The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [9]
In every monastery and cathedral in France Charlemagne established schools whose task it was to teach the basics of literacy, for only in this way could he ensure the continued existence of the knowledge of the past. To achieve his aim, Charlemagne made use of Capella’s seven liberal arts, maintained over the centuries in monastic libraries. From the middle of the eighth century onwards, the liberal arts were taught all over Europe. The English scholar Alcuin was brought over from York to head the Palace School at Aachen, Charlemagne’s glittering capital. It was probably Alcuin who standardised writing through the development of Carolingian minuscule, a tiny, clear script which was one day to become the model for modern upper and lower case lettering.
The cathedral schools also taught psalms, the chant and how to compute the seasons. After Alcuin’s death it was decreed that all parish priests should provide this minimal education free. The main cathedral schools and centres of intellectual activity were at Paris, Chartres, Laon and Reims, in northern France. Later, on the Royal Portal of the cathedral at Chartres, sculptors would place an allegory of the trivium and quadrivium, as the three- and four-subject divisions of the curriculum became known, to show to the illiterate wor shippers the power and importance of the intellect in the service of God.
A medieval miniature showing Adam naming the beasts, from a bestiary by Isidore of Seville. Adam is shown clothed, to assert his superiority over unreasoning naked animals. In the natural order of things, the animals shown at the top are lions.
The material available to teachers of the arts was limited. It had been kept alive for hundreds of years in the scriptoria of the monasteries, through repeated copying and, often, miscopying. The main source of general knowledge was the work of Isidore of Seville, a Spaniard who lived in the sixth century in the comparative safety of the Iberian peninsula at a time when the barbarian incursions which had ravaged Rome and most of Europe were still contained north of the Pyrenees. Like Capella, Isidore was conscious of the need to preserve what he could in the face of approaching chaos. He gathered together all he knew into twenty texts, structured on the principle that the meaning of everything can be traced to the source of its name. These Etymologies drew on Late Latin authors like Pliny, and took the curious form of a series of ‘trees’, rather like the modern ‘branched learning’ techniques, whereby from one source, or word, the reader could follow the various extensions of what the root word implied, through all its ‘factual’ meanings. These texts represented all that Isidore knew of the grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine and history of his time. He also wrote a short work called About Nature on the interrelationship of man and the four elements, the four humours, and the planets.
A quick-reference calendar from the ninth century. The illustration shows the Sun in his chariot surrounded by the twelve months, and the agricultural activity with which they are associated. The zodiacal signs for the months are placed at the outer edge of the circle.
The Etymologies were massive, rambling and confused. Later scholars, such as the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumberland, added to it from time to time. The encyclopedias and the other lists of ‘facts’ about the world to be found at the time in various books on minerals, animals and plants, presented the knowledge in what would appear to us a strange way. Everything had a hidden meaning, because, according to Augustine’s teaching, nature’s true meaning was not made visible by God. Nothing, therefore, was what it seemed. The ‘Book of Nature’ was a cryptogram that had to be decoded by the faithful.
The world described in these books was a world of shadows. Behind every object lay an ‘idea’, a spiritual entity that was its only real meaning. Its earthly, visible manifestation was unimportant.