science, the students apparently were taught something of Canon and Roman law and of Charlemagne's Capitularies.[1]
IV
The Chartres Quadrivium represents the extreme compass of mathematical and physical studies in France in the eleventh century, when slight interest was taken in physical science—a phrase far too grand to designate the crass traditional views of nature which prevailed. Indifference to natural knowledge was the most palpable intellectual defect of Ambrose and Augustine, and the most portentous. The coming centuries, which were to look upon their writings as universal guides to living and knowing, found therein no incentive to observe or study the natural world. Of course the Carolingian period evolved out of itself no such desire; nor did the eleventh century. At the best, the general understanding of physical fact remained that which had been handed down. It was gleaned from the books commonly read, the Physiologus or the edifying stories of miracles in the myriad Vitae Sanctorum, quite as much as from the scant information given in Isidore's Origines, Bede's Liber de temporibus, or the De universo of Rabanus Maurus.
So much for natural science. In historical writing the quality of composition rarely rose above that of the tenth century.[2] No sign of critical acumen had appeared, and the writers of the period show but a narrow local interest. There was no France, but everywhere a parcelling of the land into small sections of misrule, between which travel was difficult and dangerous. The chroniclers confine their attention, as doubtless their knowledge also was confined, to the region where they lived. To lift history over these narrow barriers, there was needed the renewal of the royal
- ↑ The substance of this sketch of the school of Chartres is taken chiefly from the Abbé Clerval's exhaustive study, "Les Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge," Mémoires de la Société archeologique d'Eure-et-Loir, xi., 1895. For the later fortunes of this school see post, Chapter XXX.
- ↑ The Histories of Gerbert's pupil Richer are somewhat better, and show an imitation of Sallust.
