The Medieval Culture of Disputation

The Medieval Culture of Disputation Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:07 PS PAGE i THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:08 PS PAGE ii The Medieval Culture of DISPUTATION Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance Alex J. Novikoff university of pennsylvania press philadelphia Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:08 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novikoff, Alex J. The medieval culture of disputation : pedagogy, practice, and performance / Alex J. Novikoff. — 1st ed. pages cm — (The Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4538-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval—12th century. 2. Civilization, Medieval—13th century. 3. Learning and scholarship—Europe—History—Medieval, 500–1500. 4. Scholasticism—Europe—History—To 1500. 5. Academic disputations—Europe—History—To 1500. 6. Religious disputations—Europe—History—To 1500. 7. Debates and debating—Europe—History—To 1500. 8. Dialogue—History—To 1500. I. Title. II. Series: Middle Ages series. CB354.6.N68 2013 909Ј.1—dc23 2013012716 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:09 PS PAGE iv For My Parents, Albert and Danie`le Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:09 PS PAGE v Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ $$FM 07-24-13 14:54:09 PS PAGE vi contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Socratic Inheritance 8 Chapter 2. Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation 34 Chapter 3. Scholastic Practices of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance 62 Chapter 4. Aristotle and the Logic of Debate 106 Chapter 5. The Institutionalization of Disputation: Universities, Polyphony, and Preaching 133 Chapter 6. Drama and Publicity in Jewish-Christian Disputations 172 Conclusions: The Medieval Culture of Disputation 222 Notes 229 Bibliography 279 Index of Works 313 General Index 317 Acknowledgments 325 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ CNTS 07-24-13 14:54:11 PS PAGE vii Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/6/16 12:15 PM ................. 18418$ CNTS 07-24-13 14:54:12 PS PAGE viii Introduction Debate and argumentation are as ancient as civilization itself, but it is the argument of this book that the debates of scholastic authors offer particularly great insight into an essential habit of medieval thought and culture. The disciplinary divides of modern historiography have much to do with conceal- ing its light. As a subject, these debates are treated seriously by philosophers and theologians interested in particular points of logic or doctrine, selectively by specialists of medieval learning who focus on particular authors or key ideas, and more rarely still by historians concerned with the wider cultural fabric of medieval society. Popular images of scholastic argumentation have only isolated the field further. From Renaissance humanists and luminaries in the age of reason to general assumptions today, these debates have rou- tinely been condemned as medieval vestiges of an anti-intellectual world: pedantic at best, pointless at worst. The parody of scholastic debate finds its most familiar caricature in the proverbial question how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a satire on medieval angelology (and scholasticism in general) that likewise seems to be early modern in origin. Our notions of modernity reaffirm this stereotype. In contemporary discourse, hardly a day goes by when we are not entreated to enter into dialogue with our wider community and to engage dialogically with our adversaries, ideals that are held up or at any rate understood to be the very antithesis of the medieval worldview.1 Marginalized and often misunderstood, the history of dialogue and debate in the age of scholasticism is in need of a fresh assessment. Many challenges remain to understanding the place of scholasticism in the broader culture of the High Middle Ages. A particular challenge is posed by the origins and development of disputation, the formalized debate tech- niques of the medieval university, whose existence is always assumed but whose impact beyond the academic environment has not been adequately explored. As a leading scholar of medieval rhetoric has put it, ‘‘the scholastic emphasis upon thesis, counterthesis, and listing of arguments must have had Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated ................. 18418$ DownloadINTR 07-24-13Date | 14:54:167/18/15 7:05 PS PM PAGE 1 2introduction its effects on all kinds of discourse. It would be difficult to name a more pervasive influence with so little study given to its effect.’’2 An especially vexed question is the relationship between the dialogue genre, a popular literary form in the twelfth century, and the dialectical methods of scholastic disputation. Giles Constable has stated the problem thus: ‘‘Dialogue and dialectic—the science of doubt as it has been called—played a fundamental part in the thought processes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It under- lay the discipline of disputation that developed in the schools and was applied to almost every branch of intellectual inquiry.’’3 Curiously, no scholar has yet pursued the history of dialogue and disputation along these other branches— what I shall call their cultural history. The centrality of scholastic disputation to medieval learning has never been doubted; the problem in charting its history is where to begin and in what direction to proceed. To date, the topic has more commonly been treated as a subsidiary and finite category of medieval logic in connection with individual ‘‘authors’’ or ‘‘schools,’’ terms them- selves that must be approached with caution in the scholastic period.4 Identifying disputation as a historical problem raises some fundamental questions. What precisely is the relation between the literary form of the dialogue and the scholastic practice of pedagogical debate? Can the formalized argumentation embodied in these dialogues and disputations (real or literary) shed light on deeper cultural mutations within medieval civilization? What impact does the institutionalization of disputation in the universities have on the surrounding literary, musical, and artistic culture? In sum, what is the cultural logic of disputation in the age of scholasticism? This book does not presume to provide definitive answers to these questions, but it does propose a more interdisciplinary and methodologically nuanced approach to a long recognized and often misrepresented feature of the medieval intellectual tradition. As I shall argue, scholastic disputation arose in the late eleventh century in connection with new developments in monastic learning, and over the course of the next two centuries it developed systematically and centrifugally from France and Italy to become a formative practice in the scholastic culture of medieval Europe, eventually transcending the frontier between private and public spheres and extending to multiple levels of society. Not only was the triumph of disputation one of the signal achievements of the medieval university curriculum, but its evolution and application beyond the confines of strictly academic circles (in debate poems and musical counterpoint, and most notably in the Christian confrontation with Jews and Judaism) suggest that the rise of medieval disputation can offer historians an Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated ................. 18418$ DownloadINTR 07-24-13Date | 7/18/15 14:54:16 7:05 PS PM PAGE 2 Introduction 3 instructive model of cultural history: specifically, it illustrates how dialogue escaped its literary origin and passed from an idea among few to a cultural practice among many. Methodology The term ‘‘cultural history’’ is as elusive as it is seductive. Frequently invoked but rarely defined, cultural history in the early modern period is often identi- fied with a combination of anthropological and historical approaches to understanding popular cultural traditions, using a variety of narrative texts or nonverbal forms of communication (public rituals, material texts, the body, and the like).5 Among French historians, the study of medieval mental- ite´s that flourished in the last third of the twentieth century was an attempt to access the shared ideas and worldviews of the medieval mind by investigat- ing its cultural matrix, described by one cultural historian as a ‘‘historical anthropology of ideas.’’6 Previous attempts at medieval cultural history have, therefore, often consisted of dissecting a single author or concept to get at the larger surrounding culture. What has not been pursued in sufficient detail is the evolution and diffusion

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