Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Vol. I: Foundations by R. W. Southern (review)

BOOK REVIEWS307 refusing to renounce their Christianity and embrace Islam.Virtually eveiything that we know about the victims ofthese executions comes from the apologetic treatises andpassiones that were written on behaU of the martyrs by Eulogius and Paul Alvarus, who Uved in Cordoba at the time. Both wrote in response to the lack of enthusiasm that the martyrs' actions eUcited from the more assimilated Christians of Cordoba. Coope's book is by no means the first to treat the subject.The earUest and most complete overview—in the anglophonic scholarly world, anyway—was Edward P. Colbert's pubUshed dissertation, The Martyrs of Cordoba (850859 ):A Study ofthe Sources (CathoUc University ofAmerica Press, 1962). More modern takes on the subject—which have insisted on scrutinizing the motives of Eulogius and Alvarus before assessing the meaning of the movement itseU— began with JamesWaltz's article ("The Significance of theVoluntary Martyrs of Ninth-Century Cordoba," Muslim World, 60 [1970]) and continued with my own book (Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain [Cambridge, 1988]).Though Coope does not review the historiography of the subject in any detaU, it is clear from her work that she has,for the most part, read and benefited from the work of her predecessors.The end result is a balanced treatment of the avaUable evidence which attempts, first and foremost, to reconstruct the tensions -within Andalusian society that could account not only for the radical actions of the martyrs but the virulence of theU apologists' attacks on both Islam and the Christians who Uved in harmony with it.As such, Coope's weU-written and very readable book provides a useful overview of an important episode in the history of Christian-Muslim interaction. It does not, however, offer any new data nor does it break new ground in terms of its approach. Kenneth Baxter Wolf Pomona College Scholastic Humanism and the Unification ofEurope,\o\. I: Foundations. By R. W Southern. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: BlackweU. 1995. Pp. xxi, 330. $44.95.) This book is the first of a projected three volumes that may weU prove to be the finest achievement ofthe most productive and perceptive ofmedievaUsts in England. Just as St. Anselm:A Portrait in a Landscape revised and completed Southern's work on Anselm and the late eleventh century, so the first of these volumes further documents and synthesizes themes familiar to readers of his earUer books, namely, his revised understanding ofthe emergence of schools of northern France and the place of Chartres and Paris, and his seminal notion of scholastic humanism that links the Platonism of the early twelfth century with the development of scholastic analysis, the recovery and assimUation of Aristotle , and the birth of the University of Paris. There is also much that is new here, not only in detaU but in his persuasive argument that the teaching of law 308BOOK REVIEWS at Bologna (as distinct from the practice oflaw) began only around 1 150, a generation later than the explosive expansion ofthe schools ofphüosophy and theology at Paris. Southern's reinterpretation of Irnerius and Gratian as legal practitioners, commentators, and compUers whose work led to rather than grew out of the teaching of law wiU probably become the most important and controversial new insight in this book. Southern's main thesis is that an educational revolution took place in the first haU of the twelfth century, buUt around a scholastic method of textual analysis and quaestiones, that not only influenced almost every level of European society but helped effect a unity of culture that had not previously existed. If, in the vision of Henri Pirenne, the Carolingian empire marked the First Europe, the unification of that geographical area (thus the second part of Southern's title) was forged only in the twelfth century through schools that were "international " in both students and masters, and by a common scholastic culture in arts, theology, and law. In Southern's view—and here his observations paraUel those of Jacques LeGoff in his work on medieval inteUectuals—scholastic culture was not allied with an elite court culture as was Italian humanism, but penetrated down to almost aU levels of society, and which created one unified culture for Europe from Italy...