28 - The early schools, c. 900–1100

Summary

Introduction

The tenth and eleventh centuries do not deserve the neglect that has been their lot. Recent historiography – whether emphasising the theme of steady transformation or interested rather in the idea of a decisive rupture around the year 1000 – has brilliantly illuminated the movements that were in progress throughout this period. These affected not only the major kingdoms of France, Germany and England, but the whole group of western societies which we have come to designate ‘Latin Christianity’, in contrast with Byzantine and eastern Christianity. Between about 900 and 1100, this area can in fact be reduced to the kingdoms of Germany and Italy, a few oases in the Iberian peninsular fighting for Christian reconquest and the kingdoms of France and England. The small Scandinavian kingdoms, culturally dependent on England, had hardly emerged, while in the east of Europe a dividing line appeared, signalling a gradual separation between Latin and Greek zones of influence. The leaders of the Frankish countries had established their domination at the end of the eighth century and in the ninth century at the expense of the Byzantine empire, first appropriating for themselves and then cultivating the symbolic power of both ancient and Christian Rome, and dipping enthusiastically into the Judaeo-Christian Bible for the federal themes of a shared ideology. The wind changed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The dream of a shared culture subservient to strong authority disappeared, giving way to regional cultures, disconnected from power, which relied more than before on the liberal arts of the quadrivium and trivium, and were less concerned with the communal benefit of biblical models than with their moral and spiritual function. However, there was a change of direction in the second half of the eleventh century: it announced that a process of restructuring was under way, inaugurating a profound transformation in the way the Bible was used throughout the West.