"Men shook hands on meeting as a pledge of peace through unreadiness to draw a sword. Titles were innumerable. In a hundred grades of dignity and by a charming custom each dignitary was addressed by his title and his Christian name or the name of his estate.

"A code of manners was drawn up for polite society in any circumstance -- at home, at the dance, on the street, at tournament, at court, ladies had to lern how to walk, curtsey, ride horseback, play, carry falcons gracefully on the wrist.

"All this, and a like code for men, constituted courtoisie, the manners of the court, courtesy.

"The poor for charity, the rich for fee or a gift, would be sheltered en route by convents or monastieries. As early as the eighth century monks established hospices in the passes of the Alps. Some monasteries had great guest-houses capable of shletering 300 wayfarers, and stabling their horses.

"Most travelers, however, put up at wayside inns. Rates were low there and a wench might be had at a reasonable rate, if he guarded his purse. Offered such comforts, many braved the dangers of travel -- merchants, bankers, priests, diplomats, pilgrims, students, monks, tourists, tramps.

"The mighty and the lowly mingled now and then -- when the king held a public assembly of his vassals and distributed food to the crowd -- when the aristocratic cavalry performed martial maneuvers -- when some prince or princess, king or queen, entered the city in panoplied state and masses lined the highway to feed the pageantry -- or when a tournament or trial by combat was opened to the public eye.

"Planned spectacles were a vital part of medieval life -- church processions, political parades, guild celebrations, filled the streets with banners, floats, wax saints, fat merchants, prancing knights, and military bands.

"Traveling mummers staged short plays in the village or city square. Minstrels sang and played and strummed romantic tales. Acrobats tumbled and juggled and men and women walked or danced on tightropes across mortal chasm.

"Our general impression suggests a wider gap between moral theory and practice in the Middle Ages than in other epochs of civilization.

"Medieval Christendom was apparently as rich as our own irreligious age in sensuality, violence, drunkenness, cruelty, coarseness, profanity, greed, robbery, dishonesty, and fraud. It seems to have outdone our time in the enslavement of individuals but not to have rivaled it in the economic enslavement of colonial areas or defeated states.

"It surpassed us in the subjection of women. It hardly equaled us in immodesty, fornication, and adultery, or in the immensity and murderousness of war.

"Compared with the Roman Empire from Nerva to Aurelius, medieval Christendom was a moral setback. But much of the Empire had in Nerva's day enjoyed many centuries of civilization while the Middle Ages, through most of their duration, represented a struggle between Christian morality and a virile barbarism that largely ignored the ethics of the religion whose theology it indifferently received.

"The intellectual virtues naturally declined in the Age of Faith. Intellectual conscience (fairness with the facts) and the search for truth were replaced by zeal and admiration for sanctity and a sometimes unscrupulous piety.

"'Pious frauds' of textual doctoring and documentary forgery seemed negligible venial sins. The civic virtues suffered from concentration on the after life but more from the disintegration of the state. Nevertheless there must have been some patriotism, however local, in the men and women who built so many cathedrals and some lordly town halls.

"In the Eastern Empire the old skills were never lost. It was above all from the Greek East and Byzantine Italy that artists and art themes now entered the life of the resurrected West.

"Charlemagne drew into his service Greek artists fleeing from Byzantine Iconoclasts. Hence the art of Aachen married Byzantine delicacy and mysticism to German solidity and earthiness.

"The monk artists of Cluny, inaugurating in the tenth century a new era in Western architecture and adornment, began by copying Byzantine models. The school of monastic art developed at Monte Cassino by Abbot Desiderius was taught by Greek teachers on Byzantine lines. When Honorius wished to decorate San Paolo fuori le mura he sent to Venice for mosaicists.

"Those who came were steeped in the Byzantine tradition. Colonies of Byzantine artists could be found in a score of Western cities. It was their style of painting that molded Duccio, Cunabue, and the early Giotto himself.

"Byzantine or Oriental motives -- palmertes, acanthus leavs, animals within medallions -- came to the West on textiles and ivories and in illiminated manuscripts and lived hundreds of years in Romanesque ornament.

"Syrian, Anatolian, Persian forms of architecture -- the vault, the dome, the tower, flanked facade, the composite column, the windows, grouped by two or three under a binding arch -- appeared again in the architecture of the West.

"There was a somber and static quality in Byzantine art, a fragile and feminine elegance in Arabic ornament that could never present the dynamic and masculine vitality of a rebarbarized and reinvigorated West.

"Nations that were rising out of the Dark Ages toward the noon of the thirteenth century preferred the noble grace of Giotto's women to the stiff Theodoras of Byzantine mosaics and, laughing at the Semitic horror of images, they transformed mere decoration into the smiling angel of the Reims Cathedral and the Golden Virgin of Amiens.

"Theophilus -- 'lover of God' in the monastery of Helmershausen near Paderhorn -- wrote about 1190 a Schedula diversarum artium:-

'Theophilus, a humble priest addresses his words to all who wish, by the practical work of their hands, and by the pleasing meditation of what is new, to put aside all sloth of mind and wandering of spirit. Here shall such men find all that Greece possesses in the way of diverse colors and mixtures -- all that Tuscany knows of the working of enamels -- all that Arabia has to show of works ducile, fusible, or chassed -- all the many vases and sculptured gems and ivory that italy adorns with gold -- all that France prizes in costly variety of windows -- all that is extolled in gold, silver, copper, or iron, or in subtle working of wood or stone.'

"And the first and basic purpose of their art is the adornment of their work, their bodies, and their homes.

"Thousands of woodworkers used knife, drill, gouge, chisel, and polishing materials to carve tables, chairs, benches, chests, caskets, cabinets, stairposts, wainscots, beds, cupboards, buffets,icons, altarpieces, choir stalls -- with an incredible variety of forms and themes in high or low relief, and often with a mischievous humor tht recognizd no barrier between the sacred and the profane.

"On the misericords one might find figures of misers, gluttons, gossipers, grotesque beasts and birds with human heads.

"In Venice the wood carvers sometimes made frames more beautiful and costly than the pictures they enclosed.

"Henry III of England had a 'great cameo' valued at $40,000. Baldwin II brought a still more celebrated cameo from Constantinople to house it at Paris in Sainte Chapell.

"Ivory was painstakingly carved throughout the Middle Ages -- combs, boxes, handles, drinking horns, icons, book covers, diprychs and triptychs, episocpal staffs and croziers, relinquaries, shrines.

"Astonishingly close to perfection is a thirteenth century ivory group in the Louvre depicting the Descent from the Cross.

"The mosaic art was now in its old age but in the course of 2000 years it had learned many subtleties.

"To make the gold ground they loved so well, mosaicists wrapped gold lear around glass cubes, covered the leaf with a thin film of glass to keep the gold from tarnishing and then, to avoid surface glare, laid the gilded cubes in slightly uneven planes.

"Like so many phases of medieval activity, it reached its Western apogee in the thirteenth century. Never again has it been so delicate, inventive, or profuse. The stiff figures and drapes and hard greens and reds of the eleventh century were gradually replaced with forms of grace and tenderness in richer hues on backgrounds of blue or gold.

"There was among these arts a free trade in themes and styles, a continuous interaction and sometimes the same artist practiced them all. We do injustice for art and artist alike when we separate one art too sharply from the rest or the arts from the life of their time.

"Reality is always more integrated than our chronicles. The historian disintegrates for convenience' sake the elements of a civilization whose components flowed as a united stream.

"The art of painting glass had been known to antiquity but chiefly in the form of glass mosaic.

"Gregory of Tours filled the windows of St. Martin's with glass 'of varied colors' and in the same century Paul the Silentiary remarked the splendor of sunlight as filtered through the variously colored windows of St. Sophis's at Constantinople. In these cases, so far as we know, there was no attempt at making pictures with the glass.

"But about 980 Archbishop Adallero of Reims adorned his cathedral with windows 'containing histories.'

"In 1052 the chronicle of St. Benignus described a 'very ancient painted window' representing St. Paschasius in a church at Dijon. Here was historiated glass but apparently the color was painted upon the glass, not fused into it.

"When Gothic architecture reduced the strain on walls and made space for larger windows, the abundant light thereby admitted into the church allowed -- indeed, demanded -- the coloring of the panes.

"Something had remained, especially in France, to excite the imagination of barbarism tamed and a Christian culture coming of age.

"In this art, as in others, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved old models and skills, had overlaid them with Asiatic conventions and mysticism and had redistributed to the West the seeds that had come to it from Rome.

"Greek carvers went to Germany after Theophano married Otto II. They went to Venice, Ravenna, Rome, Naples, Sicily, perhaps to Barcelona and Marseille. From such men, and from the Moslem artists of his Regno, the sculptors of Frederick II may have learned their trade.

"When barbarism became rich it could afford to wed beauty. When the Church became rich she took sculpture, like the other arts into the service of her creed and ritual.

"If architecture is the art of designing and beautifying a building and directing its construction, we must reject, for Gothic, the old view that the priests or monks were the architects. Their function was to formulate their needs, conceive a general plan, secure a location, and raise funds.

"Before 1050 it was usual for the clergy, especially the Cluniac monks, to design and superintend as well as to plan.

"But for the great cathedrals -- all after 1050 -- it was found necessary to engage professional architects who, with rare exceptions, were neither monks nor priests.

"The architect would not receive that title until 1563. His medieval name was 'master builder,' sometimes 'master mason.' These terms reveal his origin. He began as an artisan physically engaged in the work that he directed.

"In the thirteenth century, as wealth permited greater edifices and specialization, the master builder was one who -- no longer sharing in the physical work -- submitted designs and competitive estimates, accepted contracts, made ground plans and working drawings, procured materials, hired and paid artists and artisans, and supervised the construction from beginning to end.

"We know the names of many such architects after 1050 -- of 137 Gothic architects in medieval Spain alone. Some of them inscribed their names on their buildings and a few wrote books about their craft.

"In Venice the Byzantine influence continued.

"St. Mark's added ever new decorations, pinnacles, and spoils but always in the manner of Constantinople crossed with that of Baghdad.

"Probably through Venice, perhaps through Genoa or Marseille, the Byzantine style of domes placed with pendentives upon a Greco-cruciform base entered France and appeared in the churches of St. Etienne and St. Front at Perigueux and in the cathedrals of Cahors and Angouleme.

"In 1172 when Venice decided to restore and enlarge the Palace of the Doges, she took a medley of styles -- Roman, Lombard, Byzantine, Arabic -- and united them in a masterpiece that Villehardouin in 1202 thought moult riche et haiux and which still remains the chief glory of the Grand Canal.

No definition of an architectural style has ever escaped exceptions. The works of man, like those of nature, resent generalizations and flaunt their individuality in the face of every rule.

Mal has kindly offered to do what she has been doing for years (how many, Mal?) and that is be the facilitator while I am gone.

Thank you, Mal!!

"The Gothic style was not a virgin birth. A hundred traditions joined in a fertilizing flow -- Roman basilicas, arches, vaults, and clerestories -- Byzantine themes of ornament -- Armenian, Syrian, Persian, Egyptian, Arabic ogives, groined vaults, and clustered piers -- Moorish motifs and arabesques -- Lombard ribbed vaults and facade towers -- the Germanic flair for the humorous and grotesque.

"But why did these streams of influence converge in France?

"Italy, as in wealth and heritage the favored country of Western Europe, might have led the Gothic flowering but she was the prisoner of her classic inheritance.

"Italy exepted, France was in the twelfth century the richest and most advanced nation of the West. She above all others had manned and financed the Crusades and profited from their cultural stimulus. She led Europe in education, literature, and philosophy and her craftsmen were conceded to be the best this side of Byzantium.

"By the time of Philip Augustus the royal power triumphed over feudal disunity and the affluence, power, and intellectual life of France were congregating in the king's own domain -- that Ile de France loosely definable in the region of the middle Seine. Along the Seine, Oise, Marne, and Aisne a fruitful commerce moved, leaving behind a welath that turned to stone in cathedrals at Paris, St. Denis, Senlis, Mantes, Noyon, Soisson, Laon, Amiens, and Reiims.

"French architects and craftsmen accepted foreign commissions and everywhere the new art was called opus Francigenum - work born in France.

"England welcomed it because she was in the twelfth century half French. The Channel was but a river between two sides of a British realm that included half of France. Of that realm Rouen was the cultural capital.

"English Gothic derived from Normandy rather than from the Ile de France and kept in a Gothic frame the Norman massiveness. The transition from Romanesque to Gothic was almost simultaneous in England and France. About the same time that the pointed arch was being used at St. Denis it was appearing in Durham and Gloucester cathedrals at Fountains, Abbey and Maimesbury.

"Henry III, who had made Edward the Confessor his patron saint, felt that the Norman church built by Edward was unworthy to house Edward's bones.

"He ordered his artists to replace it with a Gothic edifice in the French style. For this purpose he raised by taxation what we may diffidently equate at $90,000,000 today. The work began in 1245 and continued until Henry's death in 1272.

"The design followed Reims and Amiens, even to admitting the Continental polygonal apse. The sculptures of the north porch, portraying the Last Judgment, were influenced by those of Amiens' west front.

"In the spandrels of the transept triforium are remarkable reliefs of angels. One angel in the south transept offers to the centuries a tender, gracious face rivaling the cherubim of Reims. Over the doorway of the chapter house are two figures representing the Annunciation, and showing the Virgin in a chrming gesture of modest deprecation.

"Even finer are the early royal tombs in the Abbey and, best of all, that of Henry III himself -- an ideally handsome and well-proportioned improvement upon the stout and stunted King.

"St. Gudule's, proud on its hill in Brussels, was begun in 1220. Its chief glory is its stained glass.

"St. Bavon's, at Ghent, built a Gothic choir in 1274.

"St. Rembaut's, at Mechlin, surveyed the countryside from huge towers never finished but still too ornate.

"Flanders was more interested in textiles than in theology. Its charcteristic architecture was civic. Its earliest Gothic triumphs were the cloth halls at Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. That of Ypres was the most majestic:-a 450-feet-long facade of three-storied arcades, with columnaded corner pinnacles and stately central tower. It was reduced to ruins in the First World War.

"The cloth Hall of Bruges still dominates its square with a superb and world-famous belfry.

"In general the grace of the Gothic style did not accord with the sturdy force of the Teutonic frame and mind. Romanesque was more congenial and Germany clung to it until the thirteenth century.

"The great cathedral of Bamberg is transitional. The windows are small and round arched, and there are no flying buttresses. But the vault is in ribbed and pointed form.

"Here at the outset of German Gothic we find a remarkable development of sculpture--at first imitating the French, but soon advancing to a style of splended naturalism and power.

"Renaissance Italians, equally mistken about its origin, invented the name Gothic for it, on the ground that only the transalpine bararians could have developed so extravagant an art.

"The decorative exuberance and exalted audacity of the style offended the classic and long-chastened tastes of the Italian soul. If Italy at last adopted Gothic, it was with a reluctance verging on contempt.

"Only after she had transformed it to her own needs and mood could she produce not only the exotic brilliance of Milan Cathedral, but the strange Byzantine-Romanesque Gothic of Orvieto and Siena, Assisi and Florence.

"Her soil and her ruins alike abounded in marble with which she could face her shrines in slabs of many tints. But how could she carve a marble facade into the complex portals of the freestone North? She did not need the enormous windows by which the chill and cloudy North invited light and warmth. She preferred the small windows that made her cathedrals cool sanctuaries against the sun. She thought thick walls, even iron braces, no uglier than stilted buttresses.

"In the picturesque little town of Avila the cathedral of San Salvador inaugurated the transition with round arches, a Gothic portal and in the apse, elegant columns rising to pointed ribs in the vault.

"At Salamanca piety preserved the old transitional cathedral of the twelfth century beside the new one of the sixteenth . The two together form one of the most imposing architectural ensembles in Spain.

"At Tarragona difficulties of finance prolonged the building of the seo or episcopal see from 1089 to 1375. The simple solidity of the older elements forms a fit background for the Gothic and Morish decoration.

"The walls of Avila still stand to prove the medieval sense of form and such gates as the Puerto del Sol in Toledo typically married beauty to use.

"From memories of the Roman castelium and perhaps from observation of Moslem forts, the Crusaders built in the Near East mighty fortresses like that of Kerak, superior in both mass and form to anything of their kind in that warlike age.

"Hungary, the bastion of Europe against the Mongols, raised magnificent castle-fortresses in the thirteenth century.

"The art flowed west and left in Italy such masterpieces of military art as the fortress-tower of Volterra and in France the thirteenth-century castles of Coucy and Pierrefonds and the famous Chateau Gaillad that Richard Coeur de Lion constructed on returning from Palestine.

"The reckless energy that we give to seeking it was turned in thse days to the creation of beauty. Amid poverty, epidemics, famines, and wars men found time and spirit to make beautiful a thousand varieties of objects, from initials to cathedrals.

"Breathless before some medieval manuscript, humble before Notre Dame, feeling the far vision of Winchester's nave, we forget the superstitition and squalor, the petty wars and monstrous crimes, of the Age of Faith.

"It was not the cold and empty tomb that the visitor enters today. It functioned. Its worshipers found in it not only a work of art but the consoling, strengthening presence of Mary and her Son.

"It received the monks or canons who many times each day stood in the choir stalls and sang the canonical Hours.

"It heard the importunate litanies of congregations seeking divine mercy and aid.

"Its nave and aisles guided the processions that carried before the people the image of the Virgin or the body and blood of their God.

"Its great spaces echoed solemnly with the music of the Mass. And the music was as vital as the church edifice itself, more deeply stirring than all the glory of glass or stone.

"Many a stoic soul, doubtful of the creed, was melted by the music, and fell on his knees before the mystery that no words could speak.

" The evolution of medieval music concurred remarkably with the development of architectural styles.

"These 'neumes' (airs, breaths)indicated a rise or fall of tone but not the degree of rise or fall, nor the duration of the note. Such matters had to be learned by oral transmission and the memorizing of an enormous body of liturgical song.

"No instrumental accompaniment was allowed.

"Despite these limitations -- perhaps because of them -- Gregorian chant became the most impressive feature of the Christian ritual. The modern ear, accustomed to complex harmony, finds these old chants monotonous and thin. They carry on a Greek, Syrian, Hebrew, Arab tradition of monody which only the Oriental ear can appreciate today.

"The Church had her reasons for fering this instinct uncontrolled. It allied itself naturally with love, the great rival of religion as a source of song.

"The hearty earthiness of the medieval mind, when the priest was out of sight, inclined it to a freedom, sometimes an obscenity, of text that shocked the clergy and provoked councils to vain decrees.

"The goliards, or wandering scholars, found or composed music for their paeans to woman and wine and their scandalous parodies of sacred ritual. Manuscripts circulated containing solemn music for the hilarious wors of the Missa de potatoribus -- the Mass of the Topers -- and the Officium ribaldorum -- a Prayer Book for Boisterers.

"Love songs were as popular as today. Some were as tender as a nymph's orisons, some were seduction dialogues with delicate accompaniments. And of course there were war songs, calculated to forge unity through vocal unison or to anesthetize the persuit of glory with hypnotic rhythm.

"Some music was folk song, composed by anonymous genius and appropriated -- perhaps transformed -- by the people. Other popular music was the product of professional skill using all the arts of polyphony learned in the litergy of the Church.

"Even in its heyday Latin had suffered national modifications from diversities of climate and oral physiology. In its very homeland the old language had been changed.

"The abdication of literature had left the field to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the common man which had always been different from those of the poets and orators. The influx of Germans, Gauls, Greeks, and Asiatics into Italy brought a multiformity of pronunciation and the natural laziness of tongue and mind sloughed off the precise inflections and terminations of careful speech.

"H became silent in late Latin.

"V, classically pronounced like the English W, acquired the sound of the English V.

"N before S dropped away -- mensa (table) was pronounced mesa.

"The diphthongs AE and OE , classically pronounced like the English I and OI, were now like long English A or French E.

"As final consonants wee slurred and forgotten (portus, porto, porte; rex, re, roi; coelum, cielo, ciel), case endings had to be replaced by prepositions, conjugational endings by auxiliary verbs.

"The old demonstrative pronouns ille and illa became definite articles -- il, el, lo, le, la and the Latin unus (one) was shortened to form the indefinite article un.

"As declensions disappeared, it sometimes became difficult to tell whether a noun was the subject before, or the object after, the predicate.

"Old German is merely a convenient phrase to cover the many dialects that exercised their tribal or provincial sovereignty in Germany before 1050 -- Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, Eastphalian, Alemannic, Bavarian, Franconian, Thuringian, Saxon, Silesian. . .

"Old German passed into Middle German partly through the influx of new words with the coming of Christianity. Monks from Ireland, England, France, and Italy labored to invent terms to translate Latin.

"Sometimes they appropriated Latin words bodily into German -- Kaiser, Prinz, Legende. This was legitimate thievery. Tragic, however, was the influence of Latin sentence structure -- keeping the verb to the end -- in changing the once simple syntax of the German people into the stiff, inverted, and breath-taking periods of the later German style. Pehaps the finest German was the Middle High German written by the great poets of the thirteenth century -- Walter von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Wolfram von Eschenbach.

"After the fall of Rome in 476 the conquering barbarians adopted the Latin alphabet and wrote it with a 'cursive' or running hand that bound the letters rogether and gave most of them a curved form instead of the straight lines that had been found convenient in writing upon hard surfaces like stone or wood.

"The Church preferred in those centuries a 'majuscule' or large-letter writing to facilitate the reading of missals and books of hours. When the copyists of Charlemagne's time preserved Latin literatue by making many copies of the classics, they saved costly parchment by adopting a 'miniscule' or small letter writing. They agreed on set forms for thetters and created the 'set miniscule' lettering that became for four centuries the usual medium of medieval books.

"In the twelfth century, as if in accord with the exuberant decoration then developing in Gothic architecture, the letters acquired flourishes, hairlines, and hooks, and became the 'Gothic' lettering that prevailed in Europe until the Renaissance and in Germany until our time.

"Very few medieval manuscripts were punctuated. This breath-guiding device, known to the Hellenistic Greeks, had been lost in the barbarian upheaval. It reappeared in the thirteenth century but was not generally adopted until printing established it in the fifteenth century. Printing was in somc measure prepared as early as 1147 by the use of woodcuts, in Rhenish monasteries, for printing initial letters or patterns upon textiles.

"Even in the darkness of the tenth century we find Gerbert collecting books with true bibliophile passion. Some other churchmen, like John of Salisbury, had their own collections and a few nobles had small libraries in their chateaux.

"Frederick Barbarosa and Frederick II had considerable collections. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villeria in Spain, gathered a great library which was publicly burned on the charge that he had intercourse with the Devil.

"About 1200 Daniel of Morley brought to England from Spain 'a precious multitude of books.'

"The Latin heritage, except of law, was forgotten in the Greek East.

"The Greek heritage, except in the Sicilies, was forgotten in the West.

"Part of the Greek heritage was hidden beyond the walls of Christendom -- in Moslem Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain.

As for the vast and distant world of India, China, and Japan, long rich in literature, philosophy, and art, Christians, before the thirteenth century knew almost nothing.

"Some of the work of linking the diverse cultures was performed by the Jews who moved among them, like fertilizing subterranean streams.

"As more and more Jews migrated from Moslem realms into Christendom, and lost knowledge of Arabic, their scholars found it desirable to translate Arabic works (many written by Jews) into the only language geneally understood by the savants of the scattered race -- Hebrew.

"So Jospeh Kimchi at Narbonne translated the Jewish philosopher Bahya's Guide to the Duties of the Heart. Joseph was the father of brilliant sons but even more important, as translators, were the progeny of Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon.

"About 1060 Constantine the African translated into Latin al-Razi's Liber Experimemorum, the Arabic medical work of Isaac Judaeus, and Hunain's Arabic version of Hippocrates' Aphorisms and Galen's Commentary.

At Toledo, soon after its conqueste from the Moors, the enlightened and tolerant Archbishop Raymond organized a corps of translators under Dominico Gundisalvi and commissioned them to translate Arabic works of science and philosophy.

"Most of the translators were Jews who knew Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, sometimes also Latin. The busiest member of the group was a converted Jew, John of Spain whose Arabic patronymic, ibn Daud (son of David) was remodeled by the Schoolmen into Avendeath. John translated a veritable library of Arabic and Jewish works by Avicenna, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi and al-Khwarizmi.

"Moral education was stressed in the Middle Ages at the expense of intellectual enlightenment, as intellectual education is today stressed at the expense of moral discipline.

"In England it was not unusual, in the middle and upper classes, to send a boy of seven or so to be brought up for a time in another home, partly to cement family friendshiips, partly to offset the laxity of parental love.

"The splended school system of the Roman Empire had decayed in the tumult of invasion and the depopulation of the towns. When the tidal wave of migration susided in the sixth century a few lay schools survived in Italy. The rest were mostly schools for training converts and prospective priests.

"For some time he Church gave all her attention to moral training and did not reckon the transmission of secular knowledge as one of her functions.

"Cities that lived by commerce and industry felt a need for employees with practical training. Against much ecclesiastical opposition they established secular schools in which lay teachers gave instruction in return for fees paid by the parents of the pupils.

"In 1300 the fee for a year in a private grammar school in Oxford was four or five pence $4.50).

"Villani in 1283 reckoned 9000 boys and girls in the church schools of Florence, 1100 in six 'abacus' schools that prepared them for a business career, and 975 pupils in secondary schools.

"Secular schools appeared in Flanders in the twelfth century.

"By the second half of the thirteenth the movement had spread to Lubeck and the Baltic cities.

"In 1292 we hear of a schoolmistress keeping a private school in Paris. Soon she was one of many.

"Teachers there were usually laymen, not clerics as beyond the Alps. In general the spirit and culture of Italy were less ecclesiastical than elsewhere.

"Indeed, about the year 970 one Vilgardus organized at Ravenna a movement for the restoration of paganism.

"There were, of course, many cathedral schools. Those of Milan, Pavia, Aosta, and Parma were particularly competent as we may judge from such graduates as Lanfranc and Anselm. Monte Cassino under Desiderius was almost a university.

"The survival of municipal institutions, the successful resistance of the Lombard cities to Barbarosa, and the rising demand for legal and commercial knowledge worked together to give Italy the honor of establishing the first medieval university.

"In 1925 the University of Pavia celebrated the eleven hundredth anniversary of its foundation by Lothair I.

"Probably this was a school of law rather than a university. It was not until 1361 that it received its charter as a studium generale -- the medieval name for a university uniting diverse faculties. It was one of many schools that from the ninth century onward revived the study of Roman law -- Rome, Ravenna, and Orleans in the ninth century -- Milan, Narbonne, and Lyons in the tenth -- Verona, Mantua, and Angers in the eleventh.

"Castile developed a royal university at Palencia, later at Valladolid. Leon had one at Salamanca, the Baleares at Palma, Caralonia at Lerida.

"Despite this royal connection the Spanish universities accepted ecclesiastical supervision and funds and some, like Palencia, grew out of cathedral schools. The University of Salamanica was richly endowed in the thirteenth century by San Fernando and Alfonso the Wise and soon stood on an equal footing of fame and learning with Bologna and Paris.

"Most of these institutions gave instruction in Latin, mathematics, astronomy, theology and law -- some in Medicine, Hebrew or Greek.

"A School of Oriental Studies was opened at Toledo in 1250 by Dominican monks to teach Arabic and Hebrew. Good work must have been done there for one of its graduates, Raymond Martin, showed familiarity with all major philosophers and theologians of Islam.

"Arabic studies were prominent also at the University of Seville, founded by Alfonso the Wise in 1254.

"Its cathedral schoools had from the early eleventh century achieved international renown. If these schools flowered into a great university at Paris, rather than at Chartres, Laon, or Reims, it was proably because the thriving commerce of the Seine, and the business of a capital, had brought to the city the wealth that lures the intellect and finances science, philosophy, and art.

"The first known master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame was William of Champeaux. It was his lectures, given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, that stirred up the intellectual movement out of which the University of Paris grew.

"When Abelard came out of Brittany, slew William with a syllogism, and began the most famous lectures in French history, students flocked to hear him. The schools of Paris swelled their ranks and masters multiplied. A master (magister), in the educational world of twelfth century Paris, was a man licensed to teach by the chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

"The University of Paris rose by now untraceable steps from the church schools of the city and derived its first unity from this single source of pedagogical licensing. Normally the license was given gratis to anyone who had been for an adequate period the pupil of an authorized master and whose application was approved by that master.

"Situated on the Mediterranean halfway between Marseille and Spain, that city enjoyed a stirring mixture of French, Greek, Spanish, and Jewish blood and culture, with a sprinkling of Italian merchants and some remnants of the Moorish colony that had once held the twown.

"Commerce was active there. Whether through the influence of Salernian or Arabic or Jewish medicine, Montpellier, of an unknown date, established a school of medicine that soon outshone Salerno.

"Schools of law, theology and the 'arts' were added. Though these colleges were independent, their propinquity and cooperation earned for Montpellier a high repute. The university declined in the fourteenth century but the school of medicine revived in the Renaissance.

"The Thames narrowed and grew shallow at that point. A fortress was built there in 912, a market formed, and Kings Cnut and Harold held gemots there long before the University arose. Presumably there were schools in Oxford in Cnut's days but we hear of no cathedral school.

"About 1117 we find mention of a 'master at Oxenford.'

"In 1133 Robert Pullen, a theologian, came from Paris and lectured at Oxford on theology. By steps now lost to history, the schools of Oxford became to the twelfth century a studium generale or university -- 'no man can say when.'

"In 1209 , according to a contemporary estimate, there were 3000 students and teachers at Oxford. As at Paris there were four faculties -- arts, theology, medicine, and canon law. In England the teaching of civil law escaped the universities and lodged at the Inns of Court in London.

"Not merely as a philosopher, not as one of the creators of the University of Paris, nor as a flame that set the mind of Latin Europe afire in the twelfth century, but as, with Heloise, part and personification of the morals and literature and highest fascination of their time.

"He was born in Brittany, near Nantes, in the village of Le Pallet.

"His father, know to us only as Berenger, was the seigneur of a modest estate, and could afford to give his three sons and one daughter a liberal education. Pierre (we do not know the origin of his surname Abelard) was the oldest and could claim the rights of primogeniture. But he felt so lively an interest in studies and ideas that, on growing up, he surrendered to his brothers his claim and share in the family property and set out to woo philosophy wherever a philosophic battle raged, or some famous teacher taught.

"In Greek and medieval philosophy a universal was a general idea denoting a class of objects (book, stone, planet, man, mankind, the French people, the Catholic Church), actions (cruelty, justice), or qualities (beauty, truth.)

"Plato, seeing the transitoriness of individual organisms and things, had suggested that the universal is more lasting, therefore more real, than any member of the class it describes -- beauty more real than Phryne, justice more real than Aristides, man more real than Socrates.

"This is what the Middle Ages meant by 'realism.' Aristotle had countered that the universal is merely an idea formed by the mind to represent a class of like objects. The class itself exists, he thought, only as its constituent members. In our time men have debated whether there is a 'group mind' apart from the desires, ideas, and feelings of the individuals composing the group. Hume argued that the individual 'mind' itself is only an abstract name for the series and collection of sensations, ideas, and volitions in an organism.

"The Greeks did not take the problem too much to heart. One of the last pagan philosophers -- Porphyry of Syria and Rome -- merely phrased it without offering a solution.

"But to the Middle Ages the question was vital. The Church claimed to be a spiritual entity additional to the sum of her individual adherents. The whole, she felt, had qualities and powers beyond those of its parts. She could not admit that she was an abstraction and that nothing but ideas and feelings in her constituent members. She was the living 'bride of Christ.' Worse yet, if only individual persons, things, actions, and ideas existed, what became of the Trinity? Was the unity of the three Persons a mere abstraction. Were they three separate gods?

"We are told that he considered universals or general ideas to be mere words (voces). Mere winds of the voice (flatus vocis), individual objects and persons exist.

"All else is names (nomina). Genera and spcies and qualities have no independent existence. Man does not exist, only men. Color exists only in the form of colored things.

"The Church would doubtless have let Roscelin alone had he not applied this 'nominalism' to the Trinty. God, he is reported to have said, is a word applied to the three Persons of the Trinity, just as man is applied to many men.

"But all that really exists is the three Persons -- in effect, three gods. This was to admit the polytheism of which Islam implicitly accused Christianity five times a day from a thousand minarets.

"The Church could not allow such teaching in one who was a canon of the cathedral at Compiegne. Roscelin was summoned before an episcopal synod at Soissons and was given a choice between retraction and excommunication. He retracted.

"He fled to England, attacked clerical concubinage there, returned to France, and taught at Tours and Loches. It was probbly at Loches that Abelard sat impatiently at his feet. Abelard rejected nominalism but it was for doubts about the Trinity that he was twice condemned.

"Anselm came of a patrician family in Italy. He was made Abbot of Bec in Normandy in 1078. Under his rule, as under that of Lanfranc, Bec became one of the major schools of learning in the West.

"As perhaps ideally described by his fellow monk Eadmer in a loving biography, Anselm was a gentle ascetic who wished only to meditate and pray and reluctantly emerged from his cell to govern the monastery and its school.

"To such a a man, whose faith was his life, doubt was impossible. faith must come long before understanding and how could any finite mind expect ever to understand God. He said:-'I do not seek to understand in order to believe' following Augustine, 'I believe in order to understand.' But his pupils asked for arguments for use against infidels. He himself considered it 'negligent if, after we are confirmed in our faith, we should not aim to understand what we have believed.'

"In 1103 William began to teach dialectics in the cathedral school of Notre Dame at Paris. If we may belive Abelard, who was too good a warrior to be a good historian, William out-Platoed Plato and held not only that universals are objectively real but that the indiv8dual is an incidental modification of the generic reality and exists solely by participating in the universal.

"So humanity is the real being which enters into and thereby gives existence to Socrates.

"Moreover (William is reported to have taught) the whole universal is present in every individual of its class.

"But in the maiden Heloise, niece of the cathedral canon Fulbert, there was a comeliness of person and a flair for learning which aroused the sensitivity of his manhood and the admiration of his mind.

"During these hectic years when Abelard and William fought the universal war, Heloise had grown from infancy to girlhood as an orphan of whose parentage no certain trace remains. Her uncle sent her for manuy years to a convent at Argenteuil. There, falling in love with the books in the little library, she became the brighest pupil the nuns had ever had.

"When Fulbert learned that she could converse in Latin as readily as in French and was even studing Hebrew, he took new pride in her and brought her to live with him in his home near the cathedral.

She was sixteen when Abelard came into her life.

"Presumably she had heard of him long since. She must have seen the hundreds of students who crowded the cloisters and lecture rooms to hear him. Perhaps, so intellectually eager, she had gone openly or furtively to see and hear the idol and paragon of the scholars of Paris. We can imagine her modest trepidation when Fulbert told her that Abelard was to live with them and be her tutor.

"The philospher himself gives the frankest sxplanation of how it had come about:---

'It was this young girl whom I determined to unite with myself in the bonds of love. And indeed the thing seemed to me very easy to be done. So distinguished was my name, and I possessed such advantages of youth and comeliness, that no matter what woman I might favor with my love, I dreaded rejection of none.

'Thus, utterly aflame with passion for the maiden, I sought to discover means whereby I might have daily and familiar speech with her, thereby the more easily to win her consent. For this purpose I persuaded the girl's uncle to take me into his household in return for the payment of a small sum. He was a man keen in avarice and believed that his niece would vastly benefit from my teaching. The man's simplicity was nothing short of astounding. I should not have been more surprised if he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of a ravenous wolf.

'Why should I say more? We were united, first in the dwelling that sheltered our love and then in the hearts that burned wthin us. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love. Our kisses outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms. Love drew our eyes together.'

"What had begun with his simple physical desire graduated through Heloise's delicacy into 'a tenderness surpassing in sweetness the most fragrant balm.'

"It was a new experience for him and wooed him quite from philosophy. He borrowed passion from his lectures for his love and left them anomalously dull.

His students mourned the dialectician but welcomed the lover. They were delighted to learn that even Socrates could sin. They consoled themselves for lost jousts of arguments by singing the love songs that he now composed.

"Secretly by night he stole her from her uncle's house and sent her to his sister's home in Brittany. Half from fear and half from pity, he offered to the infuriated uncle to marry Heloise provided Fulbert wouuld let him keep the marriage secret.

"The canon agreed and after his classes had adjourned, Abelard went to Brittany to fetch a tender but unwilling bride. Their son, Astrolabe, was three days old when he arrived.

"Heloise long refused to marry him. The reforms of Leo IX and Gregory VII, a generation back, had barred married men from the priesthood unless the wife became a nun. She was not ready to contemplate such a surrender of her mate and her child.

"She proposed to remain his mistress on the ground that such a relationship, kept judiciously secret, would not, like marriage, close his road to advancement in the Church.

"A long passage in Abelard's History of My Calamities ascribes to Heloise at this point a learned array of authorities and instances against the marrige of philosophers and an eloquent plea against 'robbing the Church of so shining a light:---'Remember that Socrates was wedded and with how sordid a case he first purged that stain on philosophy, that thereafter other men might be more prudent.' He reports her as saying:-'It would be far sweeter for her to be called my mistress than to be known as my wife. Nay, this would be more honorable for me as well.'

"Presumably we have the substance of his lecture courses in his books.

"These, however, were composed in hectic installments and hardly allow dating. They were revised in his final years when his spirit was quite broken and there is no telling how much youthful fire was quenched by the flow of time.

"Four minor logical works circle about the problem of universals. We need not disturb their rest. The Dialectics, however, is a 375-page treatise on lotgic in the Aristotelian sense;-a rational analysis of the parts of speech, the categories of thought (substance, quantity, place, position, time, relation, quality, possession, action, 'passion'), the forms of propositions and the rules of reasoning.

"The renascent mind of Western Europe had to clarify these basic ideas for itself like a child learning to read. Dialectic was the major interest of philosophy in Abelard's time, partly because the new philosophy stemmed from Aristotle through Boethius and Porphyry, and only the logical treatises of Aristotle (and not all of these) were known to this first generatin of Scholastic philosophy.

"So the Dialectica is not a fascinating book. Yet even in its formal pages we hear a shot or two in the first skirmishes of a Two Hundred Years' War between faith and reason.

"How can we, in an age already doubtful of the intellect, recapture the glow of a time that was just discovering 'this great mystery of knowledge'?

"There, with a companion in minor orders, he raised with reeds and stalks a little oratory or place of prayer which he called by the name of the Holy Trinity.

"When students heard that he was free to teach again they came to him and made themselves into an impromptu school. They built huts in the wilderness, slept on rushes and straw and lived on 'course bread and the herbs of the field.'

"Here was a thirst for knowledge that would soon make and crowd universities. Now, indeed, the Dark Ages were a nightmare almost forgotten.

"Since her separation from Abelard Heloise had so devoted hherself there to her duties as a nun that she had been made prioress and had won 'such favor in the eyes of all that the bishops loved her as a daughter, the abbots as a sister, and the laity as a mother.'

"Learning that Heloise and her nuns were looking for new quarters, Abelard offered them the oratory and buildings of 'the Paraclete.' He went in person to help establish them there and frequently visited them to preach to them and the villagers who had settled near by.

"Gossip murmured 'that I, who of old could scarcely endure to be parted from her whom I loved, was stil swayed by the delights of earthly lust.'

"It was during his troubled abbacy at St. Gildas that he composed his autobiography -- Historia calamitatum mearrum. We do not know its motive. It assumes the guise of an essay in consolation offered to a plaintive friend 'so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth naught.'

"But apparently it was intended for the world as both a moral confession and a theological defense. An old but unverifiable tradition says that a copy of it came to Heloise and that she wrote this astonishing reply:--

'To her master, nay father, to her husband, nay brother:-his handmaid, nay daughter, his spouse, nay sister:-to Abelard, Heloise.

'Your letter written to a friend for his comfort, beloved, was lately brought to me by chance. Which things I deem that no one can read or hear with dry eyes for they renewed in fuller measure my griefs. In His name. Who still protects thee...in the name of Christ, as His handmaids and thine, we beseech thee to deign to inform us by frequent letters of those shipwrecks in which thou still are tossed, that thou mayest have us, at least, who alone have remained to thee as partners in thy grief or joy.'

"The reply that tradition assigns to him is a reminder of religious vows:-'To Heloise his dearly beloved sister in Christ, Abelard her brother in the same'

"He counsels her to accept their misfortunes hunmbly as a cleansing and saving punishment from God. He asks for her prayers, bids her assuage her grief with the hope of their reunion in heaven, and begs her to bury him when he is dead, in the grounds of the Paraclete.

"Her second letter repeats her fond impiieties:-'I have ever feard to offend thee rather than God. I seek to pleae thee more than Him. See how unhappy a life I must lead if I endure all these things in vain, havintg no hope of reward in the future. For a long time thou, like many others, hast been deceived by my simulation, so as to mistake hypocrisy for religion.'

"He answers that Christ, not he, truly loved her. 'My love was concupiscence, not love. I satisfied my wretched desires in thee and this was all that I loved. Weep for thy Saviour, not for thy seducer, for thy Redeemer, not for thy defiler.'

"And he composes a touching prayer which he asks her to recite for him. Her third lettr shows her resigned to the earthly death of his love. She asked him now only for a new rule by which she and her nuns might live properly the religious life. He complied and drew up for them a kindly moderate code. He wrote sermons for their edification and sent these compositions to Heloise over a tender signature. 'Farewell in the Lord to His servant, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ.

"We find John of Salisbury reporting that in 1136 he had attended Abelard's lectures on Mont Ste.-Genevieve. Nor do we know by what license he had resumed his teaching. Perhaps he had asked none.

"It may be that some flouting of Church discipline set eccelesiastics against him and by a devious route led to his final fall.

"If emasculation had unmanned him there is no sign of it in the works tht have transmitted to us the substance of his teaching. It is difficult to find explicit heresy in them but easy to discover passages that must have made churchmen fret.

"In a book of moral philosohy entitled Seito te ipsum (Know Thyself) he urged that sin lies not in the act but in the intention. No act -- not even killing -- is sinful in itself. So a mother, having too little clothing to warm her babe, pressed it against her bosom and unwittingly suffocated it. She killed the thing she loved and was properly punished by the law to make othr women more careful but in the eyes of God she was sinless.

"Furthermore, that there should be sin, the agent must violate his own moral conscience, not merely that of others. Hence the killing of Christian martyrs was not a sin in Romans who felt such persecution necessary to the preservation of their state or of a religion which seemed to them true. Nay, 'those even who perecuted Christ or His followers, whom they considered it their duty to persecute, are said to have sinned in action.

"But they would have comimitted a graver fault if, contrary to their conscience, they had spared them.'

"All this might be logical as well as irritating but on such a theory the whole doctrine of sin as a violation of God's law threatened to go up in a haze of casuistry about intention. Who but a few Pauls would admit that he had acted against his own conscience?

"Was he not so drunk with the lees of logic that he had dared to connect it with the Logos, the Word of God, as a science almost divine? Granted that this seductive teacher arrived by unorthodox methods at orthodox conclusions.

"How many immature minds, infected by him with the logic-chopping germs, must have been, by his specious pros and cons, unsettled on the way!

"If he had been the only one of his kind he might have been left untouched, in the hope that he would not take too long to die. But he had hundreds of eager followers. There were other teachers -- William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porree, Berenger of Tours -- who were also summoning the faith to trial by reason.

"How long, on this procedure, could the Church maintain that unity and fervor of religious belief on which the moral and social order of Europe seemed to rest?

"There on April 21, 1142 he died, aged sixty three. He was buried in the priory chapel but Heloise reminded Peter the Venerable that Abelard had asked to be interred at the Paraclete.

"The good Abbot brought the body to her himself, tried to comfort her by speaking of her dead lover as the Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle of his time and left with her a letter rich in Christian tenderness.

"As usual, many causes conspired. The Greek East had never surrendered its classical heritage.

"The ancient philosophers were studied in every century in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. Men like Michael Psellus, Nicephorus Blemydes, George Pachymeres, and the Syrian Bar-Hebraeus knew the works of Plato and Aristotle at first hand.

"Greek teachers and manuscripts gradually entered the West. Even there some fragments of the Hllenic legacy had survived the barbarian storm. Most of Aristotle's Organon of logic remained. Of Plato the Meno and the Timaeus, whose vision of Er had colored Christian imaginations of hell.

"The successive waves of translations from the Arabic and the Greek in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the West the revelation and challenge of Greek and Moslem philosophies so different from the Christian that they threatened to sweep away the whole theology of Christendom unless Christianity could construct a counterphilosophy.

"But these influences would hardly have produced a Christian philosophy if the West had continued poor. What beought these factors to effect was the growth of wealth through the agricultural conquest of the Continent -- the expansion of commerce and industry -- the services and accumulations of finance.

"Schole at first meant leisure. A scholasticus was a direcctor or professor of a school.

"The 'Scholastic philosophy' was the philosophy taught in the medieval secondary schools or in the universities that for the most part grew out of them.

"The 'Scholastic method' was the form of philososphical argument adn exposition used in such schools.

"In the twelfth century, barring Abelard's classes in or near Paris, Chartres was the most active and famous of these schools. There philosophy was combined with literature. The graduates managed to write of abstruse problems with the clarity and grace that became an honorable tradition in France.

"Plato, who also had made philosophy intelligible, was a favorite there, and the quarrel between realists and nominalists was mediated by identifying the 'real' universals with the Platonic Ideas, or creative archetypes, in the mind of God.

"Under Bernard of Chartres and his brother Theodoric the school of Chartres reached the height of its influence.

Peter, like Anselm, Arnold of Brescia, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas, was an Italian who came to France for advanced work in theology and philosophy. He liked Abelard and called Sic et non his breviary.

"But also he wanted to be a bishop. His Sententiarum Libri IV, or Four Books of Opinions, applied and chastened the method of the Sic et non. He drew up under each question of theology an array of Biblical and Patristic quotations for and against. Bu this Peter labored conscientiously to resolve all contradictions into orthodox conclusions.

"He was made bishop of Paris and his book became for four centuris so favorite a text in theological courses that Roger Bacon reproved it for having displaced the Bible itself.

"But in that half century a strange event transformed theology. As the translation of Aristotle's scientific and metaphysical works into Arabic had in the ninth century compelled Moslem thinkers to seek a reconciliation between Islamic doctrine and Greek philosophy -- and as the impingement of Aristotle upon the Hebrew mind in Spain was in this twelfth century driving Ibn Daud and Maimonides to seek a harmony between Judaism and Hellenic thought -- so the arrival of Aristotle's works in Latin dress in the Europe of 1150-1250 impelled Catholic theologians to attempt a synthesis of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology.

"And as Aristotle seemed immune to scriptural authority, the theologians were forced to use the languge and weapons of reason. How the Greek philosopher would have smiled to see so many world-shaking faiths pay homage to his thought!

"But we must not exaggerate the influence of Greek thinkers in stimulating the efflorescence of philosophy in this period.

"The spread of education -- the vitality of discussion and intellectual life in the schools and universities of the twelfth century -- the stimulus of such men as Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Abelard, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury -- the enlargement of horizons by the Crusades -- the increasing acquaintance with Islamic life and thought in East and West -- all these could have produced an Aquinas even if Aristotle had remained unknown.

"Indeed the industry of Aquinas was due not to love of Aristotle but to fear of Averroes. Already in the twelfth century the Arabic and Jewish philosophers were influencing Christian thought in Spain.

"We have noted the presence of unbelief in a small minority of the European population. Contact with Islam through the Crusades and the translations extended this minority in the thirteenth century.

"The discovery that another great religion existed and had produced fine men like Saladin and al-Kamil, philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, was in itself a disturbing revelation. Comparative religion does religion no good.

"Alfonso the Wise reported a common disbelief in immortality among the Christians of Spain. Perhaps Averroism had trickled down to the people.

"In southern France there were in the thirteenth century rationalists who argued that God, after creating the world, had left its operation to natural law. Miracles, they held, were impossible. No prayer could change the behavior of the elements.

"The origin of new species was due not to special creation but to natural development.

"At Paris some free thinkers -- even some priests -- denied transubstantiation. At Oxford a teacher complained that 'there is no idolatry like that of the sacrament of the altar.'

"Alain of Lille remarks that 'many false Christians of our time say there is no rsurrection since the soul perishes with the body.'

"Peter of Abano, professor of medicine at Paris and then of philosophy at Padua, wrote in 1303 a book, Conciliator controversiarum, designed to harmonize medical and philosophical theory. He carried a place in the history of science by teaching that the brain is the source of the nerves and the heart of the vessels, and by measuring the year with remarkable accuacy as 365 days, six hours, and four minutes.

"Convinced of astrology, he reduced almost all causation to the power and movement of the stars and practically eliminated God from the government of the world.

"Inquisitors accused him of heresy but Marquis Azzo d'Este and Pope Honorius IV were among his patients and protected him. He was accused again in 1315 and this time escaped trial by dying a natural death.

"Youth had tasted the strong wine of philosophy. Could it be won back by reason?

"As the mutakallimum had defended Mohammedanism from the Mutazilites, so now Franciscan and Dominican theologians, and secular prelates like William of Auvergne and Henry of Ghent, came to the defense of Christianity and the Church.

"The defense divided itself into two main camps -- the mystic-Platonic, mostly Franciscans, and the intellectual-Aristotelian, mostly Dominicans. Benedictines like Hugh and Richard of St. Victor felt tht the best defense of religion lay in man's direct consciousness of a spiritual reality deeper than all intellectual fathoming. 'Rigorists' like Peter of Blois and Stephen of Tournai argued that philosophy should not discuss the problems of theology. Or, if it did, it should speak and behave as a modest servant of theology -- ancilla theologiae.

"Its ablest exponent was the saintly Bonaventura -- a gentle spirit who persecuted heresy, a mystic writing philosophy, a scholar who deprecated learning, a lifelong friend and opponent of Thomas Aquinas, a defender and exemplar of evangelical poverty under whose ministry the Franciscan Order made great gains in corporate wealth.

"Born in Tuscany in 1221, Giovanni de Fidanza came for some unknown reason to be called Bonaventura -- Good Luck. He nearly died of a childhood malady. His mother prayed to St. Francis for his revovery. Giovanni thereafter felt that he owed his life to the saint.

"Entering the Order, he was sent to Paris to study under Alexander of Hales. In 1248 he began to teach theology in the University. In 1257, still a youth of thirty-six, he was chosen minister general of the Franciscans. He did his best to reform the laxity of the Order, but was too genial to succeed. He himself lived in ascetic simplicity.

"His father, Count Landulf of Aquino, belonged to the German nobility, was a nephew of Barbarossa, and was among the highest figure at the Apulian court of the impious Frederick II. His mother was descended from the Norman princes of Sicily.

"Although born in Italy, Thomas was on both sides of northern origin, essentially Teutonic. He had no Italian grace or deviltry in him but grew to heavy German proportions, with large head, broad face, and blond hair, and a quiet content in intellectual industry.

"His friends called him 'the great dumb ox of Sicily.'

"He was born in 1225 in his father's castle in Roccasecca, three miles from Aquino, and halfway between Naples and Rome. The abbey of Monte Cassino was nearby and there Thomas received his early schooling.

"At fourteen he began five years of study at the University of Naples. Michael Scot was there translating Averroes into Latin. Jacob Anatoli was there translating Averroes into Hebrew. Peter of Ireland, one of Thomas' teachers, was an enthusiastic Aristotelian. The University was a hotbed of Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew influences impinging upon Christian thought.

"Thomas' brothers took to poetry. One, Rainaldo, became a page and falconer at Frederick's court and begged Thomas to join him there. Piero delle Vigne and Frederick himself seconded the invitation. Instead of accepting, Thomas entered the Dominican Order. Soon thereafter he was sent to Paris to study theology.

"At the outset of his journey he was kidnaped by two of his brothers at their mother's urging. He was taken to the Roccasecca castle and was kept under watch there for a year. Every means was used to shake his vocation. A story, probably a legend, tells how a pretty young woman was introduced into his chamber in the hope of seducing him back to life, and how, with a flaming brand snatched from the hearth, he drove her from the room and burned the sign of the cross into the door.

"Is it a divine light infused into man by God, without which it would be impossible?

"Thomas parts company at the very outset from Augustine, the mystics, the intuitionists -- knowledge is a natural product, derived from the external corporeal senses and the internal sense called consciousness of the self.

"It is an extremely limited knowledge, for up to our time no scientist yet knows the essence of a fly. But within its limits knowledge is trustworthy and we need not fret over the possibility that the external world is a delusion.

"Thomas accepts the Scholastic definition of truth as adequeto rei et intellectus -- the equivalence of the thought with the thing. Snce the intellect draws all its natural knowledge from the sense, its direct knowledge of things outside itself is limited to bodies -- to the 'sensible' or sensory world.

"It cannot directly know the super-sensible, meta-physical world -- the minds within bodies, or God in His creation. But it may by analogy derive from sense experience an indirect knowledge of other minds, and likewise of God.

"Of a third realm, the supernatural -- the world in which God lives -- the mind of man can have no knowledge except through divine revelation. We may by natural understanding know that God exists and is one because His existence and unity shine forth in the wonders and organization of the world. But we cannot by unaided intellect know His essence, or the Trinity.

1 - In created things essence and existence are different.

"Essence is that which is necessary to the conception of a thing.

"Existence is the act of being.

"The essence of a triangle -- that it is three straight lines enclosing a space -- is the same whether the triangle exists or is merely conceived.

"But in God essence and existence are one. For His essence is that He is the First Cause, the underlying power (or, as Spinoza would say, sub-stantia) of all things.

"3 -- All created beings are both active and passive -- i.e. they act and are acted upon.

"Also, they are a mixture of being and becoming. They possess certain qualities and may lose some of these acquire others -- water may be warmed. Thomas denotes this susceptibility to external action or internal change by the term potentis -- possibility.

"God alone has no potentia or possibility. He cannot be acted upon, cannot change. He is actus purus, pure activity -- pure actuality. He is already everything that he can be.

"When a form or vital principle constitutes the essence of a being, it is a substantial or essential form.

"So the rational soul -- i.e. a life giving force capable of thought -- is the substantial form of the human body and God is the substantial form of the world.

"5 - All realities are either substance or accident. Either they are separate entities, like a stone or a man or they exist only as qualities in something else, like whiteness or density. God is pure substance as the only completely self-existent reality.

"6 - All substances are individuals. Nothing but individuals exists except in idea. The notion that individuality is a delusion is a delusion.

"He writes:-'The highest knowledge we can have of God in this life is to know that He is above all that we can think concerning Him.' He rejects Anselm's ontological argument but he comes close to it in identifying God's existence with His essence. God is Being itself -- 'I am Who am.'

"His existence, says Thomas, can be proved by natural reason.

"1 - All motions are caused by previous motions and so on either to a Prime Mover unmoved or to an 'infinite regress' which is inconceivable.

"2 - The series of causes likewise requirs a First Cause.

"3 - The contingent, which may but need not be, depends upon the necessary, which must be. The possible depends upon the actual. This series drives us back to a necessary being who is pure actuality.

"4 - Things are good, true, noble in various degrees. There must be a perfectly good, true, and noble source and norm of these imperfect virtues.

"He begins with an organic, as against a mechanical, conception of organisms. A machine is composed of externally added parts.

"An organism makes its own parts and moves itself by its own internal force. This internal formative power is the soul.

"Thomas expresses the idea in Aristotelian terms. The soul is the 'substantial form' of the body -- i.e. it is the vital principle and energy that gives existence and form to an organism. 'The soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, movement, and understanding.'

"There are three grades of soul -- the vegetative -- the power to grow. The sensitive -- the power to feel. The rational -- the power to reason. All life has the first, only animals and men have the second, only men have the third.

"The soul, or life-giving form-creating inner energy is indivisibly in every part of the body. It is bound up with the body in a thousand ways. As vegetable soul it depends upon food -- as sensitive soul it depends upon sensation -- as rational soul it needs the images produced by, or compounded from, sensation.

"Even intellectual ability and moral percpetions depend upon a body reasonably sound. A thick skin usually implies an insensitive soul.

"Dreams, passions, mental diseases, temperament, have a physiological basis.

"At times Thomas speaks as if body and soul were one unified reality -- the inward energy and outward form of an indivisible whole. Nevertheless it seemed obvious to him that the rational soul -- abstracting, generalizing, reasoning, charting the universe -- is an incorporeal reality. Try as we will, and despite our tendency to think of all things in material terms, we can find nothing material in consciousness. It is a reality all the world unlike anything physical or spatial. This rational soul must be classed as spiritual, as something infused into us by God. Who is the psychical force behind all physical phenomena? Only an immaterial power could form a universal idea, or leap backward and forward in time, or conceive with equal ease the great and the small.

"For assuming, with Aristotle, that what man seeks is happiness, where shall he best find it? Not in bodily pleasure, not in honors, nor in wealth, nor in power, nor even in actions of moral virtue, though all of these may give delight.

"Let us grant, too, that 'perfect disposition of the body is necessary for perfect happiness' But none of these goods can compare with the quiet, pervasive, continuing happiness of understanding. Perhaps remembering Virgil's Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas -- 'happy he who has been able to know the causes of things.' -- Thomas believes that the highest achievement and satisfaction of the soul -- the natural culmination of its peculiar rationality -- would be this -- 'that on it should be inscribed the total order of the universe and its causes.'

"These last three constitute the distinguishing morality and glory of Christianity.

"Faith is a moral obligation since human reason is limited. Man must believe on faith not only those dogmas of the Church that are above reason but those too that can be known through reason.

"Since error in matters of faith may lead many to hell, tolerance should not be shown to unbelief except to avoid a greater evil. So 'the Church at times has tolerated the rites even of heresies and pagans when unbelievers were very numerous.'

"Unbelievers should never be allowed to acquire dominion or authority over believers.

"Tolerance may expecially be shown to Jews since their rites prefigured those of Christianity and so 'bear witness to the faith.' Unbaptized Jews should never be forced to accept Christianity. But heretics -- those who have abandoned faith in the doctrine of the Church -- may properly be coerced. No one should be considered a heretic unless he persists in his error after it has been pointed out to him by ecclesiastical authority.

"Sophists, Stoics, and Roman legists had taught that by 'nature' all men are free. The Church Fathers had agreed and had explained slavery, like property, as a result of the sinfulness acquired by man through Adam's Fall.

"Aristotle, friend of the mighty, had justified slavery as produced by the natural inequality of men. Thomas tried to reconcile these views.

"In the state of innocence there was no slavery. But since the Fall it has been found useful to subject simple men to wise men. Those who have strong bodies but weak minds are intended by nature to be bondmen.

"Authority is nobler, the higher its end. The kings of the earth, guiding men to earhly bliss, should be subject to the pope who guides men to everlasting happiness.

"The state should remain supreme in secular affairs. But even in such matters the pope has the right to intervene if rulers volate the rules of morality or do avoidable injury to their peoples.

"The Franciscans, who sought God by Augustine's mystic road of love, were shocked by Thomas' 'intellectualism,' his exaltation of intellect above will, of understanding above love.

"Many wondered how so coldly negative and remote a God as Actus Purus of the Summa could be prayed to. How Jesus could be part of such an abstrction -- what St. Francis would have said of -- or to -- such a God.

"To make body and soul one unity seemed to put out of court the incorruptible immortality of the soul. To make matter and form one unity was, despite Thomas' denials, to fall into the Averroistic theory of the eternity of the world. To make matter, not form, the principle of individuation seemed to leave the soul undifferentiated, and to fall into the Averroistic theory of the unity and impersonal immortality of the soul.

"Worst of all, the triumph of Aristotle over Augustine in the Thomist philosophy seemed to the Franciscans the victory of paganism over Christianity.

"We must not think of Scholasticism as an abstraction purged of a thousand individual peculiarities but as a lazy name for the hundreds of conflicting philosophical and theological theories taught in the medieval schools from Anselm in the eleventh century to Occam in the fourteenth.

"Already in the Natural History of the elder Pliny we find supposedly medieval superstitions on every other page.

"The indifference of the Romans co-operated with that of the Christians to almost dry up the stream of science long before the barbarian invasions littered the routes of cultural transmission with the debris of a ruined society. What remained of Greek science in Europe was buried in the libraries of Constantinople and that remnant suffered in the sack of 1204.

"Greek science migrated through Syria into Islam in the ninth century and stirred Moslem thought to one of the most remarkable cultural awakenings in history while Christian Europe struggled to lift itself out of barbarism and superstition.

"Science and philosophy in the medieval West had to grow up in such an atmosphere of myth, legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination, and sorcery as comes only in ages of chaos and fear. All these had existed in the pagan world and exist today but tempered by a civilizazed humor and enlightenment. They were strong in the Semitic world and triumphed after Averroes and Maimonides.

"In Western Europe, from the sixth to the eleventh century, they broke the dikes of culture and overwhelmed the medieval mind in an ocean of occultism and credulity.

"The greatest, most lerned men shared in this credulity. Augustine thought that the pagan gods still existd as demons and that fauns and satyrs were real. Abelard thought that demons can work magic through their intimate acquaintance with the secrets of nature. Alfonso the Wise accepted magic and sanctioned divination by the stars.

"Dead men walked the air as ghosts. Men who had sold themselvfes to the Devil roamed woods and fields as werewolves. The souls of children dead before baptism haunted the mnarshes as will-o'-the-wisps. When St. Edmund Rich saw a flight of black crows he recognized them at once as a flock of devils come to fetch the soul of a local usurer.

"When a demon is exorcised from a man, said many a medieval story, a big black fly -- sometimes a dog -- could be seen issuying from his mouth.

"The population of devils never declined.

"A hundred objects -- herbs, stones, amulets, rings, gems -- were worn for their magic power to ward off devils and bring good luck.

"The horseshoe was lucky because it had the shape of the crescent moon which had once been a goddess. Sailors, at the mercy of the elements, and peasants, subject to all the whims of earth and sky saw the supernatural at every turn and lived in a vital medium of superstitions.

"The attribution of magic powers to certain numbers came down from Pythagoras through the Christian Fathers. Three, the number of the Trinity, was the holiest number and stood for the soul -- four represented the body -- seven, their sum, symbolized the complete man. Hence a predilection for seven -- ages of man, planets, sacraments, cardinal virtures, deadly sins.

"A sneeze at the wrong time was a bad omen and had better be disarmed with a 'God bless you' in any case. Philters could be used to create or destroy love. Conception could be avoided by spitting thrice into the mouth of a frog or holding a jasper pebble in the hand during coitus.

"Augustine thought that the diseases of mankind were caused by demons and Luther agreed with him. It seemed logical, therefore, to cure illness with prayer and epidemics by religious processions or building churches. so Santa Maria della Salute at Venice was raised to check a plague and the prayers of St. Gerbold, Bishop of Bayeux, cured that city of an epidemic of dysentery.

"Good physicinans welcomed the aid of religious faith in effecting cures. They recommended prayer and the wearing of amulets.

"As far back as Edward the Confessor we find English rulers blessing rings for the cure of cpilepsy. Kings, having been consecrated by religious touch, felt that they might cure by imposition of hands. Persons suffering from scrofula were supposed to be especially amenable to the royal touch. Hence the name 'king's evil' for that ailment.

"Sumerian mathematics, born of forgotten parentage, had descended through Babylonia to Greece. Egyptian geometry, still visible in the pyramids, had passed, perhaps through Crete and Rhodes, to Ionia and Greece.

"Greek mathematics had gone to India in the wake of Alexander and had played a part in the Hindu development that culminated in Brahmagupta about 775. Translations were made of Hindu mathematicians, and soon afterward of Greek mathematicians into Arabic.

"About 830 the Hindu numerals entered Eastern Islam.

"About 1000 Gerbert brought them to France.

"In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew mathematics streamed into Western Europe through Spain and Sicily and came with Italian merchants to Venice and Genoa, Amalfi and Pisa.

"Mathematics, physics, and astronomy were closely allied and those who wrote on one of them usually contributed to the others as well.

"Sir John of Holywood (in Yorkshire), known to the Latin world as Joannes de Sacrobosco, studied at Oxford, taught at Paris, wrote a Tractatus de sphaera -- Treatise on the Earthly Shere -- and an exposition of the new mathematics, Algorimus vulgaris -- Mathematics for the Millions. Algorimus, a corruption of the name al-Khwarizini, was the Latin term for an arithmetical system using the Hindu numerals. John credited the 'Arabs' with the invention of this system and was partly responsible for the misnomer 'Arabic numerals.'

"The earth was the chosen home of Christ and the shell of hell and weather was the whim of God. Moslem, Jew, and Christian alike covered mineralogy with superstition and composed 'lapidaries' on the magical powers of stones.

"Marbod, Bishop of Rennes, wrote in Latin verse a popular Liber lapidum describing the occult qualities of sixty precious stones. A saphhire held in the hand during prayer, said this erudite bishop, would secure a more favorable answer from God. An opal folded in a bay leaf rendered its holder invisible. An amethyst made him immune to intoxication. A diamond made him invincible.

"The same eager curiosity that spawned superstitions upon the minerals of the earth sent medieval men wandering over Europe and the East and slowly enriched geography. Giraldus Cambrensis -- Gerald of Wales -- roamed over many lands and topics, mastered many tongues but not his own, accompanied Prince John to Ireland, lived there two years, toured Wales to preach the Third Crusade, and wrote four vivacious books on the two countries.

"He weighed down his pages with bias and miracles. but lightened them with vivid accounts of persons and places and lively gossip of the trivial things that make the color of a character or an age.

"Maps and routes were drawn to guide them and geography benefited.

"In 1107-11 Sigurd Jorsalafare, King of Norway, sailed as a crusader with sixty ships via England, Spain, and Sicily to Palestine. After fighting Moslems at every opportunity he led his lessened band to Constantinople and thence overland through the Balkans, Germany, and Denmark to Norway. The story of this adventurous journey forms one of the great Sandndinavian sagas.

"In 1270 Lanzarotte Malocello rediscovered the Canary Islands which had been known to antiquity.

"About 1290 Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldo, according to an unverified tradition, set out from Genoa in two galleys to sail around Africa to India. All hands, it appears, were lost.

"A famous hoax took the form of a letter from a mythical 'Prester John' who told of his dominions in Central Asia and gave a fantastic geography of the Orient.

"Despite the Crusades, few Christians believed in the antipodes. St. Augustine considered it 'incredible that a people inhabits the antipodes where the sun rises when it sets with us and where men walk with their feet toward towad ours.'

"An Irish monk, St. Fergil, had suggested about 748 the possibility of 'another world and other men under the earth.'

"Their vitality is suggested near the outset of this period by the efforts of Oliver of Malmesbury to make an airplane. In 1065 his contraption was ready. He soared in it from a high place and was killed.

"The science of mechanics produced in the thirteenth century a remarkable figure, a Dominican monk who anticipated several basic conceptions of Isaac Newton. Jordanus Nemorarius became the second General of the Dominican Order in 1222. That such a man could do such brilliant work in science bears witness -- if Albert and Thomas were not enough -- to the intellectual engagerness of the Preaching Friars.

"In three mathematical treatises rivaling those of Fibonacci in courage and influence, he accepted the Hindu numerals and advanced algebra by regularly using letters instead of figures for his general formulas.

"His Elements super demonstrationem ponderis studied the component of gravity along a trajectory and laid down a principle now known as the axiom of Jordanus -- that which can raise certain weight for a certain height can raise a weight K times heavier to a height K times less.

"Another treatise, De ratione ponderis (perhaps by a pupil), analyzed the notion of statiscal moment -- the product of a force into its inclined plane.

"A third treatise, inscribed to 'the school of Jordanus,' gave tentative expression to the theory of virtual displacements -- a principle developed by Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, and John Bernouli and finally formulated by J. William Gibbs in the nineteenth century.

"The basic picture of medieval medicine is the mother with her little store of household remedies -- old women wise in herbs and plasters and magic charms -- herbalists peddling curative plants -- infallible drugs and miraculous pills -- midwives ready to sever new life from old in the ridiculous ignominy of birth -- quacks ready to cure or kill for a pittance -- monks with a heritage of monastic medicine -- nuns quietly comforting the sick with ministration or prayer -- and here and there, for those who could afford them, trained physicians practicing more or less scientific medicine.

"Monstrous drugs and fabulous formulas flourished.

"Adelard, after studying in many Moslem countries, returned to England and wrote a long dialogue covering many sciences. It begins Platoniclly by describing Adelard's reunion with his friends.

"He asks about the state of affairs in England. He is told that the kings make war, judges take bribes, prelates drink too much, all promises are broken, all friends are envious.

"He accepts this as a genial summary of the natural and unchangeable condition of things and proposes to forget it. His nephew inquires what has Adelard learned among the Moslems?

"He expresses a general preference for Arabic as against Christian science. They challenge him and his replies constitute an interesting selection from all the sciences of the age.

"He inveighs against the bondage of tradition and authority.

'I learned from my Arabian masters under the leading of reason. You, however, captivated by authority, follow your halter. For what else should authority be called than a halter? Those who are now counted as authorities gained their reputations by following reason, not authority. Therefore, if you want to hear anything more from me, give and take reason. Nothing is surer than reason. Nothing is falser than the senses.'

"Though Adelard relies too confidently on deductive reasoning, he gives some interesting replies. Asked how the earth is upheld in space, he answers that the center and the bottom are the same. How far would a stone fall if dropped into a hole bored through the center of the earth to the other side? He answers 'Only to the center of the earth.' He states clearly the indestructibility of matter and argues that universal continuity makes a vacuum impossible.

"All in all, Adelard is a brilliant proof of the awakening intellect in Christian Europe in the twelfth century.

"We must not think of him as a lone originator, a scientific voice crying out in the scholatic wilderness. In every field he was indebted to his predecessors and his originality was the forceful summation of a long development. Alexander Neckham, Bartholomew the Englishman, Robert Grosseteste, and Adam Marsh had established a scientific tradition at Oxford.

"Bacon inherited it and proclaimed it to the world. He acknowledged his indebtedness and gave his predecessors unmeasured praise. He recognized also his debt -- and the debt of Christendom -- to Islamic science anbd philosophy and through these to the Greeks and suggested that the 'heathen' savants of Greece and Islam had also, in their own fashion, been inspired and guided by God.

"He had a high regard for Isaaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol and other Hebrew thinkers and had the courage to say a good word for the Jews who lived in Palestine at the time of the crucifixion of Christ.

"He was remembered chiefly as a man of many marvels, a magician and conjurer. It was as such that he was presented in a play by Robert Greene 300 years after his death.

"It is hard to say how much Francis Bacon owed to him. We can only note that the second Bacon, like the first, rejected Aristotelian logic and Scholastic method, questioned authority, custom, and other 'idols' of traditional thought, praised science, listed its expected inventions, chartered its program, stressed its practical utility, and sought financial aid for scientific research.

"Slowly, from that sixteenth century, Roger Bacon's fame grew until he became a legend -- the supposed inventor of gunpowder -- the heroic freethinker -- the lifelong victim of religious persecution -- the great initiator of modern thought.

"Today the pendulum returns. Iistorians point out that he had only a confused idea of experieent -- that he did little experimenting himself -- that in theology he was more orthodox than the pope -- that his pages were peppered with superstitions, magic, misquotations, false charges, and legends taken for history.

"The thirteenth century excelled in encyclopedias and in summae that were all encompassing syntheses.

"The outburst of scientific activity in the thirteenth century rivals the magnitude of its philosophies and the variety and splendor of a literature ranging from the troubadours to Dante. Like the great summae and The Divine Comedy, the science of this age suffered from too great certainty, from a failure to examine its assumptions, and from an indiscriminate mingling of knowledge with faith.

"Much of it was poetry in form only, for all varieties of didactic material -- history, legend, mathematics, logic, theology, medicine -- were given rhythm and rhuyme as mnemonic aids.

"And there were epics of small moment and great length, like Walter of Chatillon's Alexandreis which seem to us now as dull as Paradise Lost.

"There were also poetical disputations -- between body and soul, death and man, mercy and truth, rustic and cleric, man and woman, wine and water, wine and beer, rose and violet, the poor student and the well-fed priest, even between Helen and Ganymede as to the rival merits of heterosexual and homosexual love.

"The past has not transmitted itself to us impartially, except in our blood. We must all the more admire the liberality of spirit -- or the fellowship of enjoyment -- that led the monastery of Benediktbeuern (in upper Bavaria) to preserve the manuscript which reached print in 1847 as Carmina Burana (Beuern Poems) and is now our main source for the poetry of the 'wandering scholars.'

"These were not tramps. Some were footloose monks straying from their monasteries, some were clerics out of a job, most were students en route, often by foot, between home and university, or from one university to another.

"Many students stopped at taverns on the way, some sampled wines and women, and learned unscheduled lore. Some composed songs, sang them, sold them. Some abandoned hope of an ecclesiastical career and lived from pen to mouth by dedicating their poetic powers to bishops or lords.

"They labored chiefly in France and western Germany but as they wrote in Latin their poems achieved an international currency. They pretended to have an organization, the Ordo vagorium, or guild of wanderers and they invented as its founder and patron saint a mythical Rabelaisian personage whom they called Golias.

"As early as the tenth century Archbishop Walter of Sens fulminated against the scandalous 'family of Golias' and as late as 1229 a Church council condemned the 'Goliardi' for singing parodies on the most sacred songs of the litergy.

"The plays of Seneca and Hroswitha were literary exercises which apparently never reachd the stage.

"Two lines of active continuity remained -- the mimetic rituals of agricultural festivals and the farces played by wandering minstrels and clowns in castle hall or village square.

"But in the Middle Agees as in ancient Greece the main fountainhead of drama was in religious liturgy.

"The Mass itself was a dramatic spectacle. The sanctuary was a sacred stage, the celebrants wore symbolic costimes, priest and acolytes engaged in dialogue and the antiphonal responses of priest and choir and of choir to choir suggested precisely that same evolution of drama from dialogue that had generated the sacred Dionysian play.

"In the ceremonies of certain holydays the dramatic element was explicitly developed. At Christmas in some religious rites of the eleventh century men dressed as shepherds entered the church, were greeted with 'glad tidings' by a choir-boy 'angel,'and worshiped a wax or plaster babe in a manger. From an eastern door three 'kiugs' entered and were guided to the manger by a star pulled along a wire.

"On the 28th of December certain churches represented the 'slaughter of the innocents' - boy choristers marched up nave and aisles, fell as if murdered by Herod, rose and walked up into thge sanctuary, moved the crucifix from the altar and carried it to a receptacle representing the Holy Sepulcher from which on Easter morning it was solemnly restored to the altar in token of resurrection.

"As far back as 180 the story of Christ's Passion had been written as a Euripidean drama by Gregory Nazianzen, Patriarch of Cconsttantinople, and from that time to this the Passion Play has kept its hold uponb Christian peoples.

"By and large, by the twelfth century, only clerics could understand Latin and writers who wished to reach a lay audience were compelled to use the vernacular tongues. As social order grew, the reading audience widened and national literatures rose to meet its demand.

"French literature began in the eleventh century, German in the twelfth, English, Spanish and Italian in the thirteenth.

"The natural early form of these indigenous literatures was the popular song.

"The song was drawn out into the ballad. The ballad, by proliferation or agglutination, swelled into such minor epics as Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelunggenlied and the Cid.

"The Chanson was probably put together about 1130 from ballads of the ninth or tenth century. In 4000 simple flowing iambic lines it tells the story of Roland's death at Roneesvalles.

"Charlemagne, having 'conquered' Moorish Spain, turns back with his army toward France. The traitorous Ganelon reveals their route to the enemy and Roland volunteers to lead the dangerous rear guard. In a narrow winding gorge of the Pyrenees a horde of Basques pours down fronm the cliffs upon Roland's litle force. His friend Olivier begs him to sound his great horn as a call to Charlemagne for aid but Roland proudly refuses to ask for help.

"He and Olivier and Archbishop Turpin lead their troops in a desperate resistance and they fight until nearly all are dead. Olivier, blinded by blood flowing from mortal wounds in his head, mistakes Roland for an enemy and strikes him. Roland's helmet is split from crown to nosepiece but saves him.

"Roland at last blows his oliphant, blows until the blood bursts from his temples. Charlemagne hears and turns back to the rescue.

"This style of verse moved from Toulouse to Paris to London with Eleanor of Aquistaine, captured the lion heart of her son Richard I, created the minnesingers of Germany and molded the Italian dolce stil nuovo that led to Dante.

"At the origin of the style stands Eleanor's grandfather, William IX, count of Poiton and Duke of Aquitaine.

"This reckless blade found himself at eleven the practically independent ruler of southwestern France. He joined the First Crusade and sang its victory. But, like so many nobles in his heresy-infected lands, he had scant respect for the Church and made gay mockery of her priests.

"An old Provencal biography describes him as 'one of the most courteous men in the world, and a great deceiver of ladies, and he was a brave knight, and had much to do with love affairs, and he knew well how to sing and make verses, and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive the ladies.'

"Though married, he carried off the beautiful Viscountess of Chatellerault and lived with her in open scandal. When the bold bald bishop of Angouleme bade him end his wicked ways he replied:-'I will repudiate the viscountess as soon as your hair requires a comb.'

"Excommunicated, he one day met the bishop of Poitiers. he said:-'Absolve me or I will kill you.' Answered the bishop, offering his neck:-'Strike.' Said William:-'I do not love you well enough to send you to paradise.'

"The duke set a style of writing amorous poetry to noble dames. He suited the action to the word, led a short life and a merry one, and died at fifty-six.

"The German poets were called Minnesinger, love singers, and their poetry coincided with the Minnedienst (love service) and Frauendienst (lady service) of contemporary chivalry.

"We know over 300 of these minnesingers by name, and have a plentiful legacy of their verse. Some of them belonged to the lower nobility. Most of them were poor and depended upon imperial or ducal patronage.

"Although they followed a strict law of rhythm and rhyme, many of them were illiterate and dictated the words and music of their Lieder. To this day the German term for poetry -- Dichtung -- means dictation.

"Usually they let minstrels sing for them. Sometimes they themselves sang. We hear of a grat Songerkrieg, or song contest, held at the Castle Wartburg in 1207.

"There, we are told, both Tannhauser and Wolfram von Eschembach took part.

"As aristocratic troubadors and trovatori wrote delicate lyrics for the ladies of southern France and Italy, so in northern France the poets of humble birth -- known to the French as trouveres or inventors -- heightened the evenings of the middle and upper classes with poetic tales of love and war.

"The typical compositions of the trouveres were the ballade, the lai, the chanson de geste, and the roman.

"As social order improved and the status of women rose with the growth of wealth, war yielded to love as the major theme of the trouveres and in the twelfth century the chansons de geste were succeeded by the romans.

"Perhaps the Moslems in his retinue contributed some stimulus, for every literate Moslem versified.

"Some years before Frederick's death in 1250 Ciullo d'Alcamo wrote a pretty 'Dialogue Between Lover and Lady' and Alcamo, Sicily, was almost wholly a Moslem town.

"But a more decisive influence came from the troubadours of Provence, who sent their poems, or came in person, to the appreciative Frederick and his cultured aides. Frederick himself not only supported poetry, he wrote it, and in Italian.

"His son Manfred continued his patronage of poetry and wrote lyrics that Dante praised.

"Much of this 'Sicilian' verse was translated into Tuscan and shared in forming the school of poets that culminated in Dante.

"At the same time French troubadours, leaving a Languedoc harried by religious wars, found refuge in Ialian courts, initiated Italian poets into the gai saber, taught Italian women to welcome verse eulogies and persuaded Italian magnates to reward poetry imitation of the French troubadours so far as to write in Provencal.

"Probably they took no thought that the words meant long-lasting wing-bearer. Appparently the poet himself shortened his first name to Dante.

"His family had a lengthy pedigree in Florence but had slipped into poverty. The mother died in Dante's early years.

"Alighiero married again and Dante grew up, perhaps unhappily with a stepmother, a half brother, and two half sisters.

"The father died when Dante was fifteen, leaving a heritage of debts.

"Of Dante's teachers he remembered most gratefully Brunetto Latini, who, returning from France, had shortened his French encyclopedia, Tresor, into an Italian Tesoretto.

"From him Dante learned come l'uom s'eterna -- how man immortalizes himself. Dante must have studied Virgil with especial delight. He speaks of the Mantuan's bel stilo. And what other student has so loved a classic as to follow its author through hell?

"Boccaccio tells of Dante being at Bologna in 1287. There or elsewhere the poet picked up so much of the sorry science and miraculous philosophy of his time that his poem became top heavy with his erudition.

"He lerned also to ride, hunt, fence, paint, and ling. How he earned his bread we do not know. In any case he was admitted to cultured circles, if only through his friendship with Cavalcanti.