A medieval puppet-show

A medieval puppet-show

The Centre Ages are, not quite without warrant, condemned as an era of intellectual stagnation, a period with no fine art, no literature, no scientific discipline, and no philosophy. The best literature of the aboriginal world was lost, its temples and its statues were cached in ruins; its pagan philosophies had been ruled out past ecclesiastical dogmas which imposed rigid limitations upon all inquiring spirits, and stamped as impious all investigation of phenomena for which the Church found a supernatural origin, or such as threatened to throw incertitude upon her authoritative pronouncements. Knowledge and discovery are necessarily bounded by the limitations of the human intellect; merely to these were added the artificial limitations of theological dogmas.

Intellectual, stagnation, however, is after all an incorrect description of the result. Stagnation is the antithesis of activity, and there was no absenteeism of intellectual activity. Sterility rather than stagnation is the correct give-and-take, because the activities were directed into unproductive channels. Nevertheless, revolt had begun long before the fifteenth century; and the British Isles can merits to accept been the birthplace of men who gave a peachy stimulus to intellectual emancipation.

Scholars
Such were Duns Scotus in the latter half of the thirteenth century, equally to whom information technology is uncertain whether his birthplace was in Ireland or in Scotland or the north of England; William Occam, an Englishman who was possibly a pupil of Duns Scotus; and John Wiclif, the pioneer of the Reformation. Fifty-fifty more remarkable than whatever of these was Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar, the educatee and friend of the slap-up Bishop Grossetete, the greatest amongst the pioneers of scientific research, who indeed deserves to exist called the begetter of modern science; the prophet of, the great doctrine that, religious truth cannot suffer from the increment of scientific knowledge. Merely in the Middle Ages no man could be more than than a pioneer. emancipation did not arrive until the sixteenth century. Until then, the too independent thinker was assured of condemnation as a heretic, and the scientific experimentalist of condemnation as a necromancer.

Art, also, was well-nigh restricted to the service of religion, and in that service one branch of it flourished. Architecture institute telescopic in the building of churches and cathedrals; upon them piety lavished wealth, labour, and imagination. The monk, too, in his cloister could glorify God by producing masterpieces of decorative penmanship and wonders of illumination. The fine art of the painter revived in Italy, but it was all the same confined to the service of the Church and to subjects which tended to edification. Across Italian republic it hardly spread, and in England was practically unknown.

Literature
A people may do without fine art, but literature of some kind information technology must have, if simply in the shape of folk-tales, folk-songs, and war-songs. But a national literature implies a national linguistic communication, and that which is preserved by oral tradition alone tin but be exceedingly express.

An English literature had not come into being before the Norman Conquest, except in the class of the songs of the countryside and the ballads, of which merely fragments survived in writing; such as the vocal of the primitive hero Beowulf, the poem of the monastic servitor Caedmon who sang of the beginning of things, the battle lays of Brunanburh and Maldon preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The men who wrote, wrote in Latin almost exclusively. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the but prose monument of pre-Conquest English, and that is a mere compilation.

After the Conquest in that location was not for a very long fourth dimension a national linguistic communication; that is to say, the natural language of the ruling classes was Norman-French, and English language was the language merely of the common folk. The learned wrote neither English language nor Norman-French, just Latin. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Walter Map nerveless and embroidered, or invented, legends concerning King Arthur and others, lively romances to which they were pleased to requite the name of history, but their Latin tales did not constitute English language literature.

Brut
Something which deserves to exist called the beginning of English literature appeared when the monk Layamon reproduced in an English verse form, Brut, sure of the same legends. Brut was the mythical Trojan hero who gave his name to the islands of Britain. Layamon'south verse form was written in the reign of Rex John.

And then for another century and a half the simply literature which could be called pop consisted of French romances, prototypes of those which some centuries later on perturbed the encephalon of Don Quixote. England, indeed, produced a real literary effigy in the person of ane of the best of medieval historians, Matthew Paris; but he, like other men of learning, wrote not in the vernacular but in Latin.

This article is excerpted from the volume, 'A History of the British Nation', past AD Innes, published in 1912 by TC & EC Jack, London. I picked upwards this delightful tome at a second-manus bookstore in Calgary, Canada, some years ago. Since it is now more than 70 years since Mr Innes's expiry in 1938, we are able to share the consummate text of this book with United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Express readers. Some of the author'southward views may be controversial by modernistic standards, especially his attitudes towards other cultures and races, but it is worth reading as a period piece of British attitudes at the fourth dimension of writing.

History
Prehistory - Roman Britain - Dark Ages - Medieval Britain - The Tudor Era - The Stuarts - Georgian Britain - The Victorian Age