Poets and Politics

Christine de Pizan (1364 - c.1430) was considered the first professional woman of letters in Europe, first writing after the death of her husband to support her family, and then becoming so well-known for her poems and ballads that she got commissions from nobility. Her works for others were often more scholarly, such as Le Livre des trois vertus ("The Book of Three Virtues") instructing the wife of Dauphin Louis of France, Margaret of Nevers.

As the Dauphin himself was growing up, Christine dedicated three works to him, advising him on wise and effective government. One of these works, Livre du Corps de policie ("The Book of the Body Politic") described the governments of medieval Europe. In it, she criticized the Italian city-states of her birth that were run by corporations, favoring hereditary monarchies that she felt were better for the common good. Much of this book covered the king's duties as a military leader.

Perhaps it was those chapters that inspired a gift of 200 livres* to her for writing Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie ("The Book of Feats of Arms and of Chivalry"). In it, she explains the rationale for a "just war" and quotes classical writers on warfare. She rejected Trial by Combat, discussed proper treatment of noncombatants and prisoners of war, and claimed that only a king can start a war because the king is responsible for the welfare of his people and country. One year after producing this book, nobles were prohibited from raising armies by royal edict.

In 1413, Christine followed this work with Livre de la paix ("The Book of Peace"), her thoughts on good governance. This was a time of civil war in France, and she urged the Dauphin to seek peace, quoting writings of Abelard, St. Benedict, and Cicero.

The Dauphin's mother, Queen Isabeau, requested of Christine her collected works. In 1414, Christine presented the queen with a lavishly illustrated compendium of 30 of her writings. The illustration above is the frontispiece, with Christine presenting the work to Isabeau.

There was a long period away from court when she wrote less. It is assumed she was avoiding the stress of civil war by staying in a Dominican convent, but in 1429 she came out with another work at the end of the civil war. That was a poem, Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc ("The Tale of Joan of Arc"). I'll talk about that, and Joan, tomorrow.

*A unit of currency. Charlemagne established it as equal to 1 pound of silver.

John of Salisbury on Skepticism & Medicine

John of Salisbury liked the idea of academic skepticism, which ultimately came from Plato's Academy. Let me explain. The head of Plato's Academy post-Plato was Philo of Larissa, who fled Athens for political reasons and landed in Rome. While there, Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) attended some of his lectures and learned "academic skepticism." This started with Socrates' method of posing a series of questions to someone that could undermine their firmly held beliefs. Cicero's writings were known to John of Salisbury's time, but the Greek influences not so much.

John's approach was one of "moderate skepticism": although some things could be proven "definitively" there was still room to question them. He prized the use of Rhetoric and Grammar to challenge ideas, which put him at odds with some scholars who rejected the Trivium because Grammar and Rhetoric (they felt) clashed with the third part of the Trivium, Logic.

John considered the Trivium crucial to human beings because he felt philosophical thought was the dividing line between human beings and wild animals (and human beings and less intellectually gifted human beings). The arts of the Trivium were what enabled philosophical and critical thought to contribute to the ability to socialize, to create a community, and they therefore enabled human well-being.

He had very strong opinions on the state of medicine, believing that doctors had become more interested in making money than researching the best way to care for patients. Some physicians focused on the state of the soul and its relationship to bodily health. John thought this was ridiculous since there was no way to test or prove anything involving the soul. It also "trespassed on religious belief" which he was not keen to support. He expressed that doctors should spend their time divided evenly between research and practice, because the two pursuits were currently separated and leading to two separate practices that did not support each other. He proposed what he called regularum compendium: figure out what caused the illness, figure out how to cure the illness, figure out appropriate aftercare, then figure out how to avoid the illness in the future.

There was another Latin phrase that John of Salisbury coined that influenced later times, theatrum mundi, and we'll look this topic tomorrow.

The Five-Paragraph Essay

Found on Pinterest...seriously

The five-paragraph essay was treated as the cornerstone of English classes when I was growing up: it was drummed into me when I was a high school student, and it was a necessity in the English Department at my first teaching job. Despite the fact that a topic does not always fall into three points, enforcing the structure of five paragraphs was considered an ideal way to teach essay writing.

The formal parts of the five-paragraph can be found all over, and of course on Wikipedia:

• Introduction: Introducing a topic. An important part of this is the three-pronged thesis.
• Body paragraph 1: Explaining the first part of the three-pronged thesis
• Body paragraph 2: Explaining the second part of the three-pronged thesis
• Body paragraph 3: Explaining the third part of the three-pronged thesis
• Conclusion: Summing up points and restating thesis

Wikipedia informs me that it is also called (I don't recall ever seeing these terms before today) the "hamburger essay" [see illustration above], "one three one," and the "three-tier essay."

Looking for the origin of the five-paragraph format takes us back in time past the nuns who taught me, past John Dewey, past McGuffey Readers; we have to look back to the first century CE, to a work that was mistakenly attributed to Cicero.

Rhetorica ad Herennium ["Rehetoric: for Herennius"] was a very popular early book on rhetoric. Because Cicero wrote a well-known book on rhetoric (called De inventione ["Concerning the art of discovery"], he was given credit (right up through the Renaissance) for writing this more-complete book. In it, the author offers a format for an argument that may sound familiar to you:

• Exordium — Exhorting your reader to listen to your topic
• Narratio — Narrating/explaining what your topic is
• Divisio — Dividing your topic into main points
• Confirmatio — Confirming your points with arguments (usually three)
• Refutatio — Offering opposing arguments & refuting them
• Conclusio — Concluding your essay with a summary of your arguments

The Refutatio is often a part of a larger essay. The five-paragraph essay can be boiled down to

• Paragraph 1: Narratio + Divisio
• Paragraph 2-4: Confirmatio
• Paragraph 5: Conclusio

...and I spent my teenage years hoping never to be constrained in that way again!

You can read the Rhetorica ad Herennium here.

A Papal Secretary Makes His Mark

Poggio's notes on monument [link]

Many months ago this post mentioned a time when there were three popes at once, who were finally removed and replaced with a fourth. The truth is that there was a two-year gap before the Cardinals settled on a single pope. During this time, what did all the servants and staff of the Vatican do with themselves? One of them went searching for manuscripts from the past and made of them a gift to the future.

His name was Gian Francesco Poggio (later called "Bracciolini," and he was born in Tuscany on 11 February, 1380, but grew up in Florence where his father took him to be educated. It was soon clear that he had a great talent: his penmanship. In an age when all documents were created by hand, penmanship was prized. He was put in school to become a notary.

Notaries were authorized to oversee certain legal documents and transactions. At 21 he was a member of the Notaries Guild in Florence. Two years later, he was working for a cardinal, and a few months after that, for the Vatican itself. With his penmanship skills and knowledge of proper document organization and preparation, he quickly moved up through all the ranks of official Vatican scriptors, working under four popes.

Then came 1414 and the Council of Constance that got rid of all three warring popes, beginning a two-year gap in the need for secretaries who produced official documents. Poggio decided to travel. He visited the German spa at Baden, abbeys in Switzerland and Swabia, St. Gall and many others. He brought to light sole copies of important works by classical authors that might have otherwise disintegrated without being copied.

At Gall he found unique documents by Cicero, Quintilian, Statius, Gaius Valerius Flaccus, and more. Cicero's complete Orations were recovered at Cluny. The only known copy of the encyclopedic De Rerum Natura ["On the Nature of Things"] by Lucretius was recovered from a German monastery (probably Fulda). One Harvard scholar credits Lucretius' 7400-line poem on the world with kickstarting the Renaissance.

He returned to his Vatican duties, being named Apostolicus Secretarius, the papal secretary, under the newly elected Pope Martin V. He traveled a great deal still, moving around when the pope did and on re-assignments (he spent five years in England, which he hated), looking for manuscripts that needed bringing into the light. He worked under several more popes until he finally retired to a villa that he had built with the money from the sale of a manuscript by Livy. In 1453,* he was offered the position of Chancellor of the Florentine Republic by Cosimo de Medici. He fulfilled his duties there until his death in 1459.

*Coincidentally, he retired from a career created by his excellent hand-writing of documents at the same time Gutenberg was perfecting movable type and ushering in an era of mass-produced books.

Why "Dark" Ages?

Once in a time known as the Dark Ages
There lived a legend whose coming had been foretold
by the great prophet Merlin.

This is the opening of a 1999 film on Joan of Arc. Joan's dates were 1412-1431, a far cry from anyone's idea of the Dark Ages.* What were the Dark Ages, exactly? The term is commonly used to refer to a time when education lapsed and "not much happened." Well, the amount that was happening could fill a daily blog for quite awhile.

The concept of a Dark Age is credited to Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), who traveled Europe looking for Latin classics. The story goes that, upon discovering a "lost" collection of the letters of Cicero (106-43 BCE) in the 1330s, he expressed his disgust that such splendor had existed long ago but not preserved or improved upon in the intervening years:

Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offense and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

Essentially, for Petrarch, the Dark Ages was that period between the glory that was Rome and the glory that was his own era. Nowadays, if the term "Dark Ages" is used at all, it is used for the first half of the Middle Ages, denoting the period right after the fall of Rome to about 1100.

So where/when did we start talking about the "Middle" Ages?

[to be continued]

*And don't get me started on "Merlin" having a prophecy about Joan.