and educational circles strictly so-called, can be very well
appreciated from the fact that, besides King Louis's interest, his
Queen Margaret, their son Philip and son-in-law, King Theobald V., of
Champagne and Navarre, were, according to tradition, among those who
encouraged him in the work and aided him in bearing the expenses of
it. It is rather curious to find that the method of compilation was
nearly the same as that employed at the present day. Young men, mainly
members of Vincent's own order of the Dominicans, were engaged in
collecting the material, collating references, and verifying
quotations. The main burden of the work, however, fell upon Vincent
himself, and he accordingly deserves the reputation for wonderful
industry which he has enjoyed. Much as he wrote, however, it does not
exceed much in amount what was written by others of the great
scholastics, and theirs was original material and not merely the
collection of information.
If we had no other evidence of interest in nature and in natural
science than this great work of Vincent of Beauvais, it would be ample
to show the absurdity of the general impression that exists in the
minds of most scientists, and, unfortunately, also in the minds of
many educators, with regard to the barrenness of interest of {336} the
Middle Age in natural phenomena. It might easily be imagined that this
work of Vincent would have very little of interest for a modern
scientist. Any such anticipation is entirely due, however, to the
false impression that exists with regard to the supposed ridiculously
absurd views in matters of science entertained by the medieval
scholars. Those who do not take their opinions on theory, but actually
consult the books with regard to which they are ready to express
themselves, have no such opinion. There has been much more interest in
this class of books and in the scientific side of the literature of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the last few years, and
the consequence has been a complete reversal of opinions with regard
to them, among German and French scholars.
An excellent example of this is to be noted in Dr. Julius Pagel, who,
in his chapter on Medicine in the Middle Ages, in Puschmann's Handbook
of the History of Medicine, says: "There were three writers whose
works were even more popular than those of Albertus Magnus. These
three were: Bartholomew the Englishman, Thomas of Cantimprato, and
Vincent of Beauvais, the last of whom must be considered as one of the
most important contributors to the generalization of scientific
knowledge, not alone in the thirteenth, but in the immediately
succeeding centuries. His most important work was really an
encyclopedia of the knowledge of his time. It was called the Greater
Triple Mirror, and there is no doubt that it reflected very thoroughly
the knowledge of his period. He had the true scientific spirit, and
constantly cites the authorities from whom his information was
derived. He cites hundreds of authors, and there is scarcely a subject
that he does not {337} touch on. One book of his work is concerned
with human anatomy, and the concluding portion of it is an
abbreviation of history carried down to the year 1250."
It might be considered that such a compend of information would be
very dry-as-dust reading and that it would be fragmentary in character
and little likely to be attractive except to a serious student. Dr.
Pagel's opinion does not agree with this _a priori_ impression. He
says with regard to Vincent's work: "The language is clear, readily
intelligible, and the information is conveyed usually in an excellent,
simple style. Through the introduction of interesting similes the
contents do not lack a certain taking quality, so that the reading of
the work easily becomes absorbing." This is, I suppose, almost the
last thing that might be expected of a scientific teacher in the
thirteenth century, because, after all, Vincent of Beauvais must be
considered as one of the schoolmen, and they are supposed to be
eminently arid, but evidently, since we must trust this testimony of a
discerning modern German physician, only by those who have not taken
the trouble to read them.
Vincent of Beauvais was not the only one to occupy himself with work
of an encyclopedic character during the thirteenth century. At least
two other clergymen gave themselves up to the life-long work of
collecting details of information so as to make them available for
ready reference in their own times and for succeeding generations. The
very fact that three men should have taken up such a task, shows that
there must have been a loud call for this sort of writing, and that
there must have been a veritable thirst for information among the
educated classes of the time. Such books, as we have said, are not
created without a demand for them, though {338} they undoubtedly serve
in turn to awaken a greater thirst for the information which they
purvey. The other two encyclopedists of the time are Thomas
Cantipratano and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the Englishman.
Thomas of Cantimprato's work was probably published about 1260. Von
Toeply, in his Studies in Anatomy in the Middle Ages, has the most
readily available information with regard to Thomas's work. [Footnote
42] The work of most interest to us is the De Natura Rerum, a single
large volume in twenty books. It required some fifteen years of work,
and for some fifteen years before he began his work on it Thomas had
been writing various historical and biographical works. Thomas's
encyclopedic volume contains one book with regard to anatomy, one with
regard to human monsters, and books with regard to quadrupeds, birds,
marine monsters, fishes, serpents, worms, ordinary trees, aromatic and
medicinal plants and the virtues of herbs, and of curative waters of
various kinds. Then there are books on precious stones and their
cutting, on the seven regions and the humors of the air, on the earth
and the seven planets, and on the four elements and the Heavens and
eclipses of the sun and moon. When such a work was published for
general reading, it is easy to understand that no phase of information
with regard to nature failed to be of interest to readers of the
thirteenth century. Much that is absurd is contained in the book. But
when we compare it with books written in the early part of the
eighteenth century, we are apt to wonder rather at how little advance
had taken place in the four centuries of interval, than at the
ignorance of the medieval writer.
[Footnote 42: Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter von
Robert Ritter von Toeply, Leipzig und Wien. Franz Deuticke, 1898.]
{339}
We have been able, of course, in this limited space to give only a
modicum of the evidence for the cultivation of the Physical Sciences
at the Medieval Universities, and their records in monumental works
still extant; but this will probably be enough to enable those who are
interested in the subject to realize its significance and to gather
further material if they so wish. The universities were ecclesiastical
institutions. Most of them derived their authority to give degrees
directly from the Popes. Appeals were frequently made to the Popes
with regard to the discipline and the teaching at the universities.
Most of the great teachers of physical science were ecclesiastics.
Nearly all the students were clerics. Many of those who were most
successful in science reached high preferment in the Church. Evidently
the pursuit of science did not prejudice their advancement, either in
their orders, when they belonged to any of the various religious
orders, or in the Church itself. They were the near and dear friends
of archbishops, cardinals and Popes. This is entirely contrary to the
ordinary impression in the matter; but this is the plain truth, while
the contrary opinions are founded on the false assumption of Church
opposition to science.
{340}
THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY MAN AND SCIENCE.
Even after the series of demonstrations which we have given that the
great thinkers and teachers at the medieval universities were deeply
interested in the problems of what we now call natural or physical
science, most people will still not be open to conviction that
interest in nature was quite as lively in the Middle Ages as at any
subsequent period, even our own. In spite of the fact that the
scholastics faced scientific questions in nearly the same mood as we
do ourselves, and, curiously enough, anticipated very closely many of
the doctrines now current in science, not a few of those who are most
interested in the history of education will continue to think that
science occupied the minds of the students at the medieval
universities very little, and that while the great thinkers may have
known something about it, the rank and file of the university men of
the time gave scarcely any thought to it. Besides, they will be almost
sure to conclude that, whatever they did think was likely to be inept,
and in most cases quite ridiculous. Such thoughts are a part of that
unfortunate educational tradition which stamps the Middle Ages as
neglectful of nature study, as we would call it now, and as lacking in
interest in natural phenomena. Nothing could well be less true, and it
will require, I think, but the simple tracing of the life and
erudition of a single well-known student of these medieval
universities, to show how utterly absurd and unfounded is the popular
belief.
{341}
I have chosen Dante for this purpose, mainly because so much more is
known about the personal details of his life than of anyone else, and
we are able to glean from his writings and the contemporary comments
on them, a good idea of what the general information on scientific
subjects of the educated man of his period was. The fact that Dante
was a member of the Guild of the Apothecaries in Florence, an
association that included also the physicians of the city, has added
an adventitious interest to his attractions as one of the few greatest
of poets of all time, and has made details of his career and evidence
of the breadth of his education and culture of special import, so that
I have frequently taken occasion to call the attention of physicians
to the honor implied by Dante's fraternal relation to us. His
membership in the Guild of the Apothecaries, however, did not call for
any special knowledge of science on his part. He had nothing to do
with the sale of drugs, much less with the science of medicine.
Originally the Italian apothecaries, as the Greek origin of the word
indicates, were shop-keepers selling all sorts of things--edible,
adorning, or useful for personal service. They sold drugs also, and as
some of these were imported from the East, they commonly added to
their stock certain other Eastern specialties--perfumes, gems and the
like. In this way they soon became wealthy, as a rule, and indeed the
name of the rich Florentine family who came eventually to rule their
native city--the Medici--is said to be derived from similar
connections. It was the sons of these men who became the upper middle
classes in Florence. Perhaps one should say they became the upper
classes, for Florence had no nobility, in the proper sense of the
word, and men made their own positions. Their {342} descendants became
the men of culture, until finally the Florentine Guild of the
Apothecaries represented the most intelligent class of the population
of the city. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then,
most of the artists, the literary men, the architects, the sculptors,
were members of the guild. Dante's occupation when he was a peaceful
citizen of Florence was, according to tradition, that of architect,
and one building designed by him is supposed to be still in existence
in Florence.
Dante should represent for us, then, what an architect in Florence at
the end of the thirteenth century knew about natural science, as the
result of his school and university training. In our time, architects
are likely to know more about certain forms of physical science than
most other people, and due allowance would have to be made for this in
Dante's case. It will be found, though, as we discuss his erudition,
that the sciences in which he was particularly interested--astronomy
and various phases of biology with physical geography--were not those
which appeal especially to an architect, and certainly have no
relation to his occupation. His knowledge of flowers might be thought
to be due to his wish to use floral forms for structural decorative
purposes, but Dante is rather weak for a poet in the matter of the
description of flowers, and it is only from the side of their color
that they made any special appeal to him.
Most people have been led to think of Dante as not a student of
nature, because that impression would inevitably be gathered from
certain passages of John Ruskin with regard to him. Ruskin was so
faithful and loving a student of Dante that he would be expected not
to be {343} mistaken in such a matter, nor is he; but he has dwelt
overmuch on certain phases of Dante's lack of interest in nature,
until the great Florentine's devotion to creation as he saw it around
him is obscured. It is not difficult to show, from Dante's own
writings, how much he was interested in nearly every phase of nature
and natural phenomena. In the "Westminster Review" for July and
August, 1907, Mr. George Trobridge, in articles on Dante as a Nature
Poet, has furnished abundant evidence to prove his thesis, though he
too has felt the necessity for apologizing for even apparently
differing from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic Dante
student as Ruskin. Dante's works, however, themselves can be the only
appeal in this matter, and Mr. Trobridge has used them with good
effect and in such a way as to carry to anyone the conviction that
Dante was a profound student of nature in all her moods and tenses.
Mr. Trobridge says in the introduction:
"It will appear presumptuous in the present writer to differ from so
great a critic and such an enthusiastic student of Dante as Ruskin,
but it seems to him that the author of Modern Painters has done
scant justice to the intense insight of the poet into the beauties
of the world we live in and his wonderful power of expressing what
he saw. There are few even modern poets who have taken so wide a
view of the field of nature, and even Shakespeare himself scarcely
excells the great Florentine in felicity and concentration of
expression. The Divina Commedia is full of vivid pictures covering
the whole range of natural phenomena. As these pass before our eyes,
we can scarcely realize that the painter of them is not of our own
day, so thoroughly does he enter into the spirit of modern landscape
art. {344} Sometimes his pictures are momentary impressions--studies
of effects painted with a large brush; at others his touch is of a
Preraphaelitic nicety, and now and then he gives us a studied
composition full of doubtful detail like one of Turner's landscapes.
He was one with Wordsworth in his sincere delight in every form of
natural beauty. Like him, he lived beneath the habitual sway of
fountains, meadows, hills and groves; with him he saw the 'splendor
in the grass' and the 'glory in the flower.' He could 'feel the
gladness of the May' and rejoiced in 'the innocent brightness of a
new day.'"
In the matter of science as distinct from poetic interest in nature,
quite as much can be said for Dante. This greatest of Italian poets is
a fair example to take of the university man of the thirteenth century
in this respect. He was thirty-five before the first century of
university existence properly so-called closed. He may be considered a
typical product of university life. It is true he had had the almost
inestimable advantage of the schooling and culture of his native
Florence, where at the end of the thirteenth century there were more
children, it is said, in attendance at the schools to the number of
the population than there is at the present moment even in most of our
American cities. Brother Azarias in his Essays Educational, [Footnote
43] said:
[Footnote 43: Essays Educational, by Brother Azarias, with Preface by
His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. Chicago, D. H. McBride & Co., 1906.]
"In the thirteenth century, out of a population of 90,000 in Florence,
we find 12,000 children attending the schools, a ratio of school
attendance as large as existed in New York City, in the year of Grace
1893." This ratio, it may be said, is as great as is ordinarily to be
found anywhere, and this fact alone may serve to show {345} how
earnest were these medieval burghers for the education of their
children. Dante had the advantage of this, and in addition, of the
training at two or three of the universities at least of Italy,
besides spending some time at Paris, and probably a visit at least to
Oxford.
Lest it should be thought that perhaps Brother Azarias gave too
favorable an estimate in his account of the schools in Florence,
though he quotes as his authority Villani, and other authorities are
readily available, it seems worth while to give a very interesting
reference to this subject of education in one of the notes in Prince
Kropotkin's chapter on Mutual Aid in the Medieval City, from his book
Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, a work that we have placed under
contribution a number of times already in this attempt to picture
medieval conditions as they were in reality, and not in the foolish
imaginings of outworn traditions. Kropotkin's studies in what the free
cities accomplished by the union of the guilds for every fraternal
purpose, and the coordination of their citizens for every detail of
the commonweal, has made him realize that common or public school
education was an important feature of medieval free city life, and
strange as that fact may appear to many modern minds, that such public
school education occupied at least as prominent a position as it does
with us in our own time. In the quotation from him it will be seen
that he considers that Florence was not alone in this matter, and he
ventures to place Nueremberg on a level with her. Doubtless other
German cities, as certainly other Italian cities, provided similar
facilities for general education.
Kropotkin says: "In 1336 it (Florence) had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and
girls in its primary schools, 1,000 to {346} 1,200 boys in its seven
middle schools, and from 550 to 600 students in its four universities.
The thirty communal hospitals contained over 1,000 beds for a
population of 90,000 inhabitants. (Capponi, ii. 249 seq.) It has more
than once been suggested by authoritative writers, that education
stood, as a rule, at a much higher level than is generally supposed.
Certainly so in democratic Nueremberg."
The content of this educational system is our main subject of interest
at the present moment.
"Seven hundred young men received the higher education. (This in a
city of less than 100,000 inhabitants. How do our cities of 100,000
inhabitants compare with it?) The very spirit of the arts was
scholastic in Dante's day. You read the story in the oratory of
Orsanmichele, in which each art with its masterpiece receives a crown;
you read it in the chapters of Santa Maria Novella, in Gaddi's
painting of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you read it in Giotto's
sculpture of the same subject upon this marvelous campanile. Here was
the atmosphere in which Dante's boyhood and early manhood were
passed."
We shall not be surprised, then, to find in Dante, the typical product
of this form of education, an interest in every form of erudition and
in all details of information.
I have preferred to take the evidence for Dante's knowledge of science
from others, rather than attempt to supply it entirely by means of
quotations from his works. This latter would be the most scholarly
way, but Dante is not easy reading even in a good translation, and one
needs to be familiar with his modes of expression and to be accustomed
to the wonderful compression of his style to appreciate his full
significance. There is {347} no lack of good authorities, however, who
have made deep studies in Dante, to bring out for us the complete
import of all the references to the science of his time, which Dante
was tempted to make. We have perhaps been prone to think, in
English-speaking countries, that no poets have ever kept more
thoroughly in touch with the progress of science, or at least have
ever used references to scientific details with more accuracy, than
some of our own nineteenth century poets. A little study of the first
great poet of modern times, in whom Carlyle said "ten silent centuries
found a voice," though Dante by no means stands alone in the century,
but is the culmination of a series of great poets, will show that he
probably must be considered as taking the palm even from our most
modern of poets in this respect. If the expressions in text-books of
the history of education are to be accepted as evidence of the
thoughts of educators with regard to the details of education in
Dante's time, even a brief sketch of Dante's scientific knowledge will
be a supreme surprise to them.
As will be at once appreciated, Dante was not a specialist in science,
but used the knowledge of science current in his day in order to drive
home his thoughts by means of figures. It is surprising, however, what
a marvelous display of scientific knowledge, entirely without
pedantry, which anyone who knows his supreme compression of style will
realize to be the fault Dante is least liable to, was thus made by
this educated literary man of the thirteenth century. Dr. L. Oscar
Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, has in his little book The
Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, suggested a comparison
between Dante and Goethe. [Footnote 44 ] {348} Everyone realizes at
once how profound a scientist was Goethe. Professor Kuhns' comparison,
then, will bring out the scientific qualities of this great medieval
poet, who is the representative scholar of the universities of his
time.
[Footnote 44: The Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, by
L. Oscar Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, Middletown, U. S. A.
Edward Arnold, London and New York. 1897.]
"There is perhaps no innate contradiction between science and
poetry, but it is not often that they are found together in the same
man. Dante, like Goethe, half a millennium later, was not only drawn
by the beauty of nature, but he had likewise an unquenchable
intellectual curiosity, and sought diligently to understand the
meaning of the universe in which he lived.
"No other poet has ever combined the loftiest poetry with the
discussion of such complicated topics in all branches of learning.
In one place we find a long discussion of the origin and development
of life, which, naive and scholastic as it is, shows some lines of
resemblance to the modern doctrines in biology; in another place
there is a learned discussion between the poet and Beatrice
concerning the cause of the spots in the moon, in which an actual
experiment in optics is given."
The first passage to which Professor Kuhns refers, while containing
many speculative elements, is a discussion of certain important basic
problems in biology that have always appealed to thinking men at every
period of the history of science, and never more so than in our own
day. They must still be considered undecided, though many volumes have
been written on them in the last century. There are thoughts in
Dante's exposition of the subject that are startling enough to the
modern biologist, and that make it clear how much men's minds run
along the same grooves in facing questions that we are prone to think
have occurred to men only in the last {349} few generations. The other
quotation to which Professor Kuhns refers deserves to be quoted
entire. It is perhaps even more striking because of its actual
description of an experiment in optics, which shows how much this
great poetic intelligence of the medieval time, usually supposed to be
so abstracted and occupied with things other-worldly and supernal,
living his intellectual life quite beyond the domain of sense, still
remembered the teachings of his university days, and even recalled the
details of demonstrations that he had seen. The passage occurs in the
II. canto of the Paradiso, beginning with line 97: