Most medieval Christian philosophers were clerics and priests, who staffed the schools (and later the universities) in towns and cathedral cities. Many of these were also monks and friars. Monks contributed to philosophy in the cloisters of their monasteries and in universities, and friars also contributed both in the schools or studia of their orders and within universities.

MONKS

The transformation of the Roman Empire, particularly between the fifth and sixth century, was accompanied by educational initiatives on the part of bishoprics and monasteries. Between 397 and 421, Augustine of Hippo outlined a program in his treatise On Christian Doctrine for communicating Christian doctrine into which was integrated the study of profane authors and ancient culture. Influential works were produced in Italy (by Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Pope Gregory the Great) and in Spain (by Isidore of Seville), which enabled active centers of culture in the West as far away as Anglo-Saxon England to counteract the stagnation of imperial decline.

The task of the monk was to escape from this world in order to find God. What place Benedict of Nursia (d. ca. 550), the father of Western monasticism, allowed for scholarly studies by the monks who followed his Rule is not clear, although lectio divina was an obligation that required literacy, books, meditation, and thought. Cassiodorus (d. ca. 580), on the other hand, provided a library in his monastery in Calabria in southwest Italy, called the Vivarium or “fish pond,” from which ancient and Christian books were disseminated throughout Europe – to Northumbria, for example, and to the court of Charlemagne and to Isidore’s Seville.

Terminist logic is a specifically medieval development. It is named from its focus on terms as the basic unit of logical analysis, and so it includes both supposition theory, together with its ramifications, and the treatment of syncategorematic terms. It also includes other areas of investigation not directly linked with Aristotelian texts, notably obligations, consequences, and insolubles (see Chapters 10, 13, and 14).

Logic was at the heart of the arts curriculum, for it provided the techniques of analysis and much of the vocabulary found in philosophical, scientific, and theological writing. Moreover, it trained students for participation in the disputations that were a central feature of medieval instruction, and whose structure, with arguments for and against a thesis, followed by a resolution, is reflected in many written works. This practical application affected the way in which logic developed. While medieval thinkers had a clear idea of argumentation as involving formal structures, they were not interested in the development of formal systems, and they did not see logic as in any way akin to mathematics. Logic involved the study of natural language, albeit a natural language (Latin) that was often regimented to make formal points, and it had a straightforwardly cognitive orientation. The purpose of logic was to separate the true from the false by means of argument, and to lead from known premises to a previously unknown conclusion. In this process, the avoidance of error was crucial, so there was a heavy emphasis on the making of distinctions and on the detection of fallacies.

The culture of the learned elite in the Latin world bordering on the Mediterranean and stretching north into Europe underwent a profound transformation between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. Although the traditions of the immediately preceding period were never completely submerged, speculative and literary activity from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on began to generate a kind of work that speaks to us with a philosophical immediacy that almost nothing from the seventh through eleventh centuries can presume to do. As with any cultural process, the roots of the change reached back deep in time, and in its entirety it extended to all areas of society, economic and political as well as literary and intellectual. It is no accident that the twelfth century has been characterized by Western medievalists as a period of “renaissance,” while the origins of “Europe” as we think of it, and as it has exercised power in the modern world, have increasingly been pushed back to that era.

In a guide to medieval philosophy there is no need to engage this historical phenomenon in all its breadth or to speculate very deeply on its causation. Reduced to the scope of medieval intellectual history, our concern is with the emergence of “scholasticism” in its strictest sense – or, as the title of this chapter suggests, with the appearance of a cultural sphere linked to the universities. Despite the fact that either orientation – broadly cultural or narrowly intellectual – must necessarily go seriously astray about the place it assigns the history of Arabic culture or of Byzantine Greek culture (see Chapters 1 and 3), the perspective they both provide gives us an entrée to a cultural shift of dramatic proportions.

The medieval sophismata literature is a genre of academic argument that began to take shape by the early twelfth century, grew in importance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and lasted to the end of the Middle Ages. This chapter offers only the briefest overview of that literature. Although some overall patterns can be discerned, the boundaries of the genre are ill-defined and seem to have been so even in the Middle Ages. Still, it is clear that sophisms were the occasion for drawing many subtle distinctions and pursuing theoretical issues in a variety of fields.

BACKGROUND

Sophismata is the plural of the Greek singular noun sophisma. Originally, the words did not have the derogatory sense of the modern English ‘sophism’ or ‘sophistry.’ Instead they referred to whatever a sophistēs or “sophist” produced. A “sophist” was anyone who dealt in “wisdom” (sophia) in a very broad sense of the term. The word was applied, for example, to Homer and to the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. By the time of Socrates, however, ‘sophist’ had come to be used especially to refer to those who used debate and rhetoric to defend their views and who offered to train others in these skills. Because they accepted payment for their services, and because some of them employed their skill to pursue unjust cases in courts of law, the term acquired the connotation of someone who uses ambiguous, deceitful and fallacious reasoning to argue a point. Plato’s hostility to the sophists is well known, and indeed he is probably the one most responsible for the disparaging connotations ‘sophist’ and related words commonly have today

THE EFFECTS OF THE AGRARIAN AND COMMERCIAL REVOLUTIONS, 950–1300

The seismic economic changes that occurred in Western and Central Europe roughly between 950 and 1300 and known to historians as the Agrarian and Commercial revolutions had profound, long-term ramifications on the life and societal structures of the continent. Indeed, so dramatic were these socioeconomic developments that modern Anglo-Saxon historians in particular feel justified in distinguishing the former period from the one that followed: an early from a high Middle Ages. The classic accounts of this transformation of the European mainland relate how, with the cessation of the last of the external threats to the region known as the Great Invasions – the defeat in 951 of the Magyar forces in central Germany by Otto the Great at the Lech River – a period of relative internal calm descended upon Europe. The elimination of open warfare and defensive entrenchment paved the way for a resurgence of agricultural productivity, the renewed movement of trade surpluses across regions, the redevelopment of the old Roman road system, the rebirth of town life (especially in northern Italy and Flanders), the revival of commerce within these urban spaces and, most characteristically, the reemergence of the use of money (coin) as a neutral means of exchange between diverse peoples, with the subsequent development of the concomitant institutions of lending and banking.

PHILOSOPHY IN BYZANTIUM

The Greek-speaking scholars of Byzantium – the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which was not devastated in the fifth century by barbarian invasions – have often been praised for their diligence in copying a great number of ancient philosophical texts, thus making an invaluable contribution towards the preservation and transmission of these texts for the generations to come. It is more often than not overlooked, however, that in Byzantium the works of ancient philosophers were arduously copied in order to be closely studied, commented on, and otherwise used for educational purposes. There is ample evidence that, at least from the ninth century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantines seriously engaged in a fervent dialogue with the different ancient philosophical traditions. This dialogue resulted in the composition of many philosophical works that belong to various genres of philosophical writing, including paraphrases, extended commentaries, commentaries in question-and-answer form, small handbooks, treatises on specific topics (sometimes in dialogue form), and letters and orations with philosophical content.

Though philosophy in Byzantium was undoubtedly influenced by ancient Greek philosophical doctrines – which, after all, provided the Byzantines with both a well-articulated theoretical framework and a sophisticated philosophical language – its character could not but also be influenced by the Christian faith in which the Byzantine thinkers were deeply immersed. For they read and criticized the ancient philosophical texts in the light of their Christian beliefs and with the purpose of either rejecting pagan views or trying to incorporate them into their Christian outlook.

Current scholars generally behave as though the medieval traditions of mysticism and philosophy in the Latin West have nothing to do with each other; in large part, this appears to be the result of the common perception that mysticism has as its ultimate goal an ecstatic, selfless union with the divine that intellectual pursuits such as philosophy inhibit rather than support. There are, however, at least two central problems with this assumption.

First, mysticism in the Middle Ages – even just within the Christian tradition – was not a uniform movement with a single goal: it took different forms in different parts of Europe, and those forms changed substantially from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, particularly with the increased emphasis on personal piety and the feminization of religious imagery that emerges in the later centuries. The belief that mysticism entails the rejection or abandonment of reason in order to merge with the divine, for instance, represents only one strain of the medieval tradition. Although this view is explicitly advocated in the Christian West by such influential figures as Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, the prevalent identification of the allegorical figure of Wisdom with Christ provides the grounds for equally prominent figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, Richard of St. Victor, and Henry Suso to claim that mystical union with God is actually aided by reason.

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There is no dispute that nominalism is a major movement in logic and philosophy during the later Middle Ages. Not only are some major thinkers connected with it, such as William of Ockham and John Buridan, but it is the place where some decisive innovations fully unfold, such as the theory of mental language and of the universal as sign. Even so, the term ‘nominalism’ seems uncertain and equivocal, for several reasons.

First, it is commonly admitted that there are two great periods of medieval nominalism: the twelfth century and the fourteenth century. The historical and theoretical links between the two are, however, far from clear. The questions that constitute the conceptual core of the confrontations between schools in the dialectic of the twelfth century – such as the question of the unity of names, the nature of inference, and the reality of relations within the Trinity – are not found in the same terms two centuries later; as for universals, although Abaelard criticizes the theory of real universals, he posits a status which, without being a thing, must account for the imposition of universal names, and for which no equivalent is found in the fourteenth century. The rapprochement of the two periods, the exaggerated place accorded to the problem of universals, and the major role attributed to Abaelard are due to a historiography that began in France in the nineteenth century with Victor Cousin, but that current knowledge renders more and more problematic.

Just war theories of any age have the difficult dual purposes of restraining and justifying violence. Augustine’s thought, crucial for medieval Christian theory, reflected both purposes, but was casual and unsystematic. Medieval (and later) thinkers in the Latin West tried to give his scattered comments a specious doctrinal precision, packaging and repackaging the few familiar Augustinian phrases in ways that make it difficult to determine when a real shift in thought has occurred. For instance, the basic Augustinian criteria for just war were just cause, proper authority, and right intention, but agreement on these superficial generalities often masked real differences of medieval opinion.

Medieval theorizing was made more complex by the fact that warfare was not clearly distinguished from other forms of legitimate violence. Moreover, the sovereign state was supplanted by the decentralized lordships of feudalism, whereby every feudal lord had the right to use violence in his own defense. It was only when sovereign states with their monopoly of legitimate violence reappeared in the thirteenth century that something like Augustine’s idea of the just war could reemerge. The internal tensions in this theory between a suspicion of all physical violence and its ardent support are best seen in the halting justification of the Crusades. Churchmen were leery of involving the church too directly in bloodshed, and yet they championed the Crusades. That they had no term to approximate ‘Crusade’ indicates their reticence, however, and so they had trouble including the Crusades within their rubric of just war.

“Theatre is born in its own disappearance, and the offspring of this movement has a name: man.” Jacques Derrida / In 'The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin argued that technologies of mass reproduction had undermined the work of art's 'originality', rendering ideas of its 'authenticity' and its 'authority' increasingly irrelevant, however nostalgically they might be mourned. These ideas concatenate in Caryl Churchill's play A Number, whose Bernard worries about human identity under threat from cloning technology. Having met his genetic double - one, he learns, of a number - Bernard frets that 'someone else is the one, the first one, the real one', neatly tying together essence, origins and authenticity. Salter answers, 'no because . . . I'm your father'. He guarantees Bernard's uniqueness with a sui generis paternal authority, merely by reiterating the son's patrilineage. But unsurprisingly Salter's balms turn out to sting rather than soothe. Of course, all of the clones are genetically descended from him; in fact, Bernard is not 'the first one'; and, in time, Salter's paternal succour will fail even the first one, also Bernard, who turns up in the play's second scene and who eventually ends his own existential conflict in suicide.

“My darling Marian! / Forgive me for being so very affectionate but I am so intensely delighted at your success . . . I can't tell you how I triumphed in the triumph you have made . . . I saw the 1st review and read one long extract which instantly made me internally exclaim that is written by Marian Evans, there is her great big head and heart and her wise wide views . . .Very few things have given me so much pleasure. / 1st. That a woman should write a wise and humourous book which should take a place by Thackeray. / 2nd. That you that you whom they spit at should do it!” / So wrote Barbara Bodichon to her close friend Marian Evans after the pseudonymous publication of Adam Bede in 1859. Amid rumours of the novel's authorship, Marian Evans persisted in trying to keep her identity a secret. Nevertheless, Bodichon instantly recognised her as the author, divining even in an excerpt her friend's distinctive characteristics as a writer and thinker. I begin with this letter, and shall return to it on several occasions in the first part of this essay, as it helps us to understand the context in which George Eliot emerged as a writer and - especially in the phrase 'head and heart and . . . wise wide views' - handily identifies future keynotes in George Eliot criticism and biography.

The scene is set for intimacy. Two men occupy a sofa on an otherwise empty stage. They talk - one with an American accent, the other English. Their conversation is elliptical. Half-formed sentences leave the spectators to fill in blanks and gaps, but offer enough to suggest a state of renewed sexual attraction, a power game that leads one man (English), to declare his intention to leave his family and join the other (American) on a grotesque spree of global domination. This is how Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Caryl Churchill's most recent, full-length play (at the time of writing this introduction) opened at London's Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in 2006, the theatre with which Churchill has forged a close and enduring relationship, dating back to 1972 when she made her professional playwriting debut with Owners. Characteristically, Drunk Enough is a politically charged play which evidences Churchill's unsurpassed ability to dramatize the anxieties and concerns of the contemporary moment. In this particular instance, it is the nightmare realities created by the wholesale, worldwide exportation of materialist values in which the lives of others are devalued, damaged and destroyed by a 'turbo' capitalist creed of greed. This is not, however, a new topic for Churchill. Rather, the painful realities of a world divided by those who 'own' and those who are 'owned' and the havoc this wreaks on the lives and communities of men and especially women is a subject that frequently haunts her playwriting.

Of the great Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was the most prolific, and he was justly regarded as the foremost presenter of the lives of the professional and landed classes whose members provided the core of his readership. Many of his novels first appeared in parts or as serials in magazines, giving his fiction the currency which nowadays we can compare only to serial drama on television. One obituarist went so far as to write that his work 'will picture the society of our day with a fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world'. Born in London in 1815, the fourth surviving child of a failing barrister with a difficult personality and grandiose expectations, the novelist spent a miserable childhood and youth. Because of his poverty he felt himself an outcast at Harrow and Winchester, where he was a scholastic failure. He felt further rejected when his mother abandoned him for four years at the age of twelve to go to America in a vain attempt to save the family's fortunes, leaving Anthony with his father, who was by now in a mental state verging on insanity. After his father's inevitable bankruptcy, Frances Trollope turned author in her early fifties, achieving fame and prosperity with Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and a flow of successful novels through the 1830s and 1840s. Through a family contact, Anthony was found a clerkship in the Post Office, and after a period in London he was posted to Ireland, where he became a reliable and energetic public servant. In 1844 he married Rose Heseltine, about whom we know little, except that she was an expert household manager, and her husband relied on her literary judgement throughout his life.

On Sunday 11 March 2001 a huge crowd gathered to watch the first arrival into Dublin harbour of a new car ferry, reputedly the largest in the world. It was not the ferry's size that mattered to the crowd, however, but its name - the Ulysses. At the ferry's naming ceremony ten days later, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Aherne, announced, 'Of course, it took a Dubliner - James Joyce - to see that Ulysses was not in fact Greek, but was in fact Irish!!' The ferry Ulysses met with a much warmer reception in Dublin than the novel. In 1920 Joyce wrote that a great movement against the publication of Ulysses was being prepared by puritans, English imperialists, Irish republicans, and Catholics: 'What an alliance! Good grief, I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize!' Four instalments of Ulysses, serially published in The Little Review, were seized by the United States Post Office between 1919 and 1920, and the Review's editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were fined and fingerprinted for their crime. In 1922, five hundred copies of the Egoist Press edition of Ulysses were seized by Post Office authorities in New York, and a further consignment of 499 copies was destroyed by British Customs at Folkestone. Banned in Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States, Ulysses escaped official censorship in Ireland because it had been published abroad, but only under-the-counter copies were available until the early 1970s. In 1967 Joseph Strick's film version was banned outright by the Irish censors, and it was not until 2001 that the movie was released in Ireland, when it was granted a '15' certificate - a measure of the distance travelled in thirty years by what Brian Moore once called 'a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction'.

Children's humour depends largely on the body. Not entirely, but largely. Slapstick, caricature, parody, the grotesque, ridicule and the improbable in human predicaments concern the body, and so too does nonsense. A glance over Edward Lear's limericks or Lewis Carroll's Alice books will illustrate how often nonsense is associated with the body (long noses, wild hair, elongated bodies, collapsed bodies and so on). Reversals often deal with the matter of size: big and little, as we see in a number of recent films for children, like Big (1988), The Kid (2000) and 13 Going on 30 (2004). Even verbal humour may derive its effect from the body. Remember when we were kids, we often chanted 'Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names [or words] can never hurt me.' We were, of course, wrong. Words do relate to and register on the body. Just take names, for example. Funny names are often a reflection of the body, by implication if not by denotation: Leonard Neeble, Norman Bleistift, Mr Gutzman, Fat Albert, Freckles, Bonnie McSmithers, Gertrude McFuzz, Nicholas Knock, Margery Meanwell - these names are metonymic of the kind of person who carries the name. And we do not need to look farther than the Harry Potter books to see that words, other than names, can have dramatic effects on the body, as when Dudley got a pig's tail when Hagrid recited a spell of transfiguration.