The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and its Censors in the High Middle Ages (review)

190 Reviews even when the surviving versions are in Latin. This is probably excessive. The illiterate were used to aural information; Latin versions, presumably required by the church bureaucracy, would almost certainly have rested on prior oral or vernacular versions. In discussing community, she should surely have paid some attention to the other secular activities within the local area which would also have givenriseto written narratives such as courts baron and courts leet, ordinary manorial courts and meetings to determine how royal taxes should be allocated and collected. All of these presumably contributed to the complex creation of a sense of local identity. Even when they do not survive, their invisible effect should be noted. Looking at parish religion in terms of community identity cannot ignore the other aspects of that community. Sybil M. Jack Department ofHistory University ofSydney Godman, Peter, The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and its Censors in the H Middle Ages, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xxi, 372; R.R.P. US$59.90; ISBN 0691009775. To the feast of recent books on twelfth-century literary and scholastic cult must now be added Peter Godman's study of a range of twelfth-century Latin authors, provocatively entitled The Silent Masters. Godman is already well known as a prolific authority on two other periods of 'renaissance' of Latin letters: the Carolingian epoch and the High Renaissance. In recent years, Godman has become much more interested in the process of censorship as a means of curbing wild excess than is conventional in the study of humanistic letters. In this volume, Godman presents a range of twelfth-century authors whose disagreements and mutual recriminations helped bring about a more formalised process of censorship within the Latin Church. The Silent Masters reads more as a collection of essays on individual writers than as a book with a single argument about twelfth-century literary culture. In Chapter One, 'The Silencer and the Silenced', Godman uses Peter the Venerable's image of Abelard as devoted to silence at Cluny after his condemnation for heresy in 1141 as a way of introducing his broader theme about the co-existence within an education elite of verbal profusion and a widespread desire that excess be kept in check. This leads him to reflect in the second chapter, Reviews 191 'Unbuttoned dwarves', on the riotous exuberance of some less well-known authors from the late eleventh century, in particular Froumund of Tegemsee, the Ruodlieb and Anselm of Besate, all writing at a time when there were none of the institutional controls that Abelard had to encounter. A third chapter, 'Teaching by Fire and Sword', comes back to Abelard, as a figure w h o both delighted in antagonising authority, but who also had little compunction in labelling his fellow teachers as heretics themselves. Perhaps the mostfrustratingpart of Godman's analysis ofAbelard is that he never engages with the substance of either his logic or his theology. The centre of attention is given to the rhetorical pyrotechnics generated by Abelard's clash with Bernard, w h o m he sees as two masters of a kind. By not talking about logic or theology per se, but rather about the desire ofboth teachers to establish their own magisterium or teaching authority, Godman rightly underscores an important c o m m o n concern. B y not engaging with the theological arguments of either teacher, he does not really explain w h y this particular conflict should have become so heated, other than suggesting that it resulted from the clash of two particularly articulate and aggressive individuals. The fourth chapter, 'Smoldering Firebrands', follows up this fascination with the polemic of religious controversy by looking at the debate surrounding Gilbert of Poitiers. It opens with an assertion that illustrates well Godman's unfortunate tendency to dogmatic pronouncement for the sake of literary effect: 'Among Bavarian bores ofthe twelfth century, few were of more volume, and none more insistent, than Gerhoch of Reichersberg.' There is no understanding here of the theological dimensions of the arguments in which Gerhoch was engaged, or his role as an Augustinian canon. The central point that G o d m a n makes about the...