A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [43]
Questions of human behavior found answers in the book of Sidrach, supposedly a descendant of Noah to whom God gave the gift of universal knowledge, eventually compiled into a book by several masters of Toledo. What language does a deaf-mute hear in his heart? Answer: that of Adam, namely Hebrew. Which is worst: murder, robbery, or assault? None of these; sodomy is the worst. Will wars ever end? Never, until the earth becomes Paradise. The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God, “hence it is no great marvel if in this world there arise wars and battles since these existed first in heaven.”
Education, so far as it would have reached Enguerrand, was based on the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. Medicine, though not one of the liberal arts, was analogous to Music because its object was the harmony of the human body.
History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God.
The average layman acquired knowledge mainly by ear, through public sermons, mystery plays, and the recital of narrative poems, ballads, and tales, but during Enguerrand’s lifetime, reading by educated nobles and upper bourgeois increased with the increased availability of manuscripts. Books of universal knowledge, mostly dating from the 13th century and written in (or translated from the Latin into) French and other vernaculars for the use of the layman, were literary staples familiar in every country over several centuries. A 14th century man drew also on the Bible, romances, bestiaries, satires, books of astronomy, geography, universal history, church history, rhetoric, law, medicine, alchemy, falconry, hunting, fighting, music, and any number of special subjects. Allegory was the guiding concept. Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. Everything in nature concealed an allegorical meaning relating to some aspect of Christian doctrine. Allegorical figures—Greed, Reason, Courtesy, Love, False-Seeming, Do-Well, Fair Welcome, Evil Rumor—peopled the tales and political treatises.
Epics of great heroes, of Brutus and King Arthur, of the “strong stryfe” of Greece and Troy, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, of how Charlemagne and Roland fought the Saracens and how Tristan and Iseult loved and sinned, were the favorites of noble households, though not to the exclusion of coarser stuff. The fabliaux or tales of common life, bawdy and scatological, were told in noble halls as well as taverns. The Ménagier of Paris, a wealthy bourgeois contemporary of Enguerrand VII, who at the age of sixty in 1392 wrote a book of domestic and moral instruction for his young wife, had read or possessed the Bible, The Golden Legend, St. Jerome’s Lives of the Fathers, the works of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, Livy, Cicero, the Roman de la Rose,