Twenty-two years ago the Historisches Jahrbuch published a review of recent studies of John of Salisbury. It was signed by H. Hohenleutner (1958) and it surveyed work done between 1948 and 1958. In that immediately post-war period there had appeared Daniel McGarry’s most useful translation into English of the Metalogicon (1955); Christopher Brooke had brought to completion an edition and translation of the early Letters of John of Salisbury covering the years 1153-61, and Marjope Chibnall had edited and translated with great success the Historia Pontificalis (1956). There had also appeared, apart from a number of short articles and chapters, Hans Liebeschütz’s book on John of Salisbury and medieval humanism and Helbling-Gloor’s study of John’s ideas concerning nature and superstition (1956).

Dans son Essor de la littérature latine au XIIè siècle, le père de Ghellinck écrivait: ‘sans avoir jamais professé dans une école, Jean de Salisbury est une des figures les plus représentatives du monde apparenté aux écoles dans la première moitié du XIIè siècle … C’est un agent de liaison entre l’école et le monde extra-scolaire’.

Mentalität als Denk-, Verhaltens- und Lebensweise eines Standes steht notwendigerweise in Wechselbeziehung zur kollektiven Lebensform einer Kultur tragenden Schicht. Zeigt erstere deren geistige Strukturen, so kann letztere auch materielk Kulturgüter, ihre Funktion im Leben des Menschen und die Weise des Umgangs mit materielle Kultur durch Menschen umfassen. Lebensform im engeren Sinn als die Einheit von Theorie und Praxis, wie sie im folgenden verstanden wird, fuhrt zur sittlichen Lebensgestaltung im Zusammenhang der humanistischen Bewegung. Von ihr, genauer vom Standesethos des hochmittelalterlichen Weltklerus kann anhand der mittelalterlichen Quellenlage nur die Rede sein.

Lecture dcs philosophes, lectio philosophorum: la formule, comme telle, ne semble pas se trouver chezjean de Salisbury. En revanche, on rencontre chez lui une allusion à la lecture des lois: lectio legum aut etiam canonum. Cependant, la lecture glosée et commentée des textes philosophiques était une pièce importante dans I’enseignement de son maître Guillaume de Conches.

It seems unnecessary to describe once again the importance of the famous tenth chapter of the second book of the Metalogicon. Many others have done so before me. It is not only the main source of our knowledge of the early years and education of John of Salisbury, but is of importance in any discussion of the school of Chartres. However, in spite of all the attention paid to it by many scholars, no consensus has been reached up to now about its structure and significance. The aim of this paper is to give a consistent interpretation of the text, and thus to show which conclusions drawn from it may be valid and which not.

In their excellent little book Scribes and Scholars Reynolds and Wilson comparejohn of Salisbury and William of Malmesbury as classicists. The fact that the two men have never before been so compared, and the fact that even Reynolds’s and Wilson’s account contains a good many errors, shows how much is yet to be learned about the humanistic scholarship of the twelfth century. William and John are comparable in a number of ways, but most particularly in their interest in Greco-Latin antiquity: it is central to their scholarship, it is a major preoccupation in their works, it provides a key (and if we add biblical and patristic antiquity as well, the key) to their thinking about their contemporary world.

In the debate over the state of cathedral schools and their displacement as centres of learning by the rising universities, the case of Chartres has, for nearly a century, excited the most attention. Much has been written on, first, whether the activity of several prominent intellectuals of the twelfth century such as Thierry, William of Conches and Gilbert of Poitiers was primarily at Chartres or at Paris; and, secondly, whether the thought of ‘Chartrian’ masters is old-fashioned or open to the profound changes which effected twelfth-century scientific learning. These changes resulted largely from the introduction of works translated from Greek and Arabic during that century. In this paper I try to clarify the situation at Chartres itself by summing up the evidence from the manuscripts known to have been in the cathedral library in the twelfth century of the degree to which this ‘new science’ was received there, and how it was assimilated.

The Cornificians, says John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon, find new laws for every subject of study in the schools; grammar is revised, dialectic altered, rhetoric despised, and ‘abandoning the rules of former masters’, they put forward ‘new ways’ for all the subjects of the quadrivium. In fact, they despise the real quadrivium, and prefer a quasi quadrivium in which the four ‘ways’ are ways of making money or influencing events: by entering the clerical or the medical profession, or seeking a position at Court, or becoming a merchant.

Among the works of John of Salisbury the short, unfinished treatise that we call the Historia Pontificalis represents his only incursion into the writing of conventional history.’ Indeed even this, like the Metalogicon, Policraticus and Entheticus, bears the stamp of his unique individual approach to any branch of thought; and to call it conventional is little more than a polite bow of acknowledgement to the graceful preface in which he passes it off as merely another continuation of the world chronicle stretching from the Old Testament through Eusebius and Jerome to Sigebert of Gembloux and Hugh of Saint-Victor in his own age.

John of Salisbury long has drawn the attention of scholars as a representative of medieval humanism. Many studies have been devoted to his allusions to the literature of pagan and Christian antiquity. But these studies necessarily have remained somewhat inconclusive because of our ignorance about the nature of John’s exemplars of his authors. Assessment of such matters as his interests and tastes, his working methods, his dependence on his authorities, and his originality and independence requires precise knowlege of the nature of his exemplars.

Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der ps.-plutarchischen Institutio Traiani, deren Existenz bisher allein durch 16 lateinische Fragmente im Policraticus des Johannes von Salisbury gesichert ist, haben sich in der neueren Forschung zwei gegenläufige Auffassungen herausgebildet.

In 1165 the deanery of Salisbury was the object of royal jobbery. A long dispute followed in which John tried to mediate by means of several letters. In one of them he wrote: ‘If my advice is asked… I reply that in all cases of stubborn doubt one should act as follows: First let us enquire and follow the prescriptions of Divine Law on the matter; if this gives no certain solution, one should go back to the canons and (then) to the examples of the saints; if nothing certain is to be found there, one should finally investigate the mind and counsel of men wise in the fear of the Lord …’. In this enumeration of means to enlighten problems of practical life, the exempla sanctorum are placed along with the authorities of the Bible and of Canon Law, although ranking lower than these precepts. They complement the abstract rules by concrete comparison, like legal precedents they were meant to explain special cases or fill gaps in the law.

If you want to be a philosopher-shut up! Otherwise everyone will know that you are talking nonsense’. In the eleventh passus of Piers Plowman Imagination tells Will (the Dreamer) that he has been deserted by the learning of the clerks and bereft of the reason of his own mind because he could not stop himself from interfering and, puffed up with pride and presumption, had acted in matters where it was not appropriate for him to be the judge. ‘Philosophus esses si tacuisses’, as both the Bible and Boethius teach us: you might be a philosopher if only you could hold your tongue. Adam had had all Paradise to enjoy so long as he kept quiet. But when he ‘mamelede about mete’, when he began to talk nonsense, babbling about forbidden fruit when he should have kept mum—when he forgot that he was a man and began to pry into the mind and wisdom of God himself, to meddle with divine things-he was turned out of the garden. It is a passage which might have been taken straight from John of Salisbury, and indeed John was not a prophet without honour in the England of the fourteenth century. In many ways it is the theme tune of the Metalogicon and the Policraticus; and an ability to keep quiet was an understandably valuable attribute for a political agent of archbishop Theobald to possess as much as anybody else caught up in the ecclesiastical politics of the 1150s. But John of Salisbury would have us believe that the virtues of silence and non-interference had been one of the main lessons that he had learnt in the Parisian schools, which were cursed with the plague of words, and where he had been subjected to the relentless outpourings of those who talked too much and thereby created nonsensical things in profusion.

John of Salisbury’s Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum (the so-called ‘longer Entheticus’) is a philosophical and satirical poem of 1,850 lines, in Latin elegiac couplets. It is the most enigmatic of John’s major works, and the least well understood. It has never attracted much attention, and such judgements as have been passed upon it have been, on the whole, cursory and dismissive. Yet the work must be closely scrutinized, if only that the evolution of John’s thought may be better understood. I hope to make a modest beginning in this enterprise by using the techniques of palaeography and textual criticism to throw light on the genesis and purpose of the Entheticus, and on its connection with the Policraticus and Metalogicon.

The comparison of the State with an animate organism was of outstanding importance in the political theories of the Middle Ages. Despite all its various forms of appearance this comparison always served to define the place and function of each individual in particular, as well as in relation to a superior whole. John of Salisbury deserves the credit for having helped this organological view of the State to breakthrough in writing the Policraticus.

It is a commonplace in the history of political theory to mark John of Salisbury as the first medieval defender of the so-called theory of tyrannicide according to which it is allowed and properly rightful to kill a tyrant. Yet commonplaces run the risk of platitudes: they need control and regular revision; from time to time the foundations of a platform have to be revisited in order to inspect their bearing-power. That is the intention of this communication, the first section of which will investigate some traditional arguments for the existence of such a theory; the second section will replace the problematic issue in the context of John’s works, especially of his main work, the Policraticus.

It is likely that during the years of his exile (1163/4-70) John of Salisbury’s attachment to the bible was strengthened at the expense of his ‘classical humanism’. A glance at the index to Brooke’s volume of the later letters of John of Salisbury does much to confirm this hypothesis. As Smalley pointed out in this context, ‘the holy page reasserted her rule over the artes’. The ancient pagan sources which bulked large in his earlier writings are submerged under a flood of biblical quotations, allusions and exempla. The main topics of these later letters arc the Becket controversy, the papal schism and the empire-papacy conflict. The very nature of these themes must have influenced John’s mental processes. He was no hypocrite, and would not have recommended his exiled archbishop to study the psalms and Gregory’s Moralia had he himself not done likewise.