The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200.~(book reviews)

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-JUL-96

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COPYRIGHT 1996 University of Illinois Press

By C. Stephen Jaeger. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 515. $39.95.

This is an ambitious, erudite, and difficult book. Its ambition is to become a companion volume to C. H. Haskins's The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, cited in the second sentence of the introduction as a cicerone to Jaeger's century of main concern, the eleventh, which Haskins regarded as "that obscure period of origins which holds the secret of the new movement" (quoted on p. 1). Jaeger inclines to construe the later century in terms of the earlier: "From this perspective, twelfth-century humanism is the last blossoming of a program of studies that had preceded it by some one hundred and fifty years" (p.181); "common features urge us to regard that [twelfth-century] humanism and the works that represent it as the last flowering of a movement ...that preceded them by some two hundred years" (p. 291); we should ask "to what extent the eleventh century was the auctor absconditus or architectus absconditus of the twelfth" (p. 329).

The book's erudition and difficulty are linked. Few medievalists command classical and medieval writings on ethics, morality, manners, ecclesiastical and secular culture, as well as pertinent vitae and correspondence, as does Jaeger, and a signal strength of his work...

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