Back in November, I spent some time wondering about how the spring 2024 iteration of the “Why the Middle Ages Matter” course at John Adams High School would unfold. I spent the last few weeks of 2023 refining my syllabus, working on lesson plans, communicating with guest speakers, and arranging field trips. Looking back, I think I spent so much time preparing for the course because it was all so new to me. The biggest thing that got me nervous was the fact that I would be teaching high schoolers. My prior teaching experiences involved courses designed for university students, so I worried about my ability to make things resonate with a different audience. Furthermore, for the first time I would be leading a teaching team, coordinating with over a dozen guest lecturers, and planning two field trips. I really wanted it to be a good experience for everyone involved.
Now that it is May and teaching for the course has wrapped up, I like to believe that I can say that things worked out rather well. We all survived! I had six lovely students enrolled in the course. They came from different walks of life and had varying degrees of familiarity with the Middle Ages. These students were all united by their curiosity and eagerness to learn. They impressed me, other members of the teaching team, and my guest lecturers with their questions and comments. I got the impression that they saw our time together during the fourth hour of school as a time to experiment and take risks. They never worried about if a question was partially formulated or about sounding like a novice. Time and time again I thought about how fortunate I was to have such engaged students. Together, we tracked changes around the Mediterranean and beyond as curious co-investigators. With guest lecturers as our guides on our journey, our collective knowledge grew. Field trips allowed us to think beyond the confines of the classroom and encounter cultural productions from the times and places we discussed. They made the Middle Ages feel more real.
We as a class came to the consensus that our trip in mid-April to the Raclin Murphy Museum was a highlight. They were dazzled by the brand-new building, the high ceilings, and impressive gallery spaces. This was the first visit to the museum for all but one of my students. Maggie Dosch, the Assistant Curator of Education School Programs, was our North Star and guiding light as she led us through her thoughtfully-crafted tour and lesson plan. The teacher became a student as I relinquished control to Maggie and her expertise. She shared so much knowledge with us that morning as she led us through close-readings of various works of art.
Maggie Dosch (left, standing), Assistant Curator of Education School Programs, guides students from John Adams High School, South Bend, IN through a close reading of a piece depicting Byzantine iconography.
Maggie started us off with a selection of pieces from the gallery that features European Art Through 1700. It was wonderful to see my students outside of our typical classroom setting. Instead of sitting in classic student desks facing the front of our cider-blocked classroom, we were all huddled together around various tableaus and sculptures. With nothing but our humble, portable stools and notebooks and pencils, we were all equals in Maggie’s moving classroom. I found myself joining my students in asking Maggie questions about context and materiality. We all wanted to take advantage of being in the presence of someone who knew the gallery and pieces so intimately. She had us all eating out of the palm of her hand as she told us about the process of gilding, reliquaries, and more. Maggie had choreographed a beautiful, delicate dance that allowed her to move gracefully between the medieval and the contemporary. We saw works from Byzantium and Italy and beyond. Indeed, she took us on a journey around the Mediterranean even though we never really ever left South Bend. Before we knew it, our time with Maggie was done. She only had an hour to spend with us before she had to move onto her next group.
Over lunch at a nearby fast casual restaurant, my students groaned about how short the visit was. Why couldn’t we have doubled or even tripled our time? There was so much more to see and explore! We barely scratched the surface! As they chatted amongst themselves over a feast of pizza and soda, I could hear them asking each other about their favorite parts of the visit. It was great, as an instructor, to know that my students were having these conversations organically among themselves. When lunch time came to an end and we had to make our way back to John Adams High School, I reminded them that the Raclin Murphy Museum is a community resource – they were welcome to return with their friends and family. Many seemed eager to plan for their next visit!
Students from John Adams High School, South Bend, IN gather around a display detailing various inks used during the Middle Ages as well as the process of gilding
Indeed, experiential learning is crucial for making the Middle Ages matter to these students. It is one thing to work with primary sources, listen to guest lecturers, and look at art and architecture on PowerPoint slides. It is another thing entirely to get outside of the conventional classroom setting and encounter a work from the past in an intimate setting. It is a privilege to have an expert help you make various connections between artistic techniques, influences, and historical context. It is powerful to share your observations in real time with someone who can answer any questions you may have as well as provide more insights. It is a way to break down barriers.
Years from now, I have a feeling that my students will not remember me. I mean, I am guilty of not remembering all the names of my wonderful instructors! As time passes, the details of this class might become fuzzy. My students might be able to tell others something along the lines of, “yeah, I took a medieval studies class in high school that was in partnership with the University of Notre Dame.” Perhaps they will recall a guest lecture or two. They might still have a booklet that they made when Dr. Megan Hall came and taught them about medieval book making technologies. Time can take a toll on memory. Despite this, what I hope is that their visit to the museum will become something they can fondly remember years from now. I think about their course evaluations and how they wrote how appreciative they were to be in such an immersive environment. Indeed, experiential learning is powerful. It allows for one to make meaningful connections between classroom lessons and important takeaways. Sensing the Middle Ages is different from reading about it. It allows us to be transported. We are challenged to ask questions about context, movement, materiality, and more. I am so proud of my students, who embraced their status as novices. May they hold onto their curiosity, kindness, and wit as they grow older and experience new things. As for our limited time as a class: we got to see the medieval together, and for that I am forever grateful.
Anne Le, Ph.D. Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame
“That ‘Poetry is the cradle of philosophy’ is axiomatic”
(John of Salisbury, Metalogicon I.22).
Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?) (French, active about 1450 – 1485), Philosophy Presenting the Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius, Google Art Project.
It is a truth generally acknowledged that in the Middle Ages a liberal arts education consisted of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Poetry –what we might call “literature”– was primarily taught by grammarians and rhetoricians in the Middle Ages. Literary scholars, like Rita Copeland and Marjorie Woods, have therefore been very motivated to study exactly what the language disciplines of Grammar and Rhetoric entailed and precisely how they were taught in order to have a better sense of what the study of literature must have looked like in this period. Their works are indispensable for the study of medieval literature and truly are the bulk of where instruction in poetics lay in the Middle Ages. And yet, once cannot stop there.
Knowing exactly where to put poetry was something that clearly bothered many medieval philosophers. While today we might assume that poetry would clearly be associated with the Trivium, or the arts dedicated to words, specifically grammar and rhetoric, certain medieval thinkers located it within logic and also the Quadrivium, or the arts of number. Understanding why can help us to understand the multi-faceted way in which the medieval mind approached poetry in particular and the literary arts more generally.
Étienne Colaud, “John of Salisbury teaching philosophy,” frontispiece miniature of the Policraticus by John of Salisbury, BnF Ms.1145, folio 3 recto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the twelfth century when there were major curricular changes afoot in schools and universities, John of Salisbury maintained that poetry belonged to the art of grammar although it was closely allied with rhetoric. “Art,” writes John of Salisbury, “is a system that reason has devised in order to expedite, by its own short cut, our ability to do things within our natural capacities. Reason neither provides nor professes to provide the accomplishment of the impossible;” Instead, reason pursues the possible by means of an efficient plan, what the Greeks would call a methodon (Metalogicon I.11, p.33). As J.J. Murphy writes in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. II: The Middle Ages:
In medieval terminology the Latin word ars (plural: artes) denoted a body of principles relating to a specific activity such as painting, music, preaching, or writing. By extension the term was also used for a written treatise on the subject of a particular art […] The term ‘art’ or ars when applied to such a treatise indicates a discussion of what the ancient Greeks would have called techné ––‘technique’ or ‘craft’ –– rather than an abstract or theoretical discussion of a subject (p.42).
The practitioner of an art is therefore called an artifex or craftsman, and the study of the art consisted of both the intrinsic principles for practice and the extrinsic practice of the art itself.[1] When art is understood in this way, craftsmen generally agree that the person able to produce art is more skilled that the person skilled at conveying the principles underlying art. While poetry was clearly a craft that required a practitioner to study a method of practice, it was by no means clear where it ought to fit in the medieval curriculum of the arts.
John of Salisbury reports that some people thought poetry should be its own subject (shockingly!) because so much of it is clearly a “product of nature’s workshop” (Metalogicon I.18). The close tie between poetry and nature formed the basis of their argument, but John of Salisbury warns pragmatically that if poetry is removed from grammar, “its mother and the nurse of its study,” the study of poetry could be “dropped from the roll of liberal studies.” In other words, everyone studies grammar, which in those days often included a careful study of works like Virgil’s Aeneid. If poetry became its own subject, people might not take it at all!
English: Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Poetics by Abu Bishr Matta Français : Poétique (Aristote) en arabe – Abu Bishr Matta العربية: فن الشعر لأرسطوطاليس نقل أبي بشر متى – من مخطوطة باريس ٢٣٤٦ http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8422956q/f273.image
Some philosophers thought that poetry actually belonged to the subject of logic. These people were especially concerned about how to classify Aristotle’s Poetics. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle had written a group of works (one might even say lecture notes) on logic when teaching at the Lyceum. His followers, the Peripatetics, classified these works as the Organon, meaning instrument or tool, because they saw them as instrumental in preparing for the study of philosophy. The Latin West had only select works from the Organon until their increased contact with Arabic philosophers like Avicenna, who wrote a commentary on the Poetics. Following the Greek commentators on Aristotle, most of the Arabic (and subsequently Latin scholastic) commentators saw Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics as the seventh and eighth works of Aristotle’s Organon. In their zeal, therefore, to comment on the entirety of the Organon, some Latin scholastic commentators, like Herman the German, viewed poetics as a part of Logic.
As surprising as it might be to think that poetry should be considered primarily within the context of “logic,” there is strong evidence that poetry was also studied within the context of the quadrivium. And yet, many medieval thinkers, the Pythagorean believed that number lay at the root of creation itself. For example, Dante writes in the Convivio when commenting on the beauty of a canzone:
All of you who cannot perceive the meaning of this canzone, do not reject it on that account, but consider its beauty: considerable for the way it is constructed, which is the concern of the grammarians; the ordering of its discourse, which is the concern of the rhetoricians; and for the metrical numbering of its parts, which is the concern of poets. (II.xi.9–10)
The key word to focus upon here is numbering. Familiarity with the Commedia and its frequent references to the starsis enough to convince a reader that one aspect of the numbering that Dante had in mind was the medieval discipline of astronomy, but there is also good reason to think that Dante had music in mind. Some of this evidence is textual…the numerous references to music in the Purgatorio and Paradiso…, but some of this evidence can be found in Boethius.
The standard textbook for the teaching of music theory in the Middle Ages was Boethius’ Fundamentals of Music, and until 1255, it was not uncommon for most educated men , including Dante, who undertook a liberal arts education to have at least some instruction in the subject.[2] As a result, even 11th and 12th c. philosophers like Anselm and Peter Abelard wrote sacred poetry and song. In this book, Boethius speaks of poetry as a subset of one kind of music.
Boethius begins his work on music with a philosophical justification for its study. Citing Plato and Pythagoras, he observes that music is so deeply engrained in human nature that from a young age it has the power to move human souls, transform their character, and even affect their health and sense of well-being (I.1.180–185). He explains that this phenomenon should leave us with no doubt that “the order of our soul and body seems to be related somehow through those same ratios by which subsequent argument will demonstrate sets of pitches, suitable for melody, are joined together and united” (I.1.186). Since “music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired,” then “the power of the intellect ought to be summoned so that this art, innate through nature, may be mastered, comprehended through knowledge” (I.187). In this way, Boethius justifies the study of music because it reflects something about the fundamental nature of the human soul.
English: “King David, Lady Music and musicians”. In manuscript “De institutione musica”. Boetius. Español: “El Rey David, la Señora Música y los músicos”. Del manuscrito “De institutione musica”. Boecio. Date Original: 1941 – 1942. Copy upload: 2010.Source: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000009OM1.jpg
In this work, Boethius identifies three kinds of music––cosmic, human, and instrumental. This categorization implies that the human response to music is rooted in the nature of not only the human soul but of the cosmos (I.2). Cosmic music, or the music of the spheres, is the harmonious sound produced when the stars in their courses and the diversity of seasons move swiftly together in harmonious union (1.2.187–188). Human music does not concern the music produced by humans. Rather, it is the music found in the harmony of soul and body in a human being. Boethius describes this music as “a careful tuning of low and high pitches as though producing one consonance” (I.2.189). It unites not only the rational and animal parts of the soul, but the parts of the body and the body’s union with soul. Boethius promises to speak about this subject later, but he never returns to it. Instrumental music, for Boethius, includes the harmonious sounds produced by tension of strengths, human breath, percussion, etc. (I.2.189). This kind of music is what most people today associate with music, but Boethius’ understands this music to operate according to the same mathematical principles of both cosmic and human music. This mathematical concordance explains the reasons for music’s profound effect on the human soul.
Although the producer of cosmic and human music is ultimately God, instrumental music must be produced by a human musician. Boethius’ definition of a human musician broadens the horizon within which music itself is narrowly considered today. He identifies three classes of musician: the instrumentalist, the poet, and the rational judger of music (I.34.224).
The instrumentalist is no greater than a “slave” because one does not need the faculty of reason in order to produce music upon an instrument.
The second class of poets are presumably higher than slaves, but Boethius remarks that even the poets create songs by instinct rather than reason. One might recall here Lady Philosophy’s attack upon the Muses as “harpies” because their base songs only continued to prolong Boethius’ misery.
The third class of musician is the one with the ability to judge rhythm, melody, and composition. Since this class exercises reason in their experience of music, they alone should be considered worthy of esteem. This final judgment may seem harsh, but it was a common opinion in his day; Augustine repeats a similar idea in Demusica.3 In fact, both men express their love of hearing music with some guilt, even though Augustine insists that music should remain in churches (Conf.9.6, 14 and 10, 33, 49–50; Consol.I.2 and IV.6.6). In other words, Boethius repeats the infamous attack of Plato on the poets, even though he himself writes poetry in the Consolatio.
It is startling to consider that Boethius includes both poets and song-writers within the class of musicians. Any time a human being takes the mathematics of sound seriously in the construction of a work of verbal art, they are a musician, whether or not the words constructed are intended for accompaniment with music. Second, Boethius boldy asserts that the ability to judge music is superior to the ability to craft and perform music. Within this model of music, the music theorist and literary critic are both superior to the musician and the poet. The ability to judge is always to be preferred over the ability to craft. In the long war between philosophy and poetry, philosophy always wins.
Whether or not poets like Dante would have agreed with Boethius that the practice of their art was inferior to those who judge art, especially since arts are, by definition, intended to be practiced, it is interesting to consider that medieval poets, as a kind of musician, may have conceived themselves to be craftsman that used the tools of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and music (or the entire quadrivium if one is Boethius or Dante!) to construct their art while looking up at the stars.
Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame
Further Reading
Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius. Fundamentals of Music. Edited by Claude V. Palisca. Translated by Calvin M. Bower. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.
Copeland, Rita, and Ineke Sluiter. Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300 -1475. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Dante Alighieri. Dante: Convivio. Translated by Andrew Frisardi. New edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Fournier, Michael. “Boethius and the Consolation of the Quadrivium.” Medievalia et Humanistica, no. 34 (2008): 1–21.
John of Salisbury. The Metalogicon. Translated by Daniel D McGarry. Berkeley: Calif. U.P., 1962.
Martianus Capella. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Translated by William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson, and E.L. Burge. Vol. II: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. 2 vols. Records of Western Civilization 84. Columbia University Press, 1992.
Minnis, A. J., and A. B Scott, eds. “”Placing the Poetics: Herman the German; An Anonymous Question on the Nature of Poetry.” In Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–1375: The Commentary Tradition, Revised. Oxford: OUP, 1991.
O’Daly, Gerard J. P. The Poetry of Boethius. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Stahl, William Harris, Richard Johnson, and E.L. Burge. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Vol. I: The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella. 2 vols. Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 84. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Woods, Marjorie Curry. Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. 1 edition. Text and Context. Ohio State University Press, 2017.
Woods, Marjorie Curry. Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. 1st ed. Vol. 1. E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series. United States: Princeton University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691188744.
Fables—short moralized narratives, often with animal subjects, associated with the legendary figure of Aesop—have been transmitted and adapted from antiquity down to the present. In the Middle Ages, fables were used to teach Latin to children. One particular fable collection, sometimes called the “elegiac Romulus” for its verse form and supposed dedicatee, seems to have been especially popular in this regard. This collection of approximately 60 fables (many manuscripts have 58 but others may have several more) is extant in almost 200 manuscripts from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Some of these manuscripts show signs of use in the classroom (i.e., they have features such as glosses, words numbered to aid in parsing, etc. An edition by Aaron E. Wright reproduces one such manuscript).[1] There is a critical text of the elegiac Romulus edited by Paola Busdraghi, with a translation into Italian.[2] I offer below my own English translation of one fable from the elegiac Romulus, along with brief commentary.
The fable of The Stag and the Dogs (De cervo et canibus), 74 in the Perry Index, is also known as The Stag at the Spring (Cervus ad fontem)[3] or The Stag and His Antlers (De cervo et cornibus eius).[4] Other medieval versions of this fable are found in prose and verse Latin fable collections in the Romulus tradition;[5] the Parabolae of Odo of Cheriton;[6] the Novus Aesopus of Alexander Neckam;[7] and the Fables of Marie de France.[8]
In this fable, a stag views his own reflection in the spring he drinks at, proud of his many-tined antlers, but critical of his legs, which seem to him too slender. The stag flees as hunting dogs approach, now appreciating the swiftness of his legs, but his antlers become entangled as he passes through dense vegetation, and he is caught and killed. The moral typically advises that we should value or disdain things according to whether they help us or harm us.
Hunters with dogs pursuing a deer, Getty Museum MS 27, f.67v.
Here is the version of the fable found in the elegiac Romulus, from Busdraghi’s edition:[9]
De cervo et canibus
Fons nitet argento similis, sitis arida cervum huc rapit, haurit aquas, se speculatur aquis. Hunc beat, hunc mulcet ramose gloria frontis, hunc premit, hunc ledit tibia macra pedum. Ecce canes, tonat ira canum. Timet ille, timenti fit fuga, culpati cruris adorat opem. Silve claustra subit, cornu retinente moratur: crure neci raptum cornua longa necant. Spernere quod prosit et amare quod obsit ineptum est: prodest quod fugimus et quod amamus obest.
The following is my translation:
The stag and the dogs
A spring shines like silver, dry thirst draws a stag to the place; he drinks the waters, watches himself in the waters. The glory of his branching brow gladdens and delights him, his thin shins and feet depress him, annoy him. Here come the dogs, the rage of dogs resounds. He is afraid, and, fearing, takes flight, admires the aid of his once-blamed legs.
He comes into a narrow grove, is delayed by horns holding him back: snatched from death by his legs, but killed by his long antlers. It is absurd to despise what benefits you and love what hurts you: what we flee helps us, and what we love hinders us.
Medieval literature often gives an impression of hunting as a pastime of the aristocracy. And indeed, it was—or at least the practice of pursuing and killing red deer (Cervus elaphus) using a pack of hunting dogs, as this fable depicts, was the “noblest” (at least according to aristocratic hunters!) and most highly ritualized form of hunting in the Middle Ages. Hunting was, however, “central to the lives of all classes,”[10] and involved, as it still does today, killing a wide range of species using a variety of methods, such as stalking, snaring, and netting—quite effective, but nevertheless disdained by some elite medieval authors as unsporting. Another way of hunting deer was the “bow and stable” method, in which deer (red or fallow) were driven towards a line of archers.[11] This is the type of deer hunting depicted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (previouslydiscussedon the MSRB). Unlike the hunt par force de chiens—the hunt of a single animal with a pack of dogs—this method could result in numerous kills.
Bow and stable hunting, Getty Museum MS 27, f.109.
There is a ring of truth to the stag’s fate in The Stag and the Dogs: in a sense, the stag’s glorious antlers doom him. While a substantial rack of antlers is both a means of competing against other males for mates and an effective defense from many non-human predators, it was precisely the antlers which marked a stag, or hart, as legitimate quarry. The Master of Game, an early-fifteenth-century English translation of Gaston Phoebus’s hunting treatise, the Livre de la chasse, provides precise terminology for male deer in each year of their life. A stag in his sixth year, having at least ten tines on his antlers, was a “hart of ten”; at this point the animal could be pursued. But scouts for a hunting party would attempt to find not just any hart who could be pursued; ideally the party would seek “the finest hart available in the area.”[12] In modern times, as well, some hunters of deer may go for the most impressive “trophy” specimens—males in their prime with sizeable racks—rather than targeting more vulnerable animals, as predators such as wolves are inclined to do. This may have deleterious effects on deer populations.[13]
The fable of The Stag and the Dogs does not function as an indictment of hunting. This narrative fits within a larger context of interspecies violence throughout the fable genre, in which characters die as a consequence for their vices or errors. Nonetheless, rather than focusing attention on humans’ pleasure in hunting deer, as many other medieval works on the topic do, the fable invites readers to briefly consider the predicament of the frightened victim, while at the same time making a lesson out of his misjudgment.
Emily Mahan PhD in Medieval Studies University of Notre Dame
[1] Aaron E. Wright, ed., The Fables of ‘Walter of England’ Edited from Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Codex Guelferbytanus 185 Helmstadienis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997).
[2] Paola Busdraghi, ed., L’Esopus attribuito a Gualtiero Anglico, Favolisti latini medievali e umanistici, 10 (Genova: Università di Genova, 2005).
[3] Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco‐Latin Fable, trans. Leslie A. Ray, vol. 3: Inventory and Documentation of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 625.
[4] Giovanni Garbugino, ed., Alessandro Neckam: Novus Aesopus, Favolisti latini medievali, 2 (Genova: Università di Genova, 1987), p. 124.
[5] Léopold Hervieux, ed., Les fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 2: Phèdre et ses anciens imitateurs directs et indirects (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884).
[6] Léopold Hervieux, ed., Les fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 4: Eudes de Cheriton et ses dérivés (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1896).
[7] Garbugino, ed., Novus Aesopus, p. 124.
[8] Charles Brucker, ed., Les Fables: édition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, des notes et d’un glossaire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Peeters, 1998), pp. 130-1.
[9] Busdraghi, ed., L’Esopus, p. 148.
[10] Tony Pollard, “Foreword,” in Medieval Hunting, by Richard Almond (Stroud: The History Press, 2011).
[11] John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 47-67.
[12] Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk, pp. 32-4.[13] Jos M. Milner, Erlend B. Nilsen, and Harry P. Andreassen, “Demographic Side Effects of Selective Hunting in Ungulates and Carnivores,” Conservation Biology 21, no. 1 (2007), pp. 36-47.
