Synopses & Reviews
This magisterial book is an analysis of the course of Western intellectual history between A.D. 400 and 1400. The book is arranged in two parts: the first surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian, and Muslim cultures, and the second takes the reader from the eleventh-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond, the period in which the vibrancy of Western intellectual culture enabled it to stamp its imprint well beyond the frontiers of Christendom.
Marcia Colish argues that the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition were laid in the Middle Ages and not, as is commonly held, in the Judeo-Christian or classical periods. She contends that Western medieval thinkers produced a set of tolerances, tastes, concerns, and sensibilities that made the Middle Ages unlike other chapters of the Western intellectual experience. She provides astute descriptions of the vernacular and oral culture of each country of Europe; explores the nature of medieval culture and its transmission; profiles seminal thinkers (Augustine, Anselm, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Ockham); studies heresy from Manichaeism to Huss and Wycliffe; and investigates the influence of Arab and Jewish writing on scholasticism and the resurrection of Greek studies. Colish concludes with an assessment of the modes of medieval thought that ended with the period and those that remained as bases for later ages of European intellectual history.
This book inaugurates an important new series that provides a chronological account of intellectual life and the development of ideas in Western Europe from the medieval period to the present.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [360]-369) and index.
Table of Contents
Part 1. From Roman Christianity to the Latin Christian culture of the early Middle Ages. From apology to the Constantinian establishment ; The Latin church fathers, I: Ambrose and Jerome ; The Latin church fathers, II: Augustine and Gregory the Great ; Hanging by a thread: the transmitters and Monasticism ; Europe's new schoolmasters: Franks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons ; The Carolingian Renaissance -- Part 2. Vernacular culture. Celtic and old French literature ; Varieties of Germanic literature: Old Norse, Old High German, and Old English -- Part 3. Early medieval civilizations compared. Imperial culture: Byzantium ; Peoples of the book: Muslim and Jewish thought ; Western European thought in the tenth and eleventh centuries -- Part 4. Latin and vernacular literature. The Renaissance of the twelfth century ; Courtly love literature ; Goliardic poetry, fabliaux, satire, and drama ; Later medieval literature -- Part 5. Mysticism, devotion, and heresy. Cistercians and Victorines ; Franciscans, Dominicans, and later medieval mystics ; Heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; The Christian commonwealth reconfigured: Wycliff and Huss -- Part 6. High and late medieval speculative thought. Scholasticism and the rise of universities ; The twelfth century: the Logica Modernorum and systematic theology ; The thirteenth century: modism and terminism, Latin Averroism, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas ; Later medieval scholasticism: the triumph of terminism, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham -- Part 7. The legacy of scholasticism. The natural sciences: reception and criticism ; Economic theory: poverty, the just price, and usury ; Political theory: Regnum and Sacerdotum, conciliarism, feudal monarchy.