Such are some of the stereotyped ideas which crowd our mind when we
reflect upon the Middle Ages. They are certainly one-sided. Drawn for
the most part from the study of monastic literature, exaggerated by
that reaction against medievalism which the Renaissance initiated,
they must be regarded as inadequate to represent the whole truth. At
no one period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the close of
the thirteenth century was the mental atmosphere of Europe so
unnaturally clouded. Yet there is sufficient substance in them to
justify their formulation. The earlier Middle Ages did, in fact,
extinguish antique civility. The later Middle Ages did create, to use
a phrase of Michelet, an army of dunces for the maintenance of
orthodoxy. The intellect and the conscience became used to moving
paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down
with torpor, abusing virile faculties for the suppression of truth and
the perpetuation of revered error.
It is, therefore, with a sense of surprise, with something like a
shock to preconceived opinions, that we first become acquainted with
the medieval literature which it is my object in the present treatise
to make better known to English readers. That so bold, so fresh, so
natural, so pagan a view of human life as the Latin songs of the
Wandering Students exhibit, should have found clear and artistic
utterance in the epoch of the Crusades, is indeed enough to bid us
pause and reconsider the justice of our stereotyped ideas about that
period. This literature makes it manifest that the ineradicable
appetites and natural instincts of men and women were no less vigorous
in fact, though less articulate and self-assertive, than they had been
in the age of Greece and Rome, and than they afterwards displayed
themselves in what is known as the Renaissance.
With something of the same kind we have long been familiar in the
Troubadour poetry of Provence. But Provencal literature has a strong
chivalrous tincture, and every one is aware with what relentless fury
the civilisation which produced it was stamped out by the Church. The
literature of the Wandering Students, on the other hand, owes nothing
to chivalry, and emanates from a class which formed a subordinate part
of the ecclesiastical militia. It is almost vulgar in its presentment
of common human impulses; it bears the mark of the proletariate,
though adorned with flourishes betokening the neighbourhood of Church
and University.