Showing posts with label Ralph Higden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ralph Higden. Show all posts

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Finding Paradise

Higden's map,
with Eden (and East) at the top
Medieval mapmakers, if they wanted to be thorough, of course had to account for the Garden of Eden. Surely it existed somewhere in the world, but where?

It certainly wasn't in Europe, which was fairly well traveled, and so the medieval mind had to look beyond the lands they knew. The 13th century Hereford map (a mappa mundi of the T-O pattern; see the link above) places Eden on an island near India, surrounded by not only water but also a massive wall. Ralph Higden places it not only in the less-understood-to-Europeans Asia, but makes clear it is an inaccessible part of Asia (you have to explain why no one has stumbled upon it and returned with the news).

Hrabanus Maurus was a little more cautious:
Many folk want to make out that the site of Paradise is in the east of the earth, though cut off by the longest intervening space of ocean or earth from all regions which man now inhabits. Consequently, the waters of the Deluge, which covered the highest points of the surface of our orb, were unable to reach it. However, whether it be there, or whether it be anywhere else, God knows; but that there was such a spot once, and that it was on earth, that is certain. [De universo (Concerning the world)]
A German priest of the 15th century, Meffreth, seems to be the only person who thinks himself qualified to actually answer the question "Wouldn't Eden have been washed away in Noah's Flood?" He has left us a sermon in which he claims that Eden exists on an extremely tall mountain in Eastern Asia—so tall, that the waters that covered Mt. Ararat merely lapped at the base of Eden on this mountain. He further explains that four rivers pour from Eden at such a height that the roar they make when descending to the lake at the foot of the mountain has rendered the locals completely deaf.

After the 15th century, we find few references to a terrestrial location of Paradise. As man started to circumnavigate the globe and explore the interiors of more continents, it became clear that finding Eden was not going to be a simple matter of traveling.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

"Grammar" "School"—Part 2 of 2

Yesterday we looked at the use of the word "school" in the Middle Ages. Today, let's look at the descriptive term "grammar" when applied to schools.

There is a document from the late 11th century that refers to a scola grammatice [grammatic/grammar school]. We see that and similar phrases becoming more common in the 1200s. In 1387 we get the first reference in English to a "gramer scole" by John of Trevisa (briefly mentioned here), who is translating Ralph Higden's Polychronicon* and uses the phrase to refer to a school in Alexandria.

But what did they mean by "grammar" school? Was it all just about teaching grammar. Well, in a word, probably "yes." The term grew to distinguish those schools from the more involved curriculum of the schools that were tackling the seven Liberal Arts—Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic made up the foundational "Trivium" while the higher learning of the Quadrivium meant studying Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy. (The first three were all about mastering language, the four were all about mastering mathematics.)

What was covered in "grammar" schools? Well, it was synonymous with what a later age called the study of "letters," and comprised learning from great writings. Grammar school was all about reading great literature from the past and committing the lessons found therein to heart. One learned how the great writers—who could on rare occasions be pagan writers, but were mostly the Church Fathers, as well as the Latin Bible—constructed their brilliant sentences and built their arguments.

Of course, these great minds of the past did not write in English, and so the study of "grammar" could not truly be undertaken until one learned Latin. For young boys beginning instruction—usually at a nearby church under the tutelage of a priest—the first stage was learning Latin.

Latin grammar had been dissected and discussed at great length by scholars in the past, particularly by two Latin writers named Priscian and Donat. But let's save them for tomorrow.

*This work was an attempt to write a universal history, hence the name meaning "many times."