Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000-1200 (review)

The editors of this volume, urging that monastic schools remained important between 1000 and 1200 despite historians' focus on cathedral schools and nascent universities, assert that its contents collectively correct that imbalance. Given the essayists' limited attention to monastic libraries, biblical exegesis, chronicles, and music theory and praxis; their omission of monastic theology, art patronage, and female education; and the fact that they treat thinkers and schools not affiliated with monasticism almost as much as those that were, the collection itself is unbalanced. Readers are thus advised to ignore the editors' introductory claims and simply to welcome the book's contributions to medieval intellectual history, some quite original.

Contributors vary on whether "education" means schooling stricto sensu, the generic objectives of writers of didactic or prescriptive literature, or affective commitment to shared cultural values. The latter notion informs Mia Münster-Swenson's essay on bonds between teachers and students ca. 970-1200, some familiar and others less so, unique here in citing German materials. Elsewhere in this book, "northern Europe" means England and France north of the Loire. The editors each reprise their own earlier publications, Vaughan discussing Lanfranc and Anselm as teachers and Rubenstein Guibert of Nogent on the Anglo-Normans. Michael E. Moore and Jason K. Glenn treat authors, especially historians, from the school of Reims, between ca. 800 and 950 and the tenth century, respectively, accenting their site-specific interests. Priscilla D. Watkins' essay on Lanfranc as a teacher at Saint-Etienne, Caen, actually documents his administration as its first abbot. Bruce C. Brasington, observing that we know nothing for sure on where Ivo of Chartres gained his legal education, then pinpoints Ivo's key traits as a canonist. The freshest contributions are those of William C. North on Richard of Préaux as a biblical exegete (with seven appendices printing prefaces to Richard's works), John S. Ott on hagiographers' portrayal of bishops in twelfth-century Soissons, and John L. Snyder on Theinrad of Dover's music theory. These three papers draw substantially and creatively on unpublished manuscripts. And, working with well-known texts, John D. Cotts offers a revisionistic and convincing rereading of Peter of Celle's educational advice to John of Salisbury.

The editors include some thirty illustrations of art objects or texts connected more or less to the essays. Oddly, rather than using current photographs, they reprint nineteenth-century drawings of most of them. Also included is a map of dubious value since it does not locate most of the centers associated with the figures and institutions which this volume treats.