff (1960).

De laude Spaniae (end): ‘Et licet te sibimet eadem Romulea virtus primum victrix desponderit, denuo

tamen Gothorum ﬂorentissima gens post multiplices in orbe victorias certatim rapuit et amavit.’

On this text and on the Isidorian exaltation of the regnum Gothorum, see Teillet (1986), pp. 463–502,

and especially pp. 498ff.

Chronicon; De Viris Illustribus; De Origine Ofﬁciorum (in two books). See Clavis Patrum Latinorum

(1995), nos. 1190–1215.

See the convincing studies by Cazier (1986), pp. 373–86, and (1994).

752 jacques fontaine

ﬁnd their most effective application in the reformatio of church and culture,

which we call the Carolingian renaissance.

There are good reasons why it would be the island races that became the most

effective diffusers of the Isidorian culture and of its ideal on the continent. Inthe

most ancient Irish and Anglo-Saxon Latin writing, the emphasis on erudition

and on grammatical thought was a response to the primordial needs of these

young Christianities, which had barely emerged from their pagan cultures and

from their native tongues. The double ﬂame of island culture, especially from

the second half of the sixth century onwards, would owe its inﬂuence not only

to the dynamism of the wandering apostolics of the Irish monks in Great Britain

and on the continent (the peregrinatio Scottorum) but primarily to the upsurge

of Latin culture in the islands: it was in 597 that the monk and missionary

Augustine, sent by Gregory the Great, became archbishop of Canterbury. A

little before this date, Columbanus had left Bangor to go from Ireland to the

continent. He and his disciples went there to create new monasteries, from

Burgundy, via Switzerland, as far as Cisalpina where Bobbio was founded in

614.InGreat Britain and in Ireland, the turn of the sixth century thus also

seemed to be a period of intense change.

By their action, their thought and their literary legacy, the great ‘founders of

the Middle Ages’ gave a fresh face to the culture of the seventh century. They

made use of the legacy of antique education and the new demands of a Christian

education in a pastoral impulse which differentiated between clerics, monks

and laity. Adapting it to the different conditions of their responsibilities and

of their respective commitments to religious life, they gave a positive impulse

to the diversiﬁed cultural activity of that century. It was an activity which was

to spread with particular vitality in the north and north-west, in regions where

the ecclesiastical and therefore cultural reformatio of the Carolingian age would

start to build up.

Spain lived on the crest of the Isidorian age, but without the remainder of

the century seeing any minds which were as original and creative as that

of Isidore. The royal city of Toledo, capital of the kingdom, was the cen-

tre of cultural activity. Many sons and daughters of the Gothic nobility came

there to receive an education. The monastery of Agali at the gates of the city

educated monks and clerics, but also lay people. Even at court, certain educated

princes followed the tradition founded by king Sisebut, the friend of Isidore,

exercising a sort of patronage and frequenting the archbishops of Toledo, of

whom several left grammatical, poetical, historical and theological works. The

most talented was Julian, bishop of the capital from 679 to 690. Theologian

On the Carolingian reception of Isidore, Fontaine (1992b). See also La Scuola,inSettimane (1972).