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In this pioneering work Jacques Le Goff examines both the creation of the medieval universities in the great cities of the European High Middle Ages, and the linked origins of the intellectuals - the first Europeans since the Classic Age to owe their livelihoods to their teaching and accumulation of knowledge. The author's argument is that the intellectuals, Abelard most typically, were a new category of person (neither monk nor knight) with a new method (scholastic dialectic) and a new objective (knowledge for its own sake). For the first time in Spain, France, England and Germany the luxury of thinking and learning ceased to be the limited preserve of the higher echelons of the Church and the Court. The effect, the author shows, was to bring about an irreversible shift in European culture. This intellectual history of medieval Europe (translated from the revised French edition of 1984) will be widely welcomed by students and scholars of the Middle Ages throughout the English-speaking world.… (more)
User reviews
This is particularly frustrating when the book in hand belongs to the local library. Underlining is not an option. To address this vexing issue, I've taken to copying out passages in a notebook (bibliography and all (citation style is deeply idiosyncratic)). As I read the passages the day after I'd finished this delightful "little book" I noticed that they were entirely about the act of thinking as a job - as work that was done in the urban marketplace in much the same way as shoe-making or fruit-selling.
I am not enough of a romantic to regret the passage of time and the changes that have taken place, but I am enough of an intellectual to see the very real dangers that anti-intellectualism as a cultural reality and a deliberate aim have caused and the havoc that it continues to wreak.
Le Goff writes as someone who is not necessarily enamored of the past, but still admiring; there is no fawning, and no little teasing at the expense of such as Abelard and Heloise (in all fairness, they did name their only child Astrolabe). At the same time, he takes care to develop the historical context of a world in which there was established a street level, marketplace viable relationship between thinkers and urban dwellers, an intimacy which has disappeared. It is easy to read the awe in the narrator's words that this role was embraced and respected for so long. The tragedy of its demise is all the more painful even 800 years later as we all look to our own recent pasts to find the basis for anti-intellectual behavior. We will not find it there. It is laid out in the pages of this wonderful book as an elegy to the arts of thinking and arguing as useful trades in the world market place.
My notebook has become a treasure chest, filled with signposts to the places where my heart stopped and started again and noticed that the world was never going to be the same. Many of those lead me back here.