Social History of Knowledge - From Gutenberg to Diderot

2

PROFESSING KNOWLEDGE:
THE EUROPEAN CLERISY

Learning … a calling … endowing us with light to see farther than other men.

Barrow

First come I; my name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this college.
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

H. C. Beeching

THIS chapter is concerned with the main discoverers, producers and disseminators of knowledge in early modern Europe. These discoverers, producers and disseminators are often known as ‘intellectuals’. Karl Mannheim described them as the social groups in every society ‘whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society’. In a famous phrase, already quoted (5), he called them the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’, an ‘unanchored, relatively classless stratum’.1

CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES

It is often claimed that the intellectual emerged only in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, when the word ‘intelligentsia’ was coined to refer to the men of letters who were unwilling or unable to find posts in the bureaucracy. Alternatively, the emergence of the group is dated to the end of the nineteenth century, in the course of the French debate over the guilt or innocence of Captain Dreyfus, with the Manifeste des intellectuels in the captain’s favour.2 Other historians, notably Jacques Le Goff, speak about intellectuals in the Middle Ages, at least in the context of universities.3 These disagreements are partly over definitions but they also reveal a major difference of opinion over the relative importance of change and continuity in European cultural history.

A common view of modern intellectuals is that they are the descendants of the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, who are the descendants of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who are either a secular version of the Protestant clergy, or the descendants of the humanists of the Renaissance. Such a view is too ‘present-minded’, in the sense of scanning the past only for people more or less like ourselves. Michel Foucault was not the first person to see present-mindedness and continuity as problematic, but he remains the most radical critic of these common assumptions.

A Foucauldian history of intellectuals might discuss the discontinuity between the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, who wanted to overthrow their old regime, and the eighteenth-century philosophes, who wanted to reform theirs. Again, it might note the gap between the anticlerical philosophes and the English puritan clergy of the seventeenth century, who have been described as the first example in history of ‘radical intellectuals’ in a traditional society, ‘freed from feudal connections’.4 However, in the eyes of these puritans, their true or general vocation or ‘calling’ was neither learning nor political activity, which were simply different means to a higher end, religion. Their ideal was that of the ‘saint’, and this aim led some of them to express anti-intellectual attitudes.5 Another discontinuity separates the Protestant clergy from their predecessors the Renaissance humanists, and yet another divides the humanists from the scholastic philosophers they so often denounced, Le Goff’s medieval intellectuals.

To avoid confusion, it might be a good idea to follow the lead of Samuel Coleridge and Ernest Gellner and to describe the specialists in knowledge as a ‘clerisy’.6 The term will be employed below from time to time to describe social groups whose members variously thought of themselves as ‘men of learning’ (docti, eruditi, savants, Gelehrten), or ‘men of letters’ (literati, hommes de lettres). In this context lettres meant learning rather than literature (hence the need for the adjective in belles-lettres).

From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, scholars regularly referred to themselves as citizens of the ‘Republic of Letters’ (Respublica litteraria), a phrase which expressed their sense of belonging to a community which transcended national frontiers. It was essentially an imagined community, but one which developed customs of its own such as the exchange of letters, books and visits, not to mention the ritualized ways in which younger scholars paid their respects to senior colleagues who might help launch their careers.7

The aim of this chapter is to discuss what a famous sociological essay of 1940 described as ‘the social role of the man of knowledge’.8 Today, that phrase irresistibly prompts a question about the women of knowledge at this time. They were more or less ‘excluded’ from the pursuit of learning, as the seventeenth-century French philosopher Poulain de la Barre pointed out in his treatise The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673).

It is true that women of letters or learned ‘ladies’ existed throughout the period, although the term ‘bluestocking’ was not coined until the late eighteenth century. Among the most famous of these were Christine de Pisan, the fifteenth-century author of The City of Women; Marie Le Jars de Gournay, who edited Montaigne’s Essays, studied alchemy and wrote a treatise on the equality of men and women; the universal scholar Anne-Marie Schuurman, who lived in the Dutch Republic, attended lectures at the University of Utrecht and wrote a treatise on the aptitude of women for study; and Queen Kristina of Sweden, who summoned René Descartes, Hugo Grotius and other scholars to her court in Stockholm, and after her abdication founded the Academia Fisico-Matematica in Rome.

All the same, women were unable to participate in the republic of letters on the same terms as men. It was extremely rare for them to study at a university. They might learn Latin from relatives or from a private tutor, but if they attempted to enter the circle of the humanists, for example, they might be rebuffed, as in the case of the fifteenth-century Italian learned ladies Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele. Isotta entered a convent following the public ridicule of what men saw as her intellectual pretensions.9

Women were also involved in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, attended meetings of the Royal Society and published her philosophical opinions. Voltaire wrote his Essay on Manners for the marquise du Châtelet in order to persuade her that history was as worthy of study as the natural philosophy she favoured. In these areas too the position of women was a marginal one. Bernard de Fontenelle wrote his dialogues on the plurality of worlds for a female audience, and Francesco Algarotti published a treatise called Newtonianism for Ladies, on the somewhat patronizing assumption that intelligent women could understand the new science if it was explained to them in simple terms.10

THE MIDDLE AGES

The example of Héloïse, who was Abelard’s pupil before she became his lover, reminds us that women of knowledge could already be found in the twelfth century. It was at that time that a European clerisy became visible in the world outside the monasteries for the first time since late antiquity. This development, like that of the universities, was a result of the increasing division of labour associated with the rise of towns.

The clerisy included a group of learned laymen, usually either physicians or lawyers. Law and medicine were the two secular learned professions, with their place within the medieval university as well as status in the world outside it.11 They were corporate groups, sometimes organized in colleges (like the London College of Physicians, founded in 1518), concerned to maintain a monopoly of knowledge and practice against unofficial competitors.

However, in the Middle Ages the majority of university teachers and students were members of the clergy, often members of religious orders, above all the Dominicans, who included the most famous medieval teacher of all, Thomas Aquinas. Even academic investigators of nature such as Albert the Great and Roger Bacon were friars. The students often wandered from university to university, so they were an international group, conscious – as their Latin songs show – of their difference from the normal inhabitants of the city in which they happened to live. As for the teachers, they were mainly what we describe as ‘scholastic’ philosophers and theologians, although they did not use this term but referred to themselves as ‘men of letters’ (piri litterati), ‘clerks’ (clerici), ‘masters’ (magistri) or ‘philosophers’ (philosophi). Some of these men of letters, like the twelfth-century Englishman John of Salisbury, could also be found at courts.12

As for the word ‘schoolmen’ (scholastici), it was a term of contempt invented by the supporters of a new-style university curriculum, the ‘humanities’ (below, chapter 5). Teachers of this new curriculum were nicknamed the ‘humanists’ (humanistae) and the term spread, first in Italy and then through other parts of Europe. These humanists were a new form of clerisy. Some were in holy...