Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish (review)

Marcia Colish has published widely and influentially on the history of medieval thought. This Festschrift celebrates her valuable achievements with thirteen essays written in her honor, some boasting witty titles, eight of them on twelfth-century topics, five on later ones up to Machiavelli. Great figures are present: St. Anselm of Canterbury, Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, Gratian of Bologna, and Nicholas of Cusa, among others. Important themes, too, are here: theories of language, the devil, Christology, the sources of law, wonders, programs of study, music, princely virtues, and saints’ cults. And the contributors are well-established scholars. An excellent evaluation of notions of schools of thought—Porretans, nominalists, and so forth—in the study of twelfth-century history is made by William Courtenay (“Schools and Schools of Thought”). Gary Macy (“Fake Fathers”) finds that canon law discussions of the role of women in the Church were most often based on spurious authorities. Arjo Vanderjagt (“Constant Exercise”) brings to life links between modern devotion and humanism in northwestern Europe in the late-fifteenth century with a study of a letter of Rudolfus Agricola offering pedagogical advice. Grover Zinn (“Minding Matter”) unpicks the discussion by Hugh of St. Victor of a (now lost) symbolical drawing of Noah’s ark that denotes the Church as the body of Christ. One of Colish’s books was on The Mirror of Language (New Haven, 1968), and, appropriately, her interests in language are reflected in an amusing essay by Mary Sirridge on the content and functions of vocative and substantive phrases such as “I am called” and “I am.” Priscian’s “rambling” and “notoriously cryptic and episodic” discussion of these, she writes (p. 97), “in no way discouraged medieval commentators from trying to extract a consistent theory from his remarks.” Willemien Otten (“Broken Mirrors”) also writes on theory of language and Abelard’s teaching on the Incarnation, but he loses the reader when he writes that Abelard sees “incarnational teaching resulting in an intersubjective human process of universal learning by which Redemption can ultimately be the result of one teacher’s unusual talent” (p. 86). M. B. Pranger shows how St. Augustine’s exclusion of evil from being shaped the thought of Pope Gregory the Great, Anselm of Canterbury, and Heinrich von Kleist about the devil. In an interesting way Jason Taliadoros challenges Colish’s assessment of the controversy in Anglo-Norman circles over Lombard’s Christology, but his attempt to bring John of Salisbury into these debates (pp. 139–40) is not successful. Edward M. Peters’s essay on Gervase of Tilbury (“The Lady Vanishes”) usefully adds to knowledge and understanding of twelfth-century stories about edifying and memorable wonders. Nancy Van Deusen provides a most helpful study of the Timaeus in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa. E. Ann Matter shows how Alberto Alfieri in the early-fifteenth century happily turned Macrobius’s swirling realm of the heavenly spheres into a Christian vision of the afterlife. Cary Nederman suggests that Poggio Bracciolini and Machiavelli were not so startling in their views on greed since Nicolas Oresme and Christine de Pizan in the fourteenth century were already heading in a similar direction. Joel Seltzer vividly shows how Hussite radicals in fifteenth-century Bohemia dismantled the practices that accompanied the cult of saints, yet by the early-sixteenth century the Utraquists in Prague “celebrated St Jan Hus Day with all the hoopla of a national holiday” (p. 297). Occasional misprints notwithstanding, these “Mind Matters” are well worth reading. They are opened and brought together with an appreciation by the volume’s editors of Colish’s published work.