The Historians' History of the World 07

Above all, however, Bruno attempted to revive the scholarly activity of the clergy. Through him and through the men whom he trained, the court again became the centre of a scholarly movement; the royal chapel took on the character of a superior school. Of the seven liberal sciences which at that time comprised the whole sum of earthly wisdom, only the three lower ones, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, had, since the memory of man, been taught in the schools; that Bruno directed his studies to the four higher ones likewise, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, made him appear like a restorer of these sciences in the eyes of his contemporaries. While he himself still continued to study, he became at the same time the teacher of many others; he never let the superiority of his mind be felt unpleasantly, but rather by his winning friendliness and gentle earnestness, succeeded in charming everyone. While he himself “hastened forward on the path of virtue with gigantic strides,” as his biographer expresses it, he never wearied of looking back after those who were left behind, to help them on their way.

[950-1000 A.D.]

The scholarly efforts of the court gained in breadth and depth after Otto turned his attention to them, and they had already begun to bear fruit in the year 950. Soon afterwards the learned Rather was called to court. He was born in Lorraine, had left his home and made his fortune in Italy through King Hugo, but had been driven out of his bishopric at Verona. Bruno himself learned from Rather, who was held to be the first theologian of his time. Bishop Liutprand of Cremona came to court a little later, and also his not ordinary knowledge of old Latin literature does not seem to have been left unused by Bruno. It was no longer only the bones of the saints which were brought from over the Alps, but those other relics of antiquity which are so much more precious in our eyes; above all, the valuable manuscripts of classic authors. More than a hundred of these were brought into German countries by an Italian, Gunzo by name, at Otto’s command, some of the most valuable of which Italy has carried back again after a lapse of centuries. People now applied themselves with fresh zeal to the study of the old poets, orators, and historians—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Cicero, and Sallust arose together from the dead and became the teachers of the Germans in the liberal sciences.

From the court the new studies spread throughout the kingdom, the cloister schools especially taking a gratifying part in the general advancement. St. Gall and Reichenau reached their most flourishing period; Fulda tried to maintain its old position; Hersfeld emulated it; a teacher from Italy was called to Würzburg. In Saxony, Corvei especially cultivated the sciences; also in the convents, especially at Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, the girls read Virgil and Terence together with the lives of the saints. While people had scarcely learned to know the ancients, with minds still dazzled by the brilliancy of their oratory, they found courage to compete with them; behind cloister walls men put their hand to works which, with all their roughness, are not without a certain lofty beauty, which show a sturdy attempt to reach perfection of form, and which through their contents possess for us an imperishable value.

It is a literature of a peculiar character which was developed out of these efforts. It rests upon a national foundation and is yet clothed in a garment of classic Roman language; it is monastic and ascetic, but at the same time naturalistic according to the conception of the ancients; it is ecclesiastic, but untrammelled by dogmatic disputes and canonistic scholasticism; finally it is courtly, but at the same time simple, true-hearted, and upright. The old-German heroic folk-lore is reproduced in hexameters which are imitated or borrowed from Virgil; the naïve fables must accommodate themselves to the strict beat of old verse measure; the wonderful stories of the origin of the Saxons are repeated in the language of Sallust and Tacitus; a nun treats the legends of the saints in the form of a Terentian comedy. Bruno has stamped the impress of his mind upon this whole literature. His taste for philological learning, his ascetic zeal, his high position at court which came to him from birth, influenced it perceptibly for over a century. But there was also another spirit at work which he neither could nor would control. In these books lives also the strong, sturdy, and true spirit of the German people.