It's worth having the favourite saying of St Bernard, the leader of the most landscape-conscious order (the Cistercians) engraved on one's heart 'A monk's duty is to mourn, not to teach'.
p.11 'Christianity was an oriental, ie non-Graeco-Roman religion'
For people living on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean
'Christian and Roman became synonymous terms. The monks and hermits
and the holy men sitting on their pillars provided ordinary people
with a link with the emperor; for the emperor would listen to the holy
men's interventions and admonitions'
p.12 'The west was different' Pagan traditions were strong. and
Roma eterna (Eternal Rome) was seen as the high point of all
civilisation
p.43 Boethius (c480-524) was the outstanding thinker of the period. Born a Roman aristocrat, he was a philosopher, a theologian, a poet, a mathematician, and an astronomer. In prison, awaiting execution, he wrote The consolation of philosophy in which he reflected on the amazing nature of the universe and asked 'What grandeur or magnificance can glory have, contrasted with such small and narrow limits?' For centuries Aristotle was known only through Boethius.
p.47 At a turning point in a battle the Frankish king Clovis (described as Merovingian, after the name of his ancestor) said 'If thou grant me victory over these enemies,... then I will also believe in Thee and be baptised in They name'. He won and this is how Gaul became a Christian and Catholic country!
p.50 The reasons for the success of Christianity (by 400) were (1)
'the powerful appeal of a belief which promised eternal life and
spiritual peace to all men regardless of their present condition. For
life on earth was hard, painful and short for most people' (2) Romans
were influenced by the Zoroastrian view that the universe was a
battlefield between the forces of good and evil - and they wanted
support against the 'demons', represented by demons (who the
Christians identified with the Greek and Roman gods), so they wanted
help from 'the grace of Christ' to fight against the demons. (3)
Constantine said the Christian god had helped him win a military
victory (4) Rome's military defeats showed the need for help (though
the pagans replied that it was neglecting the old gods which caused
the troubles). (5) St Augustine had a higher view. He thought true
glory existed only in the City of God.
P 52 Augustine also solved the problem about what Christians should do
about Greek philosophy: make as much use of it as possible! 'Augustine
accepted the Neo-Platonists' concept of plenitude, the fullness of the
world of all possible types of creation... the theory of "the great
chain of being"'. So (p.53 ''the Church, without ever entirely losing
its ambivalent feelings about secular culture, came to be the guardian
and preserver of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions'... 'It proved
to be an uncomfortable but a fruitful heritage'.
[TT see above note re Clovis. It seems that Christianity provided a
synthesis between Eastern, Greek and Gothic concerns]
Ency Brit: St Augustine (354- AD) was Bishop of Hippo, in Africa. (now Annaba in Algeria) His father was a pagan and his mother a Christian of intense piety. At first he was a Manichaean - a Christian sect which saw the world as a conflict between light and dark substances. Then he came across the work of Plotinus (lived 3rd century). His conversion to Christianity took place (see the Confessions) in a garden in Milan in 386
p. 58 'The barbarian invasions, the wars, the devastations and expropriations largely destroyed the physical basis of the classical tradition, the propertied, urban, leisured class and the schools which it had supported. It was a slow and uneven process'.
p.64 'The fusion of the tribal Germanic and the settled Roman societies took several centuries to accomplish and, since it took place in different ways and at different speeds, it produced a rich variety of new political, social, ethnic and cultural structures and societies. Nevertheless, all these looked back to and often tried to recapture a common Christian and Roman heritage.'
p.68 'The villages or groups of villages, with their fields surrounded by forest, scrub or marsh, were mostly self-contained - small oases of cultivated land in a vast uncultivated continent'
p. 68 'Germanic paganism was centred on the worship of trees and thus there was a taboo on destroying forests'
p. 73 'The estates [of Christian Europe] grew out of Roman origins and the barbarians had not found it difficult to take them over, nor to imitate and spread them. Gangs of slaves still worked the demesne, or home farm'. Slaves came from wars and from traders or people became slaves as penalties. Slavery began to decline when it was discovered that, given some land, they could feed themselves when not needed for estate work.
p 99-100 The feudal system 'could hardly have developed as it did if it had not also rested on much older Germanic traditions of lordship and loyalty' [as Tacitus describes]. The feudal oath of loyalty was a contract between free men.
p.140 Use of the wheeled plough pulled by a team of oxen led to cultivation in long strips. Earlier fields, pulled by un-wheeled ploughs, had been small and rectangular.
p.142 'The King's Knot and the associated parterre beneath Stirling Castle though repeatedly reformed, do occupy the site of a great garden which was probably laid out by James I soon after 1424, in imitation of the King's Garden below Windsor Castle where ha had first seen his queen'.
p.143 'From its beginings in the Roman Empire, the Christian Church had been an imperial and, hence, an international institution.'
p. 144 Many new towns were founded north of the alps from the 13th to 15th centuries, often founded by princes or bishops.
p.168 Louis VI was known as 'The Fat'
p 203 Aristotle's greatest impact was in the Islamic and Judaic worlds.
TT Note: Germanic society was founded on family groups and free men joining under a lord. In Rome there was a leisured class and an enslaved class.
p. 33 'Apart from the cultivation of a small patch round his dwelling, the peasant farmed portions of the arable in the 'open' fields of the settlement'. These fields were given temporary fencing when planted and then cattle were allowed in to manure the land. (tt: the 'small patch' is the kale yard of Scotland)
The chivalrous class was given land (a benefice) which they could sublet to peasants. This system worked with good agricultural land - not in the mountains. (p.42)
p.41 This gave them the means for a 'leisured' life. At first in a wooden fortress on a hill top and then in a stone fortresses. 'His relaxations partook of the warlike origin of his order; he hunted and played at war in the tournament, so that beasts for the chase and heavy war-horses were an integral and expensive part of his establishment. This life was prepared for in youth'
p.43 'banalities' (from ban=summons or command) commanded the peasant to takes his grain to the lord's mill and his apples to his lords apples.
p. 47 A tripartite division of society developed 'the clerk prayed,
the knight fought, the peasant worked'.
Church ownership of large areas of land dates back to Roman times.
This gave it the only wealth which mattered. Later magnates gave land
hoping for better treatment after death [note the similarity to Roman
superstition)
p.48 Endowments of land remained the property of the magnate 'in some
sense' - the land could not be taken back. Monasteries established
daughter-houses and, of course, ran their land on a feudal basis.
p. 49 Parishes were intimately connected with lordship and land. It
was the lord who appointed the priest and most of them regarded the
village church as their property. The funding was meant to be a tenth
(tithe) of the produce of the manor + a glebe [= a plot of land to
cultivate].
p. 50 St Bernard became a leader of the Cistercians [based at Citeaux
in Burgundy]. His favourite text was 'A monk's duty is to mourn, not
to teach'.
p. 54 the trivium subjects were grammar, rhetoric and
dialectic; the quadrivium subjects were music astronomy,
geometry and arithmetic. Together, these became the 'seven liberal
arts' of the medieval school.
p 55. ('universitas'= a corporation) Thus a university is a
corporation of teachers to give degrees with the right to teach
others.
p. 48 'As bishop of Tours, St Martin travelled through the country-side with an escort, destroying idols and sacred trees. The Imperial Government even caused heretical Christians to be arrested and put to death'
p.3 'The medieval west was born on the ruins of the Roman world. This was both a help and a hindrance to it. Rome both fed it and paralysed it'.
p.74 'The urban population was a group of consumers who only took part in farming as a sideline and who needed to be fed. There were no fields, strictly speaking inside medieval towns, but there were gardens and vineyards which played a significant role in feeding the townsfolk'
p.93 '...the castle was the centre of feudal organisation' p.94 after c1300 castles began to lose their power to magnates and kings
TT: note what a castle can do on a chess board: it is powerful in two directions but defenceless against certain forms of attack.
104 in the twelfth century 'The future seemed to belong to Genoa, Florence, Milan, Sienna, Venice, Barcelona, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck. And yet modern Europe was not built out of towns but out of nation states. The economic base of the nowns was never to be large enough'.
p.120 'But the great focal point of civilisation in the early middle ages was the monastery, and increasingly the isolated monastery in the countryside'
p. 128 The most brilliant mind of the 5th to 8th century was Boethius. He said 'nature is what informs each thing by by a specific difference'
p.210 'There was a striking contrast in the medieval west between the small pockets of land devoted to gardening which monopolised most of what agricultural refinement there was, and the large areas abandoned to rudimentary techniques'
p.293 '...the first class cities, numbered from 20,000 to 40,000 inhabitants...Moreover, as has often been justly pointed out, the medieval town was completely intermingled with the countryside. Townsfolk led a seimrural life within the walls, which gave protection to vines, gardens, indeed even meadows and ploughed fields, livestock, and dung. And yet the contrast between town and country was stronger in the middle ages than in most societies and civilsations. Town walls were a frontier, the strongest known in this period. The ramparts, with their towers and gates, separated two worlds.'
p.325 'Innovation was a sin. The church made a point of condemning ovitates or novelties. This happened with both technical and intellectual progress. Inventions were immoral'
p.330 Understanding the etymology of the word' symbol' helps to understand its place in the theology & literature of the middle ages. 'Symbolon, to the Greeks, meant a sign of recognition, represented by the two halves of an object shared between two persons. The symbol was the sign of a contract. It was a reference to a lost unity; it brought to mind or summoned up a superior, hidden reality. Now, in medieval thinking, "each material object was considered to be the representation of something which corresponded to it on a higher level, and thus it became its symbol". Symbolism was universal, and thought was a perpetual discovery of hidden meanings, a constant 'hierophany'. For the hidden world was a sacred world, and symbolic thinking was only the elaborated, educated form, at a learned level, of the magic thinking in which the popular mentality was bathed... It was always a question of finding the keys which would force open the hidden world, the true and eternal world, the one in which men could be saved'
p. 332 'Nature was the great reservoir of symbols... Minerals, plants and animals were all symbolic... Lapidaries, lists of flowers, and bestiaries, in which these symbols were catalogued and explained, occupied an important place in the ideal library of the middle ages. Stones and flowers not only had symbolic meanings but also beneficent or maleficent powers'... Floraria were close to being herbals. They introduced into medieval thought collections of simples, old wives' remedies, and the secrets of monastic herborists.'
p. 333 'Medieval symbolism found a particularly large field of application in the very rich Christian liturgy, chiefly in fact in interpreting religious architecture... It is easy to understand that the round church was the image of the perfection of the circle, but it must be realised that the cross-shaped plan did not only represent Christ's crucifixion, but rather was the ad quadratum form based on the square, designating the four points of the compass and epitomizing the universe. In both cases the church was a microcosm.
P. 333 Amongst the most basic forms of medieval symbolism, the symbolism of numbers played an important role. It was a framework for thinking and was one of the guiding principles of architecture. Beauty came from proportion and harmony, whence the pre-eminence of music as a numerical science. "To know music," said Thomas of York, 'is to know the order of all things"....'Number was the measure of things. Like words, numbers adhered to realities. "To create numbers," said Thierry of Chartres, "is to create things". Art, which was an imitation of nature and of creation, had to take number as a guide' A miniature shows a dream of the monk Gunzo of Cluny in which the saints are, 'tacing out the plan of the future church for him with ropes' [see Kenneth John Conant]
p. 308 'The very nature of medieval culture, which tended not to establish formal models like classical culture, means that it is impossible to generalise about the form taken by cities during the Middle Ages. Medieval towns and cities came in all shapes and sizes, adapting themselves freely to every geographical and economic circumstance' He then proceeds to some generalisations!:
p. 367 'Bruges, the largest mercantile city in northern Europe, developed round a fortified area castle, later called Oudeburg (old city), which had been founded by the counts of Flanders along the River Reye at the end of the ninth century'.
p x 'Fundamentally the Middle Ages exemplified a human society based upon transcendental and spiritual motives. Material values were firmly kept in second place and, while it was held that a man might legitimately seek his livelihood, he must not exalt pecuniary interest above his honour or the good of his soul. The fact that many men, and women, fell short of these ideals does not change the fact that the ideals were firmly placed in the forefront of society'
p xv Harvey rejects the suggestions that (1) England was behind other countries in its medieval gardens (2) medieval gardeners were not interested in aesthetics.
p.xv His work is based on 'more than forty years of reading medieval building accounts and related records, mostly English. In all times and places, building and gardening have gone hand in hand'
p.1 'All the great phases of European gardening have been closely associated with urban culture'
p. 4 Harvey distinguishes
Vergier or orchard
Pomarium or utilitarian orchard
Gardinium a kitchen garden
Viridarium the pleasure ground
Herbarium for medicinal plants (Harvey uses herber as an
abbreviation for the medieval Latin herbarium and
comments that 'In most cases the context indicates the shade of
meaning emphasized: close garden with lawn, flower garden, or garden
of medicinal herbs)
p. 11 'Woodstock, where the great park had been enclosed for Henry I, included after 1165 the walled pleasuance of Everswell, consisting of an orchard with a series of pools fed by the natural spring. This was famous as Rosamund's Bower, and gave its name to a whole class of enclosed pleasure gardens'.
p. 13 It is quite wrong to say that no woodland planting took place before the Renaissance
p. 17 'To sum up, it may be said that there is ample proof that ornamental gardening flourished, in England as well as in north-western Europe, from the late eleventh century if not earlier; that it was based on a keen delight in the appearance of plants and their perfumes, and also in the sight and sound of running water'
p.26 For the period 500-1000 the evidence is: 'gardens and flowers in relation to the religious history of the Western Church; laws and legal records that relate to plants; and literary references in poetry'.
p. 28 Charlemagne promulgated a famous law c 800, the Decree concerning Towns (Capitulare de Villis). p. 29 'The decree laid down that crown lands in every city of the Empire should have a garden planted with "all herbs" as well as certain trees and fruits. The herbs listed are 73 in number, the fruits and nuts 16, making a grand total of 89 species...the first two entries are lilium, rosas: Lily in the singular, Roses in the plural. This must surely imply the inclusion of more than one kind of rose, at least the red and white'.
p. 29 Note : 'the fact that what is primarily of utilitarian interest is headed by the two plants which, throughout the Middle Ages, were those of the highest decorative quality'. Though he also notes that 'both roses and lily bulbs were used in medieval medicine'. 'It seems altogether more reasonable, bearing in mind the medieval determination to find both beauty and utility in all the works of the Creator, to regard the lily and the cultivated roses as given pride of place precisely on account of their ornamental character'
p 31-2 Charlemagne's Capitulare with the plants in categories and their numerical positions in brackets
p. 32 'Charlemagne died in 814, and within the next few years was made the extraordinary plan for an ideal monastery, a copy of which has been almost miraculously preserved in the great abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. The author of the plan may have been Abott Haito of Reichenau, and as the plan is addressed to Gozbert, Abbott of St Gall from 816 to 836, there is no doubt as to its approximate date'
p. 34 'The last important document of the Carolingian group is the poem of Walafrid Strabo, already mentioned, written about 840. As a work of literature it can now be adequately appreciated, the Latin original faced by an English translation, in the fine edition of Raef Payne and Wilfrid Blunt. What is particularly notable is Walafrid's appreciation of the beauty of ornamental plants, Sage, Flag Iris (I germanica L.), lily and Rose, both to sight and smell. Walafrid again was a member of the Court circle'. He devotes 23 stanzas to individual plants and most of them are in the Capitulare.
p 38 The arabs built a great palace city (Medina Azahara) 5 miles from Cordoba.
p. 43 'Horticulture and botany remained primary subjects of study in Muslim Spain'. Many of their scientific works were translated into Castilian under Alfonso X.
p. 44 'At this point we reach the earliest surviving gardens of Europe, those of Granada at the Alhambra and Generalife. These are now only reconstructions, in large measure mistaken, but the design of their architectural features and surroundings remains'.
p. 44 Ibn Luyun [Abu 'Uthman ibn Luyun al-Tujibi of Almeria (1282-1349)] composed 'the third of the great garden books of Moorish Spain' in 1348. It is a poem, described as the 'Andalusian Georgics' and has sections on soils, water, manures, ploughing, propagation. 'In a final section Ibn Luyun lays down the basic rules for planning a pleasure garden, on a soughern aspect with a well or watercourse shaded by evergreens, and a pavilion at the centre with views in all directions. Around would be flowers of different sorts, then trees including fruit trees, and climbing vines along the boundaries. There should be paths surrounding the garden under (arbours of) climbing vines; fruit trees should be planted in basins so that they give protection from the north wind without shading the plants from the sun. The overall shape of the garden should be oblong. In all this there are many striking points of fundamental likeness to the northern layout described a hundred years earlier by Albertus Maguns. Both in the Christian North and the Muslim South there was to be a central place to sit in and oberve the beauties of the garden; in Spain necessarily shaded by a pavilion'
p 50 The Sicilian route of Arabic influence has been exaggerated. It is more likely to have gone through Castile and through the Salerno (and through Amalfi)
p 51 Villa Palmiri its garden was 'perhaps the most famous in medieval literature'
p. 54 'As in so many other fields, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 had revolutionary significance for gardening'. They had close links with the the Normans who conquered Southern Italy
p. 64 The famous Canterbury plan (for Christ Church cathedral priory) shows 'another galleried courtyard' to the east of the great cloister. Part of it is marked herbarium and since it is on the way to the Infirmary, the correct translation must be 'herb-garden'
p. 82 Edward I made a slow journey through Italy and France on his return from the Crusades. He then gave special attention to the royal gardens at the Palace of Westminster and made a great herber. p. 86 Gardening became more lavish after his death in 1307.
p. 87 'At Eltham the principal garden had a rampart walk, and a second walled garden was made in 1388-9 for the king and queen to have dinner there in summer time'.
p. 88 'Lambeth Palace in the fourteenth century had a great garden and a flower garden as well as some nine acres of ground that eventually became Archbishop's Park'
p.98 Hubert Van Eyck and Pol de Limbourg. 'The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry goes a step further and provides what are virtually colour-photographs of the landscape and garden at the Chateâu de Dourdan and at the Palais in Paris'
(HUIZINGA, Johan, Dutch. Sanskritist, cultural historian and philosopher, b. 1872 in Groningen, d. 1945)
p. 65 'Medieval thought in general was saturated in every part with the conceptions of the Christian faith'.
p. 69 'Thus the aspiration to the splendour of antique life, which is the characteristic of the Renaissance, has its roots in the chivalrous ideal. Between the ponderous spirit of the Burgundian and the classical instinct of an Italian of the same period there is only a difference of nuance'.
p. 105 'Few books have exercised a more profound and enduring influence on the life of any period than the Romaunt of the Rose. Its popluarity lasted for two centuries at least'
p. 116 'CHAPTER 9: The Conventions of Love'
It is from literature that we gather the forms of erotic thought be
longing to a period, but we should try to picture them functioning as
elements of social life. A whole system of amatory conceptions and
usages was current in aristocratic conversation of those times. What
signs and figures of love which later ages have dropped! Around the
god of Love the bizarre mythology of the Roman de la Rose was
grouped. Then there was the symbolism of colours in costume, and of
flowers and precious stones. The meaning of colours, of which feeble
traces still obtain, was of extreme importance in amorous conversation
during the Middle Ages. A manual of the subject was written about
1458, by the herald Sicily in his Le Blason des Couleurs, laughed at
by Rabelais. When Guillaume de Machaut meets his beloved for the first
time, he is delighted to see her wear a white dress and a sky-blue
hood with a design of green parrots, because green signifies new love
and blue fidelity. Later, he sees her image in a dream, turning away
from him and dressed in green, 'signifying novelty', and reproaches
her with it in a ballad: En lieu de bleu, dame, vous vestez vert.[Instead
of in blue, lady, you dress in green.]'
p. 255 'Denis the Carthusian wrote a treatize, De venustate mundi et
pulchritudine Dei. The difference of the two words of the title at
once indicates his point of view: true beauty appertains to God, the
world can only be venustus - pretty. All the beauties of creation, he
says, are but brooks flowing from the source of supreme beauty. A
creature may be called beautiful in so far as it shares in the beauty
of the divine nature, and thereby attains some measure of harmony with
it. As a starting-point of aesthetics, this is large and sublime, and
might well serve as a basis for the analysis of all particular
manifestations of beaury. Dennis did not invent his fundamental idea:
he founds himself on Saint Augustine and the pseudo-Areopagite, on
Hugh of Saint Victor and Alexander of Hales. But as soon as he tries
really to analyse beauty, the deficiency of observation and expression
is apparent. He borrows even his examples of earthly beauty from his
predecessors, especially from Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor: a
leaf, the troubled sea with its changing hues etc. His analysis is
very superficial. Herbs are beautiful, because they are green;
precious stones, because they sparkle;; the human body, the dromedary
and the camel, because they are appropriate to their purpose; the
earth, because it is long and large; the heavenly bodies, because they
are round and light. Mountains are admirable for their enormous
dimensions, rivers for the length of their course, fields and woods
for their vast surface, the earth for its immeasurable mass. Medieval
theory reduced the idea of beauty to that of perfection, proportionn,
and splendour. Three things, says Saint Thomas, are required for
beauty: first, integrity or perfection, because what is incompoete is
ugly on that account; next, true proportion or consonance; lastly,
brightness, because we call beautiful whatever has a brilliant colour.
p 109 Guillaume de Lorris had given it charm of form and tenderness
of accent. The background of vernal landscape, the bizarre and yet
harmonious imagery of allegorical figures, are his work. As soon as
the lover has approached the wall of the mysterious garden of love,
the allegorical system is unfolded. Dame Leisure opens the gate for
him, Gaiety conducts the dance, Amor holds by the hand Beauty, who is
accompanied by Wealth, Liberality, Frankness, Courtesy, and Youth.
After having locked the heart of his vassal, Amor enumerates to him
the blessings of love, called Hope, Sweet Thought, Sweet Speech, Sweet
Look. Then, when Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtesy, invites him to come
and see the roses, Danger, Malebouche, Fear, and Shame come to chase
him away. The dramatic struggle commences. Reason comes down from its
high tower, and Venus appears upon the scene. The text of Guillaume de
Lorris ends in the middle of the crisis.
p 110 Jean Chopinel, or Clopinel, or de Meun, who finished the work,
adding much more than he found, sacrificed the harmony of the
composition to his fondness for psychological and social analysis. The
conquest of the castle of the roses is drowned in a continual flood of
digressions, speculations, and examples. The sweet breeze of Guillaume
de Lorris was followed by the east wind of chilling scepticism and
cruel cynicism of his successor. The vigorous and trenchant spirit of
the second tarnished the naive and lightsome idealism of the first.
Jean de Meun is an enlightened man, who believes neither in spectres
nor in sorcerers, neither in faithful love nor in the chastity of
woman, who has an inkling of the problems of mental pathology, and
puts into the mouths of Venus, Nature, and Genius the most daring
apology for sensuality.
Venus, requested by her son to come to his aid, swears not to leave a
single woman chaste and makes Amor and the whole army of assailants
take the same vow as regards men. Nature, occupied in her smithy with
her task of preserving the various species, her eternal struggle
against Death, complains that of all creatures, man alone transgresses
her commandments by abstaining from procreation. She charges Genius,
her priest, to go and hurl at Love's army Nature's anathema on those
who despise her laws. In sacerdotal dress, a taper in his hand, Genius
pronounces the sacrilegious excommunication, in which the boldest
sensualism blends with refined mysticism. Virginity is condemned, hell
is reserved for those who do not observe the commandments of nature
and of love. For the others the flowered field, where the white sheep,
led by Jesus, the lamb born of the Virgin, crop the incorruptible
grass in endless daylight. At the close Genius throws the taper into
the besieged fortress; its flame sets the universe on fire. Venus also
throws her torch; then Shame and Fear flee, the castle is taken, and
Bel-Accueil allows the lover to pluck the rose.
Here, then, in the Roman de La Rose, the sexual motif is again placed
in the centre of erotic poetry, but enveloped by symbolism and mystery
and presented in the guise of saintliness. It is impossible to imagine
a more deliberate defiance of the Christian ideal. The dream of love
had taken a form as artistic as it was passionate. The profusion of
allegory satisfied all the requirements of medieval
p 111 imagination. These personifications were indispensable for
expressing the finer shades of sentiments. Erotic terminology, to be
understood, could not dispense with these graceful puppets. People
used these figures of Danger, Evil Mouth, etc., as the accepted terms
of a scientific psychology. The passionate character of the central
motif prevented tediousness and pedantry.
In theory, the Roman de la Rose does not deny the ideal of courtesy.
The garden of delights is inaccessible except to the elect,
regenerated by love. He who wants to enter must be free from all
hatred, felony, villainy, avarice, envy, sadness, hypocrisy, poverty,
and old age. But the positive qualities he has to oppose to these are
no longer ethical, as in the system of courtly love, but simply of an
aristocratic character. They are leisure, pleasure, gaiety, love,
beauty, wealth, liberality, frankness, and courteousness. They are no
longer so many perfections brought about by the sacredness of love,
but simply the proper means to conquer the object desired. For the
veneration of idealized womanhood, Jean Chopinel substituted a cruel
contempt for its feebleness.
Now, whatever influence the Roman de la Rose may have exercised on the
minds of men, it did not succeed in completely destroying the older
conception of love. Side by side with the glorification of seduction
professed by the Rose, the glorification of the pure and faithful love
of the knight maintained its ground, both in lyrical poetry and in the
romance of chivalry, not to speak of the fantasy of tournaments and
passages of arms.
p.9 (opening para) Whoever sets foot in some peaceful haven of the Cistercians, whoever comes upon a scene of ruins in the snow, a church choir forgotten in the woods, a monastery perched on the Pyrenean cliffs, is moved by them. Solemnity, calm and dignity speak from the stones. Some part of everyone knows the longing for unconditional self-commitment, which gave these works their birth; renouncing the world, living in an isolated community, in which each day is to be imbued with special meaning by that ultimate Truth of daring ideal, that through unceasing meditation upon God and his incessant praise one's self may be forgotten and yet found. The monastic impulse is common to many religions - Islam, Buddhism, and both the Greek and Latin Churches. The monastic ideal represents one of humanity's truly imposing designs for living. Strong natures have repeatedly striven to vest this idea with a form suited to their time and culture.
p. 10 Rule of St Benedict Regula Sancti Benedicti Ch 66: 'Whenever possible the monastery should be so laid out that everything essential, that is to say water, mills, garden and workshops for the plying of the various crafts, is found within the monastery walls' p. 11 Under the Benedict Rule 'The whole course of the day was divided into hours of prayer, reading, work, eating, meditation and sleep'
p. 13 St Anthony set off a hermit movement around 305 'he had lived totally withdrawn for about twenty years in the desert on the east bank of the Nile'. p. 14 Egyptians also seem to have founded the first monastery, at Tabernisi, opposite Denderah.
p. 19 'The Rules of St Augustine (354-430) are held to be the oldest in the West' [Basil the Great 330-379) was the first to set down detailed rules]. Augustine 'contains the the earliest known prescription of the Hours'.
p 19 Monasticism reached Gaul in mid-4th century. p 22 Celtic monasticism began in 5th century
p. 15 Pic of Mt Athos - and it looks like a garden outside the
monastery wall.
p. 24 Benedict was born c 480 at Nursia 30 miles east of Spoleto in
the Sabine Hills and withdrew to Subiaco. A Roman hour was 75 mins in
summer and 45 in winter
p. 28 Monte Cassino was NOT the foundation of monastic layout. Its more likely to have come from France. The Vita S Filiberti is a better source [ie the Life of St Philibert]
p. 31 Many Benedictine monks were compelled to join the order, sometimes as slaves and prisioners.
p. 66 'The monks moved in an area totally permeated with works of true that even in the early Middle Ages the cloister was the object ot attention, but with Odilo's cloister in Cluny of shortly before 1050 a new seems to have been reached. The cloister was liberated to become the architectural feature of the monastery. In the coming centuries its almost limited potentialities, both architecturally and as a vehicle for painting sculpture, were exploited by all enterprising monasteries. The cloistei increasingly the spiritual home of the monks.'
p. 240 from 'Concerning the French Journey of Peter Damian and his trans-alpine itinery': 'how the cloister is vast and by its very beauty appears as if it invites the monks to dwell there'
