Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 151 assessing the degree to which Aristotelianism discredited dream revelation is that writers who do not take dreams seriously rarely bother to mention them. Pursuing his theme of ambivalence, Kruger examines Walafrid Strabo's Visio Wettini and Nicolas Oresme's Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum cell as examples of the dream vision form in fiction and philosophy, pausing on the way to reflect on the partial truth which linked dreams, mirrors, andfictionin the medieval mind. The book concludes with the autobiographical dreams of Guibert of Nogent and Hermann of Cologne. A s a history of a male intellectual tradition the work ignores questions of social context. Hildegard of Bingen's Causae et curae is briefly discussed as an example of moral dualism but her use of physiological theories is not dealt with. Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are mentioned in passing to show then conformity to the Augustinian tradition. Kruger's scholarship is impressive and his choice of examples occasionally refreshing. If his thesis of continuous ambivalence lacks nuance it has the virtue of staying true to the spirit of his subject and tracing an important theme in medieval thought. L. Sharon Davidson Department of Economic History University of Sydney Le Goff, Jacques, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa L Fagan, Cambridge Mass. and Oxford, Blackwell, 1993; paper; pp. xxix, 194; 45 plates; R.R.P. A U S $ ? [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. This is a slapdash book which, despite the reputation of its author, did not need to be translated into English. The original was published in 1957 and is now very dated. The woolly, opinionated introduction to the translation, which raises more questions than it answers, cannot hide the shortcomings of a book whose author has eschewed the hard, critical labour necessary for the topic. Any 'definition' of 'intellectual' that excludes all Carolingian writers as well as others such as Dante (p. 2, although he gets, unaccountably, an illustration on p. 146 [as does Jan Hus!] and a bibliography on p. 185), or Villon (p. xviii, although the whole of p. 153 is devoted to his poetry), in the interests of including those whose vocation was professor and scholar, that is, university professionals, and then includes as well the goliards ('those escapees from the established structures', p. 26) 152 Reviews and Abelard (who 'was a goliard'!) and Heloise and Bernard of Chartres (who 'was foremost a professor', p. 58) and Jean de M e u n (continuator of the Romance of the Rosel) and Meister Eckhardt and then announces that at the end of the Middle Ages the 'profoundly anti-inteUectual' (p. 158) humanist was to cause the intellectual of the Middle Ages to disappear, forfeits any claim to serious consideration. The book is, in fact, no substitute for Haskins' 1927 potboiler The Renaissance of the twelfth century. Use of the latter would spare us such translationesc as 'comparatist perspective', oblique references to Foucault and other French writers on intellectual sociology ('organic', 'critical', and 'marginal' intellectuals, none of which terms are explained), and references to the 'wonderful' work of this or that scholar. If w e do want a litde more on the origins of universities, subjects, teachers, techniques, and tools, we can always fall back on Anders Ptitz, The world of medieval learning (trans., 1981). Le Goff s book, in fact, degenerates into a potted history of medieval university methods and episodes. Regionalism, nationalism, and the politicizing of the later medieval university, were, it seems, inimical to the 'medieval urban intellectual', as were certain trends in later medieval philosophical thought. The book peters out in the well-worn territory of late scholasticism versus humanism. All pretensions towards a sociology of intellectuals, and any defence of the odd statement that the 'milieu' of the intellectuals 'had never had a better awareness of itself than it did in the Middle Ages' (p. 1) are abandoned. Despite Martines (Power and imagination: city-states in Renaissance Italy [1979], p. 206) w e are told that the humanist was an aristocrat and, anticipating Jardine and Grafton (From humanism to the humanities, 1986), Le Goff claims that the medieval scholar worked in the open market-place, whereas the...