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

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Education and learning 753

and exegete, poet and liturgical writer, he was also the author of a grammar,

and the chronicler of the Rebellion of Paul against Wamba, the only work of

the Visigothic age whose very lively tales were comparable to those of Gregory

of Tours. At the same time, a very different literary activity was developing in

the north-west of the peninsula, in the mountainous solitudes of Bierzo. The

works of the monks Fructuosus and Valerius expressed the narrowly ascetic

ideal of an austere and rural Christian culture, quite removed from the Isido-

rian tradition and more analogous to that of the insular monks. During this

time the Latin culturalisation of the Lombards was much slower in Italy, even

if the arrival of a Catholic dynasty in Pavia hastened this process there after

650; but literary production only became perceptible again there from the next

century onwards.

Despite a certain atony in seventh-century continental Europe, including

among the Gauls/Franks who were scarcely distinguished by the mediocre

works of the chronicler known as Fredegar, of a Defensor of Ligug

eorofa

Theofrid of Corbie, the resumption of cultural activity can be measured in

quasi-material fashion, particularly in the second part of the century, through

the copying and the circulation of manuscripts. In this ﬁeld the progress made,

during the last half century, by codicological science nowadays provides the

means of following with a certain precision the circulation of books as well as

their carriers, from Spain to Ireland and to Germany, and from Rome as far

as the British Isles. This we can illustrate with a single example, the research on

the most ancient manuscript tradition of Isidore’s Treaty on Nature, which has

allowed us to see its diffusion in Europe and its successive editions in the courts

of the seventh and eighth centuries.

The stemma of these ancient manuscripts,

established by the traditional philological method of classiﬁcation according

to common faults, has been able to be projected into time and space, thanks

to the codicological analyses now available in the collection of the Codices

Latini Antiquiores.Ithas thus been possible to write a few novel pages of

cultural history on ‘the diffusion of De natura rerum in Europe from Sisebut

to Charlemagne’ and to show the routes taken in the seventh century by the

ancestors of the three groups of manuscripts – Hispanic, Gallic then Italic,

insular then Germanic – which transmitted the text to us.

It has even been

possible to determine that it was in the islands, and most probably in Ireland,

that the text was glossed and augmented by one chapter. Of course, we must

have as much critical apparatus as possible at our disposal in order to supply

the materials for a later study of the spelling and the quality of the Latin of the

Fontaine (1960).

Ibid., pp. 69–84, and the classic stemma of witnesses of the seventh and eighth centuries (facing

p. 70), projected on to a map (facing p. 84).

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754 jacques fontaine

copyists in a given scriptorium. Thus one can get an idea of the possibilities

offered by codicology, in tracing a concrete history of the living culture and a

mapped geography of the circulation of manuscripts: the philological task of

the textual editor has thus become inseparable from that of the historian, and

helps to open up new perspectives.

The journeys of the Scotti and their ideal of missionary peregrinatio con-

tributed in no small way to expediting the circulation of manuscripts between

the islands and the continent.

The movements of the Irishman Columbanus

are a classic example. At the beginning of the century he went from Burgundy

across the Alps, and new monastic foundations marked out his routes: from

Annegray and Luxeuil to St Gall, Bregenz and Bobbio. One other example is

notable: that of the Northumbrian abbot Benedict Biscop, who accomplished

no fewer than six journeys to Rome between 653 and 668.

Not only did his

toughness allow him to bring back to the north of England quantities of pre-

cious manuscripts, some of which even went back to copies from Vivarium.

Biscop also succeeded in bringing back to Northumbria the archichanter of

St Peter’s at Rome, in order to have him teach Latin chant directly to the

Northumbrian monks.

Such achievements were not isolated. They explain the rapid development

of Latin culture amongst the islanders and the quality of their knowledge

and of their Latin. The early arrival in Ireland of several works by Isidore

of Seville in the middle of the century illustrates the diversity of the sources

of this enrichment. In this island, which Rome had never conquered, the

Christianisation and the development of monastic life (so pre-eminent that the

bishops were abbots

), together with the adoption of Latin as a written cultural

language, rapidly brought about the appearance of a new literary production.

The latter co-existed, if not interacted, with Celtic literary traditions, as one

can see in the oldest Irish Christian hagiography.

One can see it too in the

singular poems of ‘hisperic’ Latinity, these strange Hisperica Famina (Irish or

perhaps Gallic?) whose title alone testiﬁes to an extreme research in lexical

hermetism.

The taste for rare words (sometimes borrowings from Greek

and Hebrew), intertwining constructions and rhythmic lines all make up a

reﬁned and artistic language whose obscurity is sometimes compensated for

Starting with the classic works by Levison (1946) and Laistner (1957). On Colombanus, see the

papers in Clarke and Brennan (1981), also the bibliography by de Prisco in Polara (1987), p. 278.On

the Irish and the continent, L

owe (1982) and Picard (1991).

On Benedict Biscop and his travels Hunter Blair (1970), pp. 155–83.

Courcelle (1948), pp. 356ff and 374ff.

On the issue of Irish abbot-bishops, see Stancliffe, chapter 15 above.

Forasubtle interpretation of these developments, see the exemplary study by Stancliffe (1992).

Starting from the annotated edition by Herren (1974) and (1987). Both have a detailed bibliography.

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Education and learning 755

by afreshness of inspiration, which is not without taste. From the memories

of these ‘wandering scholars’, descriptions of inland and coastal landscapes

deliver up the poetic keys of an original world, far removed from that of the

classical Mediterranean.

The inﬂuence of Celtic-Roman culture crossed, in England, with that of

the new missionaries who came from Rome to Canterbury in 669: the African

abbot Hadrian who had been bishop of Naples, and the eastern monk Theodore

of Tarsus.

The synthesis of these Roman, Gallo-Roman and Irish currents

was to ﬁnd its highest expression in the monasteries of Northumberland. The

literary and spiritual genius of the Anglo-Saxon monk the Venerable Bede

made him the last and not the least of the founders of the Middle Ages.

his Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede rightly paid homage to the

cultural work of the two Roman missionaries: ‘Both being abundantly educated

in sacred as well as secular letters, never surely was there a happier time since

the Angles conquered Britain.’

It was only in the middle of the century that

this Roman inﬂuence had begun to penetrate the Northumbrian foundations

of Lindisfarne (established in 635 by Aidan of Iona) and of Whitby.

It could

be seen clearly in the monastic education dispensed by the twin monasteries

of Wearmouth and Jarrow, founded in 674 and 685 respectively.

In the course of the half century which he spent in Jarrow (between 685 and

735), Bede acquired his immense knowledge and rediscovered the secret of a

pure Latinity, linking Roman gravity to a classical ﬂuidity. He described his

serene and hardworking life, divided between intellectual and spiritual joys:

‘Living since then all the time of my life in this same monastery, I devoted all

my cares to meditating upon the Scriptures, and whilst observing the regular

discipline and the practice of singing each day in church, I always found it

sweet to learn, to teach or to write.’

Is there a ﬁner expression of the monastic

alliance between the love of letters and the desire for God? Still, one must note

the way in which Bede is no longer Isidore. Like Aldhelm of Malmesbury in

the south of England, Bede distrusted rhetoric and dialectic and also ancient

cosmology (it is a pity that it had not been Christianised by Isidore), and he

Cf. Bischoff and Lapidge (1995). For England in the seventh century, see also Thacker, chapter 17

above.

In addition to Hunter Blair (1970), see Bonner (1976) and King and Stevens (1979). Also Diesner

(1981).

Bede, HE iv.2:‘et quia litteris sacris simul et saecularibus ...abundanter ambo erant instructi . . .

neque umquam prorsus ex quo Brittaniam petierunt Angli, feliciora fuere tempora’.

On Iona and its inﬂuence, Stancliffe,chapters 15 and 16 above, and on the Northumbrian monasteries,

Thacker, chapter 17 above.

Bede, HE i.5, 24:‘cunctumque ex eo tempus vitae in eiusdem monasterii habitatione peragens,

omnem meditandis scripturis operam dedi; atque inter observantiam disciplinae regularis, et cotid-

ianam cantandi in ecclesia curam, semper aut discere aut docere aut scribere dulce habui.’

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756 jacques fontaine

turned most frequently to the sole authority of the Bible. Amongst profane

wisdom he tolerated only a grammar purged of all allusion to antique paganism,

and the techniques which made possible the calculating of periods in monastic

life: cosmography, astronomy and calendar computation. Despite his praise of

the profane and sacred knowledge of Theodore and of Hadrian, he well and

truly renounced ancient culture as such, at least in theory.

Insular culture was to work wonders on the continent, in the restoration

there of the observance of the precepts which ruled monastic life and also in

the correct application of the Latin language, indispensable to the elementary

culture of the monks and the good keeping of the services. Faithfulness to the

old and new rules, which resulted from this contribution, was expressed by

the diffusion of the so-called ‘mixed’ Rule of Benedict and Columbanus in the

continental monasteries of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Moreover, the

pure insular Latin of which Bede was to leave the most polished literary models

struggled effectively here against the graphical, if not already grammatical,

corruption of the Latin which many continentals practised, even the litterati.

It was because, despite their bilingualism, Celts and Saxons who had thus

become Latinophones, spoke and wrote an acquired Latin language without

any connection with their maternal language, Celtic or Germanic, that this

rather stiff language was paradoxically more correct than that of what would

become the Romance-speaking lands, where the language was bastardised by

the accelerated evolution of a spoken Latin from the old Roman stock. Later

on, this reimportation of a sort of colonial Latin from Ireland and Britain

slowed down the divergence between written and spoken Latin, and it helped

to consolidate the positions of Latin culture on the continent. A little later,

however, the refound awareness of classical correction would only increase

the feeling of distance, henceforward insurmountable, between the written

and spoken languages. The emergence of the continental romance languages

would follow.

Anew cultural species was in the process of being born from these contacts.

In Frankish Gaul, as in Spain, whilst some classical traits ﬂourished in the Latin

texts edited by hardly literate scribes, such as in the Formulary of Marculf and

the Chronicle of Fredegar, or on the inscribed slates of the Visigoths,

it was the

reading of ancient and patristic works, including those of the great writers of

the beginning of the century, that supported the effort to restore a Latin which

was faithful to the norms of the traditional school. But this effort came up

against the lowering of the level of teaching then being given in the bishoprics

This mixed form spread particularly in the foundations of Queen Balthild from 650 onwards. One

can ﬁnd it in the eighth century in the abbey of St Wandrille: see Fontaine (1982). On Balthild,

Fouracre, chapter 14 above.

Editions of the slates by Velazquez (1989) and (1991). But this is still Latin, in the judgement of D

ıaz

ıaz (1992).

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Education and learning 757

and the monasteries. The hagiographers nevertheless allow us to glimpse the

variable modalities of the scholars’ training of the seventh century when they

sketch the infancy and youth of future saints.

Besides the education given

in the bishoprics and monasteries, one can see from these texts that a certain

intellectual and/or spiritual initiation remained guaranteed in several places.

First of all in the family, which sometimes entrusted the child to a preceptor;

then in the public schools, for which the bishops continued to assume the

patronage in certain towns; lastly in the princely courts, where the adolescent

was often taken in charge by a nutritor who guaranteed that he had some sort of

material, moral, intellectual and even religious tutelage. Except for the child’s

initial education in the family, there was scarcely any canonic order in the

subsequent attendance at these different places by adolescents; for this order

varied at random in the individual biographies. The methods and the content

were different depending on whether it was a monk, a cleric or a layman who

was being educated, even if many examples showed a great variety of movement

or crossings between these three ways. One can also distinguish geographical

divergences: the south remained more faithful to the antique legacy, the north

was more a tributary of Celtic and Germanic customs. The diversity of methods

and objectives thus reﬂected, in theory and practice, the differentiation of the

new societies in the making. But these latter all took pains to maintain the

practice of writing, indispensable to administration as well as to religious life,

even when faced with popular cultures whose oral traditions were strengthened

and renewed by the constant practice of Christian liturgy, through listening to

readings, homilies and prayers, and the singing of psalms and hymns.

The tension between the spoken and the written language had not yet

reached breaking point. The precepts and diversiﬁed linguistic practice of a

Gregory the Great remained a model for the preachers who tried very hard to

lower the stylistic level of their Latin in order to be understood by all their

listeners. In northern Gaul, the Life of St Eligius, composed shortly after his

death in 660 by his friend Bishop Audoin of Rouen, shows that at the end of

the seventh century communication in the Latin language between a priest and

his listeners was still acceptable on condition that the speaker forced himself

to ‘give his pronunciation as rustic an inﬂection as his style’. The fragments of

the sermons of Eligius, which were transcribed in this Life, bear witness to this

effort at simpliﬁcation, even if it remains ‘highly likely that part of the message

escaped its listeners’.

The cultural divergence between East and West thus reached a critical degree

at the end of the seventh century. It had been accentuated by the mutual

distrust engendered by the military adventures of Justinian in the western

Heinzelmann (1990).

VanUytfanghe (1974) and, for the oral culture, Richter (1994).

This is the clear and nuanced conclusion of Banniard (1992b).

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758 jacques fontaine

Mediterranean, and no less by the theological positions he adopted. It had

been aggravated by the increasing ignorance of Greek in the West, and of Latin

in the East where, under Heraclius, it ceased to be the ofﬁcial language of the

Empire.

In the West, in the course of these two centuries, the Greek language

and Greek culture ended up by retaining no more than a few bridgeheads in

certain privileged centres. In the time of Bishop Martin, Braga, for example,

had a school of monastic translators, and for a few decades Canterbury saw

the spreading inﬂuence of the twin Greek and Roman culture of Theodore of

Tarsus, but neither the Byzantine ofﬁcials of Ravenna nor the refugees from the

East in Rome seem to have contributed towards any local restoration of Greek

language or culture. Only Sicily remained the foyer of a Hellenism sufﬁciently

vibrant for the emperor Constans II in 660 to have thought of transferring

his capital there when the Empire was nearly overwhelmed by Islam and by

Slavs; but this Hellenism remained insular and, as such, isolated. Byzantine

Africa itself fell into the hands of the Arabs who seized Carthage in 695 before

occupying the greater part of Spain from 711 onwards: Byzantium then lost its

last positions in the western Mediterranean, with the exception of the exarchate

of Ravenna.

All these Arab conquests of lands which were formerly Roman, were to bring

in their wake a long exodus of educated men, and thus of manuscripts, towards

the Christian territories situated to the north-west of the Mediterranean, a

factor which was most important in preparing the way for the Carolingian

renaissance. This latter was an indirect consequence of the political change

which one can see beginning at the battle of Tertry in 687. The victor at Tertry

was Pippin of Herstal, ‘mayor of the palace’ of Austrasia, and victory heralded

the eventual transfer of sovereign power from the Merovingians to the Pippinid

family.

Educated in St Denis, the Pippinids (or, later, ‘Carolingians’) were to

concentrate on the abbeys in the north and the east of Gaul, especially those

of their own region, between the rivers Scheldt and Meuse. They were to value

monastic education so much that they had it given to their children. In the

same d

epartement (nowadays the Somme), where the battle of Tertry was to be

fought, the Irish founded a monastery in the second half of the seventh century

at Peronna Scottorum (on the site of the future town of P

eronne) near the tomb

of their compatriot St Fursey who died about 650. This monastic establishment

was to become one of the most active missionary bases of their religious and

cultural inﬂuence on the continent, on both sides of the Rhine. It was also

at the end of the seventh century that Latin culture began once again to be

the object of ofﬁcial recognition in northern Italy. Byzantines and Lombards

SeeBerschin (1968) and (1980); also Herren (1988).

Foradifferent view of the Battle of Tertry and its consequences, Fouracre, chapter 14 above.

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Education and learning 759

signed a peace treaty there in 680; and a few years later King Cunipert solemnly

welcomed a Latin grammarian to his court at Pavia, whilst a literary creation

worthy of this name was reborn: in prose, with the writing of the Origo Gentis

Langobardorum towards 671;inpoetry with the composition of the Rythmus

de Concilio Ticinensi in 698.

Whilst signs of such a renewal were multiplying across the Christian West,

the Islamic grip was tightening its hold on all the Byzantine East – with

the exception of Asia Minor – and Constantinople was besieged ﬁve times

by Arab troops between 673 and 677. The inevitable decline of cities, and

the destruction and massacres provoked by these invasions dealt blows to

ancient and Christian Hellenism which could scarcely be put right again, and

to scholastic institutions which had hardly changed their programmes or their

methods since the separation of the two partes imperii in 395. These disasters

brought about a veritable rupture of cultural traditions in the thus reduced

Empire.

Hence the production in Byzantium of ﬂorilegia and of apocalypses,

but also of the historical ﬁction of the ‘patriographers’ who imaginatively tried

to rewrite the past in order to compensate for the present-day reality of despair.

Inasort of examination of conscience, the men of these generations tried to

redeﬁne their knowledge and to ‘reach a safety and permanence in the midst

of uncertainty’. Thus, in an as yet obscure way, they prepared for a profound

change in Byzantine culture, and thus for the painful birth of another Middle

Ages.

On this late continuity and its violent break, see Lemerle (1971), although this excellent work

unfortunately separates Christian culture and production. See also Kazhdan (1983) and Wilson

(1983).

The exploration of the crisis of conscience and of the slow changes that affected Byzantine culture

in the seventh century has been undertaken in particular by Cameron (1992), from whom this ﬁnal

paragraph takes its inspiration.

chapter 28a

ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF

WESTERN EUROPE

Ian Wood

The end of the West Roman Empire led to the fracturing of western Europe

into a host of sub-Roman states. The new masters of what had been the west

Roman provinces were for the most part Germanic war-leaders, although in the

western parts of Britain there was a resurgence of Celtic power, while Ireland

and much of Scotland had never been subject to Rome. The emergence of

Germanic, and the development of Celtic kingdoms introduced or at least gave

greater prominence to non-Roman artistic traditions, especially in metalwork

and subsequently in manuscript illumination. At the same time Romancultural

traditions did continue, and indeed develop, and not only in those parts of the

West which were reconquered by the Byzantines, like Ostrogothic Italy. The

barbarian kingdoms of the West modelled themselves in many respects on the

Roman Empire, and this modelling included the acquisition of Roman objects

and the commissioning of objects in Roman style. Yet the desire to ape Rome

was not strong enough to create anything like a uniﬁed artistic culture.

Neither did the growing uniformity of religious belief create such a culture,

even though Christianity gave the West a single religion, a common set of

religious practices (for instance in the liturgy and pilgrimage), and, perhaps,

a more uniﬁed exegetical position for understanding art.

Individual scenes

from the Bible were depicted time and again. Furthermore, the leading saints

of the church were provided with a recognisable iconography, making them an

identiﬁable presence in much of the post-Roman West.

Despite all this, the

dominant feature of western art and architecture in the centuries following the

demise of the West Roman Empire was the absence of any single deﬁning style.

As a corollary, however, sheer variety and experiment is in itself a distinguishing

mark of the period.

Elsner (1995).

On the change within artistic representation, see Brown (1999) and Wood (1999).

Nees (1997), p. 966.

760

Art and architecture of western Europe 761

architecture

In many respects architecture was the least innovative area of western art in

the early Middle Ages. Unlike Byzantium, western Europe did not witness

anything as striking as the developments which culminated in the building of

the dome of Hagia Sophia. Certainly there were centrally planned buildings,

most notably baptisteries, but also churches such as S. Vitale in Byzantine

Ravenna. For the baptismal liturgy a square, circular or octagonal building

was functional, and also ideologically appropriate, since such shapes had been

associated with the architecture of tombs: and what was baptism but the death

of the Old Adam and the birth of the New?

Most western church architecture,

however, derived in one way or another from the rectangular basilica, whose

form was well suited to the requirements of the liturgy of the mass.

Yet there were other pressures which determined the shape of early medieval

churches. Even in Rome buildings were reused, either in their entirety or as

spolia.Several of the most important papal churches of the sixth and seventh

centuries were adapted from previous buildings: SS. Cosmas and Damian

(c.530) was created out of two imperial buildings, S. Maria ad Martyres (609)

was created out of the Pantheon, and S. Adriano (c.630) had been the senate

house itself.

The ﬁrst and last of these were rectangular in plan. In all three

cases the take-over of a previous building must also have signalled something of

the papacy’s relation to the past: to the old administrative structures of imperial

or senatorial Rome or to the failed religion of the pagans. The papacy was heir

to one and victor over the other.

There were, however, some major churches which were ‘built from the

ground up’: including Pope Pelagius’ S. Lorenzo (c.580) and Pope Honorius’

S. Agnese (c.630), both of them, signiﬁcantly, overlying catacombs outside the

walls of the city.

Oneoftheir functions must have been to cope with pilgrims

in search of the shrines of the martyrs. The most inﬂuential piece of Roman

architecture to be erected in this period was, however, not a complete church,

but rather the new annular crypt created by Gregory the Great (590–604), built,

like the shrines of Laurence and Agnes, to cope with the crowds of pilgrims:

in this case for those visiting the chief shrine of Rome, that of St Peter.

New building was more obviously in evidence in Ravenna, the administra-

tive capital of Byzantine Italy. The city had seen a building boom through-

out the ﬁfth century, having become the favoured city of the last western

rulers of the Theodosian dynasty. There the empress Galla Placidia (d. 450)

built a palace chapel, the basilican church of S. Giovanni Evangelista (post-

425), and a complex dedicated to the Holy Cross, which included a shrine to

Krautheimer (1942).

Krautheimer (1980), pp. 71, 72.

Krautheimer (1980), pp. 83–5.

Krautheimer (1980), p. 86.

762 ian wood

St Lawrence, now known (wrongly) as the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. At

the same time the bishops of Ravenna were involved in building the city’s

cathedral and its baptistery. This monumental tradition continued under the

rule of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic (493–526), who was himself buried

just outside Ravenna, in a remarkable two-storied mausoleum, whose only

unquestionably Germanic feature is a thin ornamental frieze which recalls bar-

barian metalwork. (Plate 1).

The majority of the buildings surviving from

Theoderic’s reign, however, are churches, notably those constructed for the

king’s Arian followers, among them the basilican court chapel, now known

as S. Apollinare Nuovo, and the Arian baptistery. The greatest of Ravenna’s

surviving Catholic churches, S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe, were also

planned in the period of Ostrogothic rule. They were, however, completed

after the Byzantine reconquest of Ravenna in 540,

when they probably ben-

eﬁted from imperial largesse: certainly the church of S. Vitale boasts capitals

supplied from the imperial quarries of Proconnesos in the Sea of Marmara.

Ravenna was not the only Adriatic city to gain a ﬁne new church in the mid-

sixth century. Scarcely less impressive than the great Ravenna churches is the

surviving episcopal complex of basilica, atrium and baptistery, built by Bishop

Euphrasius in the Istrian town of Porec.

The Euphrasiana also seems to have

beneﬁted from Justinian’s support, boasting marble capitals from Byzantium.

Elsewhere, in the West, however, the history of architecture is difﬁcult to

follow. Few standing buildings of the Germanic successor states of western

Europe can be attributed with certainty to the sixth and seventh centuries.

In Visigothic Spain there is a handful of possible examples, among them the

crypt of the cathedral at Palencia, and the churches of San Juan de Ba

nos

(Plate 2), Quintanilla de las Vi

nas and San Pedro de la Nave.

This last church

was moved wholesale from its original site, and the authenticity of parts of its

reconstruction is questionable. In any case its original date of construction is

unclear. So too the building of Quintanilla de las Vi

nas presents a considerable

chronological problem, though an inscription recording the restoration of the

church in 879 provides a clear terminus ante quem for the ﬁrst phase of the

monument, which seems to be Visigothic. Another inscription, of the year

661,provides a more ﬁrm date for the building of Reccesuinth’s aisled church

of San Juan de Ba

nos, though it is known from excavation that the east end

of the church, which was originally trident shaped, has been radically altered.

Despite the problems of dating these buildings and establishing their original

form, it is certain that stone buildings, some of them aisled, were erected in

Deichmann (1974), p. 221.

Deichmann (1976), pp. 48–9, 234–5.

Deichmann (1976), pp. 96–105.

Prelog (1994).

Fontaine (1973), pp. 173–7, 195–209.