Introduction: individuals and institutions in medieval scholasticism*

Antonia Fitzpatrick and John Sabapathy

This volume has three purposes. It gathers together a wide range of current approaches analysing the relationship between individuals, institutions and medieval scholasticism; it sets them in a broad historiographical frame; and through these it suggests an agenda for future work in relation to these subjects. It does that by bringing together a range of important perspectives, including many not well known within Anglophone circles. This introduction sets a number of them out at length. An afterword by David d’Avray offers suggestions for agendas to be extended. The editors offer suggestions themselves below.

A miniature portrait in a landscape: Richard Southern

A very helpful way of opening out the issues and problems in which we are interested can be provided by considering the work of one of the greatest medieval historians of the twentieth century, partly because his distinctive interpretations remain of great interest, partly because he exemplified a number of wider currents. Sir Richard Southern (1912–2001) began and ended his intellectual life writing about scholasticism, both in relation to specific individuals’ thinking and in relation to wider patterns of thought and the social structures underlying them.¹ In particular, Southern’s work helpfully reflects a wider tendency to separate phenomena which in this volume we wish to connect. These are: work on the substance of individuals’ thought (e.g., Southern’s work on Anselm or Grosseteste’s thought); work on wider intellectual practices and also schools and intellectual groupings (e.g., his work on ‘scholastic humanism’; his argument that there was no school of Chartres); and, finally, work on the administrative organization which structured, enabled and/or constrained this thought (e.g., his work on ecclesiastical government; his argument that Grosseteste’s writings are incompatible with an Oxford/Paris formation and therefore prove an English provincial education). All these we sketch below.

Southern’s writings, then, present a nuanced picture of how he thought individuals and institutions interacted in medieval scholasticism and can provide the point of departure for our wider consideration of the recent historiography. It is a mark of their interest, weight and force that sixteen years after his death they remain one of the great syntheses with which it is worth engaging. Southern alternated between the close-up and the panorama. On the one hand, there are the portraits of the ecclesiastics and thinkers Anselm of Aosta/Bec/Canterbury (c.1033–1109) and Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–1253). On the other, there are the much larger landscapes in which such writers thrived: first, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970) and the unfinished project on scholastic humanism. It is these latter which are most ‘institutional’ – but they are such only in some respects and, in part, negatively so. Western Society was the book Southern said he enjoyed writing least. Not coincidentally, it is also the most conventionally ‘institutional’, dealing with the development of ecclesiastical organization between c.700 and c.1520 (it was a volume in the ‘Penguin History of the Christian Church’, definitionally ‘Institutional’). There is discussion of ‘thought’ here, but it is diffused through the whole or sneaks in through individual pen portraits (of Archbishop Eudes Rigaud or Grosseteste). ‘Administering’ and ‘thinking’ appear as oil and water in consequence. The two volumes of Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe establish a more comfortable ‘institutional’ register. If Western Society is institutional largely in an (ecclesiastical) organizational sense, Scholastic Humanism is institutional in the sense of describing the intellectual practices its protagonists developed. It is these that are orientated towards exploring and asserting the fundamental dignity of human nature, its right ordering and its enrichment through the cultivation of human and divine friendship. The overwhelming focus is on the intellectual disciplines developed for these purposes: institutions-qua-practices. Here is the canonist Gratian’s ‘integration of doctrine and law’; the exegete Anselm of Laon’s move ‘from glosses to sententiae’; the subsequent ‘stumbling’ ‘from sentences to system’; the ‘great achiever’ Peter Lombard’s re-organizing of theological commentary.² Institutions-qua- organizations are here, but somewhat negatively. Some inhibit thought, others do not exist, a select few enable. The school of Laon’s inability to expand, given its finite hill-top location, is described; the existence of any ‘school of Chartres’ is given a final savaging (a long-running debate between Southern, Peter Dronke and others); the practical problems with cathedral schools are described; the need for curriculum organization at Paris is analysed. A core narrative is the institutional clearing of the ways which led to the eventual ascendancy of Paris, an ascendancy Southern sadly never fully described since it would have formed a pivot in the never-completed third volume. That absence inadvertently contributes to the absence of institutions-qua- organizations, since chronologically this volume would have contained Southern’s account of how universities regulated themselves and were regulated from Robert of Courson’s 1215 rules, Gregory IX’s 1231 bull Parens scientiarum, to the 1277 condemnations of various Aristotelian teachings in the arts faculty.³ It is fair to say, however, that (a) comments about such organizational underpinnings could already have been made for twelfth-century Bologna in earlier volumes; and (b) their absence may point partly towards Southern’s thematic, disciplinary and geographical preferences: namely, intellectual practices, theology and Paris. Nevertheless, it is clear that volume three would have stressed the organizational institutionalization which produced the dominance of Paris, even if only to argue for its negative intellectual effects. A core of that criticism is clear from Robert Grosseteste, in which a key argument is that Grosseteste’s ‘provincial’ English education accounts for his innovative work across multiple fields, work which could not have been well countenanced by the disciplinary silos of Paris (or Oxford). Parisian hegemony entailed intellectual conservatism, in Southern’s account. If that critique relates to scholastic organizational institutionalization, our great loss is that we lack Southern’s full case for it as well as his case for the failure of his scholastic system as a set of institutionalized intellectual practices.

We stress ‘his’ because that narrative was sharp and particular. It had three stages: innovation, application, then disintegration.⁴ From c.1080 to 1160 was the first period of heroism, ‘the essential period of innovation’, when ‘the scholastic method of absorbing, elaborating, Christianizing and systematizing the whole intellectual deposit of the Greco-Roman past to produce a complete body of doctrine about both the natural and the supernatural worlds took place’.⁵ Scholastic theology then entered a ‘placid phase in which it put on weight and grew in importance … without making any spectacular new advance or asking any new fundamental questions’.⁶ This period up to variously 1215 or 1250 saw ‘the theoretical work of scholars in the schools [turned] to practical use in government’.⁷ Thereafter Southern’s history of scholastic humanism was one of ‘increasing difficulties encountered, especially from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, by those who aimed to make the system complete in substance and operation’.⁸ Central to these difficulties was scholars’ compulsion for both completeness and order, since ‘systematization requires selection, selection requires omission, and omission impairs completeness’.⁹ Implicit anyway in even early scholastic sophistication was a tendency towards over-elaboration, impenetrable private languages and the picking at ostensibly innocuous threads which would ultimately unravel the whole.¹⁰ This was so, furthermore, before the Aristotelian and Arabic textual influx of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries which ‘opened up many new problems on which no generally agreed solutions appeared to be attainable’.¹¹ Even at the very apex of their ‘comprehensive serenity’ – Southern suggested – it is not clear that the scholars’ confidence in their enterprise was well-founded.¹² This characterization has not carried universal assent by any means. One might look to Alain Boureau for an alternative, much less negative account of the later chronology; or to John Marenbon for both a critique of Southern’s idea of ‘scholastic humanism’ per se and of his unitary model of scholasticism.¹³

This is not the moment to seek to resolve such issues. Scholasticism itself can, of course, be defined in different ways, as much to do with how a group validates itself as the holders of knowledge as with the intellectual practices they then carry out.¹⁴ We find the following definition by Riccardo Quinto helpful, which focuses on scholasticism as a set of intellectual practices. Scholasticism following Quinto’s ‘ideal type’ is a ‘certain way of reading texts’. This ‘way’ [modo], Quinto suggested, comprised the following: (1) an ‘objective’ engagement with texts ‘independent of the subjective conditions of the commentator’, that is, not primarily concerned with a ‘subjective’ personal, spiritual engagement – as in monastic texts; (2) texts are subject to an analytical reading, with ‘individual statements’ compatibility established though dialectical means’; (3) the text’s value comes wholly from its truth-value and not from its ‘own’ interest or purpose – to that degree it produces knowledge (scientia), ‘an ensemble of propositions guaranteed by their conformity to an authoritative text, yet integrated in a new ensemble in which their legitimacy and reciprocal connection shines in an even clearer way’.¹⁵ We wonder about the first proposition insofar as it seems there are scholastic texts (e.g., Bonaventure’s Journey into the Mind of God) which are both ‘scholastic’ and meditative, but we nevertheless find this ‘ideal type’ dynamically useful. (Isabel Iribarren’s chapter on Jean Gerson’s poem the Josephina in this volume also raises important questions about this facet of the ideal type.) We would stress two further aspects.¹⁶ First, scholasticism’s modo was conspicuously world-facing as well as revealed-truth-reconciling. Scholastic thinking was not cloistered in an ivory tower. On the contrary, its influence was a function of its utility and applicability well outside the schools.¹⁷ This volume, then, pointedly emphasizes the extension of scholasticism’s institutional role far beyond academic ‘disputed questions’. Second, and correlated, the range of subject matter and fields of action addressed by scholasticism was accordingly vast and certainly not restricted to theology or philosophy. The chapters which follow deliberately reflect this. Without aiming to be comprehensive, our chapters show the place of scholastic ‘trouble-shooting’ in law and inquisition, for instance, just as much as in theology; in poetry as well as history; and in targeting problems ranging from the concrete and particular to the abstract and general. In what follows we now review important relevant historiographical trends and then return to those areas marked out above – namely individuals, schools and, finally, institutions as both practices and organizations.

Perspectives and premises

What is one interested in?

This book is interested in the back-and-forth relationship between individual thinkers and the various institutional contexts in which their thought was produced and by which it may have been inflected. It is obvious that the parameters of one’s interests and axioms radically predetermine and alter the history one writes. In the history of philosophy alone, for example, there are a variety of possible approaches.¹⁸

A particularly insightful way of encapsulating this plurality was suggested by David d’Avray over thirty years ago. He suggested that, among the subjects grouped under ‘the history of ideas and attitudes’, one could differentiate between history which was principally interested in (1) the history of original ideas; (2) ideology and social development; (3) ‘ordinary’ beliefs.¹⁹ This schema remains very helpful – though one might want to make explicit that (1) also contains the history of philosophy as a set of disciplinary interests.²⁰ Of course, historians have sometimes interested themselves in more than one in the same instance. However, part of our point in using Southern as a point of departure is that more often than one might expect these interests have been canalized in a rather artificial way. We may, say, be interested in Dominican thought, but what we want to do with that thought may vary. We may be mostly interested in how theological ideas played out in identity formation for a group; why Dominican organizational life seemed so much less painful than the Franciscans’; how to isolate those aspects of inquisitorial procedure which are intellectually ‘Dominican’ in order to differentiate what, within inquisitorial depositions, may be ‘Dominican’ and what may be ‘irreducibly’ heretical. Three contributors to this volume have addressed each of these respective questions (Fitzpatrick, Melville, Biller), but it is an obvious truth that the complexity of Dominican life as it was experienced by medieval Dominicans intertwined all these facets of institutional and intellectual life and more.

These are not either/or alternatives: all are important. Accordingly, we have not sought to even out differences of approach so much as to showcase what each offers. This volume seeks to think further about these interconnections, the reciprocal relationship between individual and institution and the thinking the latter produced. As Nathalie Gorochov said apropos the University of Paris, ‘no text without context then, but equally [scholastic] works themselves are liable to reflect the institutional, political, social, and religious stakes which galvanize the history of the university’.²¹

The history of medieval thought on whose terms?

The moment for undertaking such an exercise seems propitious across a range of historiographies which are different both in geographical origin and historiographical style. We have already alluded to the obvious fact that the sorts of ambition one has for an intellectual history very significantly alter the resulting account. Peter Biller has recently argued that it is worth thinking again about Antonio Gramsci as a mediator in connecting intellectuals with their various contexts.²² Biller suggests there was a road not taken after the 1970s with respect to constructing stronger analytical models which put intellectuals in a better-rooted, sociological context; and the present seems a good time to review this.²³ Gramsci certainly furnished some of the moving parts which drive the engine of what is still one of the most stimulating essays on the subject of ‘intellectuals in the middle ages’: Jacques Le Goff’s book of 1957, revised in 1985.²⁴ That argument – elegantly compressed by Alain Boureau and compatible with Southern’s – was a three-act tragedy of individuals devoured by the institution which also empowered them, the university:

The immediate point is this: Le Goff’s (and Biller’s) sociological history of intellectuals is only one possible frame which could be chosen for something which contributed to ‘a history of medieval thought’. The degree to which Le Goff privileged the university as the relevant space in which such an intellectual history played itself out is made clear by the vigorous ‘counter’-thesis and paradox of Alain de Libera in 1991: intellectuals as intellectuals could only freely and properly develop once university activities were extended outside the university, since there intellectual activities and identities could flourish independently of that institutionalized setting. Condemnations such as Étienne Tempier’s 1277 censure of various Aristotelian positions being taught in the Paris arts faculty acted as a goad to thought. Censure ultimately played a useful role; and the leaking of intellectual activity outside universities ultimately produced ‘the intellectual’.²⁶ (One notes that here universities are still given a very privileged space in terms of the sheer possibility of thinking at all in these middle ages.) ‘Intellectuals’ as a category – argued de Libera – were therefore closely connected with the deprofessionalization of philosophy.

Such a critique indeed takes many of Le Goff’s starting premises for granted.²⁷ However, historians of philosophy might critique the ‘ideas in context’ of Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge for being long on context and personalities and short on ideas.²⁸ Historians of philosophy might be more interested in the ideas than their authors.²⁹ The history of philosophy, however, can be written with different accents. The history of philosophy stresses a continuous history of philosophical interests as validated by contemporary philosophers (ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language etc.). It may also seek to show the ongoing resonance of medieval philosophical formulations as a resource for contemporary philosophy. This, however, may require taking it some considerable distance from its medieval setting-in-life (Sitz im Leben). The history of philosophy might be denatured by such an enterprise. Thus John Marenbon (another contributor here), while sympathetic to and practitioner of such methods, has nevertheless argued that the re-tooling of medieval philosophical formulations so as to make them fit for modern philosophical use may cause significant problems from a historian’s perspective. Damage may be done to the history of philosophy. One may give a precision to a medieval argument which was lacking, unnecessary, in its medieval formulation. Restating medieval formulations using the symbols of modern propositional logic produces a ‘deformation of the historical truth’. Finally, applying the interpretative principle of charity to such thought, whereby the most coherent and least problematic interpretation is always preferred, is ‘not a good method to arrive at a fair understanding of that which a past philosopher actually thought’.³⁰

Elsewhere, Marenbon has helpfully suggested one might study ‘antiquated philosophy’ for at least six reasons which sometimes intertwine (this intersects with and extends d’Avray’s model above). In summary, these are: (1) because its philosophical content may help the progress of contemporary philosophers; (2) because, as history, intellectual history is as interesting as the next sort of history; (3) this, however, requires a division of labour in which the history of philosophy provides an ‘internal history’ for philosophers while the history of ideas offers a more ‘external’ history of wider interest; (4) really great philosophers perennially merit study as exemplars of thinking philosophically, though arguably few medieval philosophers would make the canon; (5) like great works of literature, anyone interested in understanding the heights of human culture should read its great philosophical works (again the question of what counts is begged); (6) reading antiquated philosophy challenges what we might conceive of as valid philosophy precisely because it operated differently from what we hold philosophy to be.³¹

The ‘return’ of institutions and organizations

If it is to introduce the historiographical context of the present volume as it relates to intellectuals, this introduction should do something similar with respect to ‘institutions’, which have been less fashionably the focus of post-war historical study, be those institutions constitutional, legal and ecclesiastical, administrative or economic. Such institutions saw a waning of an influence which had waxed strongest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and whose dominance itself largely evoked movements such as the Annales ‘school’. Southern himself acknowledged that Scholastic Humanism was in part a reaction against older institutional models.³²

Southern’s rather negative approach to the role institutions played in constraining individual thought is best exemplified in his arguments about Grosseteste’s intellectual formation. Grosseteste was an extraordinarily wide-ranging thinker across a range of different intellectual, linguistic, scientific, mathematical, philosophical and theological traditions. In what institutional matrix should he be placed? A long-standing tradition suggested a Parisian and an Oxford one. Southern argued for a provincial English one. To look in Paris’s direction was to see Grosseteste ‘as a precursor of Albert the Great [d. 1280]; and I [Southern] look on him as an enlargement of Adelard of Bath’, the equally skilled interdisciplinary English intellectual of an earlier generation (d. c.1150).³³ This remains a somewhat controversial interpretation and Southern restated it forcefully in the book’s second edition. Southern’s arguments are detailed and specific but his conclusion is this:

In other words, one apparently marginal institutional setting (Hereford) enabled an interdisciplinary creativity which would have been quite impossible within the ostensibly obvious places for such study (Paris, Oxford). Grosseteste’s work before 1220 ‘showed no clear signs of a scholastic background and give no indication of theological study or training’.³⁵

In this case, the institutional margins are where this important and innovative work can happen, not the centre. This is no rule, however, demonstrating the iron inflexibility of university syllabuses, a black mark against scholasticism’s institutions; it is simply what happened in this case. Indeed arguments have been made that Grosseteste could have had a Parisian intellectual formation.³⁶ This would be interesting not because Southern would then be wrong, but because of how he would be wrong. Southern’s axiomatic argument was that Grosseteste’s interdisciplinary freewheeling was incompatible with a highly regulated, scholastic milieu (Paris). If Grosseteste can be shown to have had Parisian formation, it makes Southern’s underlying argument about institutional formation highly overdetermined.³⁷

Southern’s reaction against an over-privileging of institutions can be usefully connected with more recent approaches which stress the variability of what particular institutional spaces enable or constrain. Étienne Anheim, for instance, has called for better ‘topographies of institutions’.³⁸ He argues that not all positions in an institutional space are equivalent and they change over time. The intellectual pope Clement VI (1342–52) can prove a decisive figure in reconfiguring papal authority at the centre of the papacy because he is at the centre of the papacy.³⁹ This sounds obvious, but it need not be. The history of the western Church suggests that after the Gregorian reforms ‘the closer one is to the centre the greater one’s capacity to transgress or innovate becomes … – Franciscanism takes off when Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) decides to protect it, and one could suggest that Boniface VIII (1295–1303) was the best placed, paradoxically, to doubt the Christian faith’.⁴⁰ Anheim suggested that the situation with respect to the court is the opposite: ‘peripheral positions in relation to the court, where the dependence [on the institution] is relative, as for Petrarch [at Avignon], are the topographical positions with the strongest innovative capacity’:

What institutions do is neither constant nor a given: they both enable and constrain, but how they do so always requires analysis and attention to time, place and individuals. The complexity of the dialectic between individual and institution may be vertiginous. One forceful example is the Avignonese papal penitenciary Opicino de Canistris (1296–c.1354), whose idiosyncratic psychosexual Mediterranean maps and registers, Sylvain Piron has argued, are an inverted response to the institutions which shaped him. Like Kafka’s ‘K’, he is the ‘unhappy bureaucrat who cannot stop himself from loving the institution which destroys him’.⁴² Opicino, for all his idiosyncrasies – because of all his idiosyncrasies – is in some sense a symptom of his own institutions.⁴³

An inverse pendant to Opicino’s exceptional idiosyncrasy, stressing intellectual anonymity, is Ulla Kypta’s recent account of the agency of countless nameless, literate and numerate clerks of the English royal exchequer in the twelfth century.⁴⁴ This is, in fact, as ‘intellectual’ an institution as more recognizable ones and Kypta’s argument is as follows: it is fundamentally mistaken to think of kings and high-level administrators as the guiding hands and minds behind the innovative administrative development of the exchequer as a government department. They played no such role. Rather, agency belongs anonymously to the humble clerks who, through their many, small, repeated actions and modifications, created the exchequer-as-department, the unintended longer-term consequence of those same actions and their development of the technical language needed to articulate it to one another. This is the autonomy of exchequer routine, which develops its own agency à la genetic mutations which are at once random and preserved as a function of their fit within their environmental context. The resulting interpretation is effectively one about a kind of ‘automatic government’: unconscious, impersonal, anonymous. The institution is the (anonymous) practice. However, between Opicino and the anonymous exchequer clerk, who was the more ‘institutionalized’, who the more ‘individualized’? Are idiosyncratic ‘one-offs’ more ‘individual’ by definition than ‘orthodox’ contributors to institutional practices? Might a ‘conservative’ institutional enforcer such as Étienne Tempier not be both?⁴⁵

In recent decades European historians have found new ways to return to those older, important concerns, all the better for the collective time spent away from them.⁴⁶ One might point to the Dresden-based ‘Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte’ (FOVOG, Research Network for the Comparative History of Religious Orders), led by Gert Melville (another contributor), which has focused comparatively on the rationality and constitutional logics of a wide range of religious orders. The project ‘Power and Institutions in Medieval Islam and Christendom’ (PIMIC) focused on medieval institutional similarities and differences between western and Islamic countries.⁴⁷ FOVOG has focused on recognizably ‘hard’ institutional forms – religious orders; PIMIC on ‘structures or processes performed by social regularities, which do not simply flow from an addition of individual behaviours, but rather as the outcome of power struggles among multiple actors who shape institutions as arenas of social conflict and dispute’.⁴⁸ Kypta’s work on the exchequer comes out of a distinctive German tradition of historical semantics and conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte).⁴⁹ Art historians have analysed the institutional ‘content of the form’, examining the connections between corporate identity, memory and bureaucracy in images in charters, as well as in cartularies and charters themselves.⁵⁰ Such work takes diplomatic (the history of formal texts and their rules) into new fields, building importantly on Michael Clanchy’s seminal contribution to the history of literacy and the written word.⁵¹ Many fields remain (we still need an intellectual history of registers and cartularies, for instance).⁵²

An especially vivid proof of the importance of these issues is that one of the most controversial medieval disputes of recent years has focused on institutionalization. The issue is heresy; and the core of the dispute is whether Cistercian and Dominican, as well as other, ‘secular’, theologians articulated so compelling a set of intellectual grids for perceiving heresy that inquisitors internalized them and projected them from the schools onto the world, reality notwithstanding, from the late twelfth century on. ‘Cathars’, by this account, were the institutionalized tromp l’oeil produced by intellectual inquisitors. Whether or not one accepts these arguments, the issue concerns intellectuals’ creation of institutions which change reality.⁵³ Institutionalization plainly matters. We have, so far, briefly introduced intellectuals and institutions, key categories in this book. We turn now to unpacking the ‘question’ of individuals before thinking about how these elements can be understood to interlock and interact.

Individuals

Impersonal individualism

The history of ‘individuals’ and individualism in western liberal historiography has been extraordinarily shaped by somewhat uncritical contemporary valuations of ‘the individual’ and individualism, whether that historiography belongs to the 1860s or the 2010s.⁵⁴ This is, perhaps, as unsurprising as it has become unhelpful – but its contradictions are interesting. On the one hand, the roll-call of named medieval intellectuals includes a clutch who might even today muster a trace of popular recognition (just about): Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Petrarch. These are unmistakably significant figures. On the other hand, there is a forceful argument that our ‘standard’ accounts of medieval thought are almost fatally reliant on a wildly distorted, partial picture of what the most important intellectual texts of the period were. A misplaced, ‘literary’ privileging of authorship means we seek to write a personalized history of this thought when, in fact, we must learn to write a history of influential texts about whose authors we often know nothing personal. The ‘death of the author’ is resurrected. In some cases much editing of manuscripts remains to be done. We have lists of works without authors and lists of authors without works, to paraphrase Alain de Libera.⁵⁵ Texts are often individual and impersonal. Further, this is not something we must rectify, ‘not an accident or external catastrophe but the very essence of the matter’: the anonymous manner of copying manuscripts was a fundamental feature of such thinking and needs to be built into our accounts. (Recall Kypta above.) ‘To understand the history of thought as an anonymous history, such is, in our view, the first task of the medievalist’, de Libera argued.⁵⁶ Yet – to join this with his other argument – as ‘thought’ escaped from the universities it produced that egoist, the intellectual. The resulting paradox, according to de Libera, is that ‘the middle ages of the “intellectuals” was marked simultaneously by the invention of egoism and the effacement of the ego’.⁵⁷

The point can be exemplified through Peter Abelard (c.1079–1142), intellectually famous for his contribution to dialectic, individually famous for seducing his pupil Heloise and the castration and flight which followed. Abelard is arguably a curious amalgam of excess and absence with respect to his individualism. Institutions play a non-accidental role. His History of My Calamities has been described as dramatizing a ‘conflict between the individual and the surrounding world, the institutions of the church to which the individual belongs’.⁵⁸ The History is indeed a sequence of battles against intellectual antagonists (William of Champeaux, Anselm of Laon, Bernard of Clairvaux), nothing if not individualistic. Something of this mutability or volatility was sensed at the time. Bernard of Clairvaux said Abelard was ‘a man dissimilar from himself ’.⁵⁹ Nonetheless, Aron Gurevich suggested, behind these antagonisms, Abelard’s ‘personality remains hidden behind a mask, or rather, behind several different masks, following on from another, which the philosopher saw fit to don’.⁶⁰ One of Abelard’s teachers, Roscelin, said he did not know what to call Abelard since he was neither a cleric, a layman or a monk. Indeed, Abelard’s modern biographer Michael Clanchy persuasively constructed his life according to the sequence of roles Abelard assumed (master, logician, knight, lover, man, monk, theologian, heretic).⁶¹ To Roscelin’s retort Clanchy suggested the riposte that Abelard ‘fitted none of these [Roscelin’s] roles because they were too restrictive’.⁶² More positively, Caroline Walker Bynum said (at least of the History) that it ‘is really the story of the rise and fall of a type: “the philosopher”’.⁶³ Gurevich offered a more sociological solution: ‘[B]ecause of his new social status, which he tried to create for himself, [Abelard] was unable to integrate himself into any group’. Abelard exemplified a new type of individual, ‘the autonomous individual’.⁶⁴

Nevertheless, in Gurevich’s account one cannot help but feel he is disappointed that Abelard did not do better at fully expressing himself beyond his masks. Did institutions, therefore, enable or inhibit Abelard? Historians of individualism sometimes seem unsure whether individuals’ institutional contexts are the grit which produces the pearl or simply a stone inside the shoe. Much of the time interpretative problems arise precisely because of this idea of ‘free’ individuation, excessively idealized apart from a specific social context.⁶⁵ Indeed, this, ultimately, is the problem with Gurevich’s wider history of the origins of European individualism (whence his account of Abelard). Gurevich was torn between historically relativistic and specific ways of expressing individualism (for him, e.g., the Icelandic Sagas) and a teleological, developmental model through which individuals are increasingly, absolutely, expressing themselves (where Abelard disappoints). By this yardstick, the middle ages are ultimately found wanting: ‘The system of values substantiated by medieval Christianity did not encourage men and women to proclaim and assert their individualities’. Gurevich’s assumption of how free such an assertion can ever be appears as remarkably unproblematized as his argument that medieval Christianity provided so necessary and restrictive an armature.⁶⁶ In so far as Gurevich’s middle ages had individual high points, Augustine figures as the overwhelming peak, with Petrarch at the other end.⁶⁷ Yet if even (!) Abelard somehow failed fully to discover his personality; if, between Augustine (d. 430) and Petrarch (d. 1376!!) the landscape of European individualism appears uninhabited, perhaps we are looking at a question mal posée? As many historians have pointed out, this way of thinking about discovering personality and a particular way of being individual imposes a highly static expectation of what ways of being individual ‘count’.

The mirage of the complete individual

One can critique the older argument which elevated the individual in other ways. Important and still influential presumptions were set out in Jacob Burckhardt’s hymn to the renaissance individual in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt’s deeply sociological account offered an explanation of why Italian city-states allegedly produced the individual. The argument can be compressed as follows: particularly in despotic city-states but also in republics, the cult of the individual extended well beyond leaders who used it as a means of gripping power more tightly. Fostered by competition for favour and patronage, the renaissance state accordingly provided both space and stimulus for individual self-cultivation. This individuation was not necessarily political since its articulation spread into private spheres, but in republics the effect was the same since competition for power and its subsequent exercise also provided a platform for individualism and self-differentiation.⁶⁸ By contrast, in the middle ages both inward and outward aspects of self-consciousness were ‘dreaming or half-awake’ beneath a veil:

In this negative stress on restrictive categories and groupings which inhibit the full articulation of individuality one sees the interpretation which had left its clear trace elements in Gurevich’s account and many others. One way of identifying what goes wrong here is to suggest that the historiographical ideal of what the individual ought to look like has not progressed very far beyond the model of nineteenth-century realist fiction, capable of dramatizing the relationship between inner and outer worlds.

If, by contrast, Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves is a modernist literary account of consciousness, perhaps it is then interesting to ask what a modernist historiographical equivalent might look like. In many ways the dominance of traditional biography as the mode of studying the individual probably contributes to the conservatism analysed here. A modernist stress on permeability and flux is, of course, very much more in sympathy with modern brain science but also with more recent approaches to understanding specific forms of identity, such as gender.⁷⁰ Piron’s reading of Opicino de Canistris, stressing his multiple, interpenetrating identities, might then be seen as a much more responsive development of such approaches (and contrasting with Gurevich, who also wrote on Opicino).⁷¹

Beyond false oppositions

A second critique of the ‘old’ elevation of individuals was made by Caroline Walker Bynum – discussing twelfth-century religious and spiritual groups – and is worth revisiting. (Southern’s individualistic scholastic humanism, we should note, is one of the interpretations she critiqued for their privileging of internal mental space over external group.) Bynum’s argument had several key turns.

First, it is worth stressing Bynum’s focus on religious groups as a basis for individuals’ sense of selfhood. In modern, secularizing accounts religion often figures as a feature which must be sublimated before a more or less explicitly ‘full’ individualism can be achieved.⁷² This can be seen in the tendency (encouraged by Burckhardt) to align ‘secular’ with ‘renaissance’ in analyses of intellectual development.⁷³ Yet, as Étienne Anheim has pointed out in relation to the impeccable renaissance and anti-scholastic figure of Petrarch, he could only articulate his individuality ‘on condition of having the humility to accept the Other (God, death) in himself ’. Petrarch’s version of self-expression is not a Cartesian cogito ergo sum but credo ergo sum. As Anheim suggested, one could write an equally true, parallel history of self-knowledge and the philosophy of conscience to the conventional, secularizing one which took full account of the role of religion.⁷⁴

Second, a ‘Burckhardt-style’ opposition between group and individual is unhelpful. Medieval ‘individualism’ did not go hand-in-hand with declining group identity. On the contrary, the proliferation of reflections about the former was sharply aligned with the proliferation in number and form of the latter: ‘[I]t was characterized by the one because it was characterized by the other’.⁷⁵ The individual understands him-her-self as such through a group’s projection and validation of this.⁷⁶ Further, the articulation of individualism was very frequently connected directly to fulfilment of a model and/or fulfilment of a type (‘fulfilment’, not ‘conformity’, since the question of how to fulfil the type was to be contested, as with the Franciscans on whom more below). A central insight of Bynum was that these models and types provided the means to articulate individuality with increasing granularity. Corporate and individual identity do not need to be opposed in this way. Institutionalization in different ways was how the groups gave shape to individuals.⁷⁷ The medieval use and importance of models and types (those ‘enemies’ of individual character!) can, in fact, provide an answer to what a modernist historiographical analogue of Woolf ’s The Waves might look like. It might, that is, look something like Jacques Le Goff’s Saint Louis (1996), a book which deconstructed the notion of the individual apart from the typological models (king, warrior, etc.) in relation to which he validated himself. This is a book, after all, which (in)famously asked: ‘Saint Louis – did he really exist?’ How, that is, can he be said to exist for us as a historical individual apart from the grids and characters through which he was expressed in the medieval sources?

Exemplarity was central to Louis (as with the advice he gave to his children). Exemplarity-through-typology is also central to two of the greatest individualistic works of medieval literature: Dante’s Commedia (the categorization of damned to redeemed; the sorting by moral qualities; the mirroring of this by fitting contrapasso punishment); and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the exploration and testing of character/vocational types; the exploration of their personae and their fallibilities). In terms of lived life, however, perhaps no more powerful or problematic model of exemplarity is available than Francis of Assisi. The whole purpose of Francis’s order was to exemplify the apostolic life and imitatio Christi, an exemplification which Francis’s stigmatization took to extremes. Francis was a man whose concern with being a model, being an example, being a pattern, is stressed again and again in texts close to his earliest entourage, such as the Writings of Brother Leo. It is present in Francis’s Testament, the unexploded bomb he left behind which would go on to blow up in the faces of a series of friars and popes in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Testament, the rule-that-was-not-a-Rule, would blow up so repeatedly precisely because it provided the nexus for conflict between Francis’s own exemplary manifestation and definition of what being a Franciscan meant in practice on the one hand and what the Rule’s institutionalized version seemed to say on the other. The chapters by Sylvain Piron and Gert Melville look at the problem of religious orders (specifically mendicant ones) from these quite distinct angles. The Franciscans’ problem with their own institutionalization can, then, be reconnected to the problem which Bynum raised in her article but which, like Southern’s, remains unanswered:

There are presumptions here one might want to question. Is the twelfth-century’s equilibrium quite as clear as assumed here? Are later disequilibria quite as apparent as assumed? However, even if one wished to qualify the axioms, the fundamental grounds of Bynum’s question still demand answers. It is hoped that our focus on precisely this period – from the later twelfth century (Corran, Melville, Sabapathy) into the thirteenth (Corran, Sabapathy, Biller, Dufal, Fitzpatrick, Piron), fourteenth (Dufal, Kempshall, Linde) and fifteenth centuries (Iribarren, Marenbon) – will help to do so. Indeed, it is precisely this period’s proliferation of thought and practice regarding individuals and institutions which provides the rationale for our chronological focus. The chapters in this volume are intended to take us beyond unnecessary oppositions in general as well as taking forward a range of more detailed questions and problems.

‘Schools’ and beyond

Richard Southern was keenly aware of the role of intellectual ‘schools’ in his own life. In his sensitive memoir of his friend Beryl Smalley Southern wrote that ‘she wanted to be remembered as a member of a group’.⁷⁹ The importance of filiation extended to Southern’s own work. Michael Clanchy recalls talking to him near the end of his life about the origins of Scholastic Humanism. Of Southern’s two great teachers, Vivian Galbraith and Maurice Powicke, Clanchy suggested to Southern that Powicke must have been more influential on the project, given his own interest in scholasticism, as in his work on the theologian and archbishop Stephen Langton. Southern, however, was vehement in saying that it was all down not to Powicke but Galbraith, whom he praised elsewhere for unravelling ‘the significance of documents of modest size’ and throwing ‘light on the thoughts, circumstances, and difficulties in which they had their origin’.⁸⁰ In fact, it is hard to see a better ‘model’ for Southern’s work on ‘scholastic humanism’ in its connecting of intellectual and ‘real world’ concerns than Powicke’s Stephen Langton, but Southern’s disavowal is nonetheless notable. Positive or negative, intellectual filiation – and its (mis)remembrance – mattered.

Problems with schools

The genealogical master-pupil relationship provides one way of framing intellectual filiation for the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, but the question of what, if anything, constituted a medieval intellectual school is complex. Answers could range from a more or less loose network of shared interests, such as Peter the Chanter’s ‘biblical-moral’ Parisian tendency, to a Dominican studium in which a particular set of intellectual positions are sometimes assumed as a corollary of that membership. Within twentieth-century historical, and historical-theological, continental scholarship on scholasticism there was also a distinctive investigative thread which effectively confined itself to an ideological plane, searching for thirteenth-century intellectual schools as defined by individuals’ common subscription to discrete sets of doctrine. Much work was framed by researchers’ own beliefs; and while we would not want to be reductive about that, equally it seems foolish to ignore it.

Southern took no part in this doctrinal approach to intellectual schools. We have already seen that he approached the medieval institutionalization of thought from a different angle. He also thought that ‘as a general rule, medieval historians do well to avoid words ending in “-ism”’,⁸¹ the exception being his own ‘scholastic humanism’. This continental tradition nevertheless left deep marks on historiography. The key questions here were taxonomic: what were the branches of intellectual affiliation and influence one should induce? How determinative were differences shaped by readings in Aristotle, Avicenna, Platonic texts, or Augustine, for that matter? In the decades following the classic studies by Karl Werner and Franz Ehrle in the late 1880s – which first divided Aquinas’s ‘Aristotelianism’ from Franciscan ‘Augustinianism’ – there was much debate over where exactly the intellectual fault lines between these apparent, great, ideological tectonic plates should be drawn. The resulting historiographical confusion sprung from an attempt to codify individuals’ thought according to a vast taxonomy of ‘-isms’. One automatically associates this tendency with Etienne Gilson, but equally indicative is the work of Maurice de Wulf, for instance, who argued for a complex five-fold taxonomy within thirteenth-century thought: Augustinianism vs. Thomism vs. Scotism vs. Averroism (all as mutually divergent sub-species of Aristotelianism) vs. Neoplatonism (as a separate current of thought altogether). Such complexity tells its own story, perhaps to the long-term detriment of medieval intellectual history.

Nevertheless, school labels ending in ‘-ism’ have proved surprising durable as shorthand terms in historical writing on scholasticism, even though the general approach to medieval thought to which they used to be tethered has somewhat fallen out of fashion. If doctrinally focused schemata bear critiquing from several angles, then two problems are particularly important for us. First, these schemata assume that doctrinally defined intellectual schools established themselves only in the thirteenth century. Like Bynum’s question about the balance between individual and group, this is a chronological issue and raises the question ‘So what?’ in either case. Fernand Van Steenberghen’s solution, while implicitly critiquing De Wulf and Gilson for failing to give a convincing explanation for diachronic change, exemplified his targets’ tendency to privilege a doctrinally focused approach. According to van Steenberghen, the twelfth century’s characteristic philosophy was too pluralistic, literary and subjective to admit of systematic differentiation into schools.⁸² It was only from c.1250, when a new Aristotle stripped of Arabic and Neoplatonic interpolations became available and could underpin a rigorous, constraining, objective and shared approach to philosophy, that schools attuned to doctrinal difference could emerge. To complicate matters further, historians of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century thought have kicked against the entire bulk of this writing on the thirteenth century to argue that doctrinally defined schools can be detected only from the late fourteenth century (the clash of philosophical and theological ‘ways’, ‘nominalists’ vs. ‘realists’, etc.), if at all.⁸³

The second problem lies at a deeper level and goes to the heart of some of the questions addressed by this volume. When talking of intellectual schools in the middle ages (as in any period) we run the risk of reification in thinking of schools as intellectual communities defined by total mutual agreement on doctrine. The artificial imposition of uniformity upon the original and creative thinking of individuals simply does not stand up against a close, hard look at the evidence. The diffuseness of the so-called contemporary ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history illustrates the difficulty of such labels today, let alone the ‘Annales School’.⁸⁴ This lies at the heart of the critique of Southern’s ‘scholastic humanism’ by Marenbon, for whom it offers too monochromatic a view of very colourful twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic worlds.⁸⁵ To agree with Marenbon’s rejection of Southern’s formulation would entail abandoning any general co-ordinating ‘word ending in “-ism”’ (saving scholasticism) for these groups and thinkers. That may be no bad thing, especially if one thinks the designation ‘scholastic humanism’ is indeed fallacious. It would produce a much more multi-polar set of configurations (again, good so far as they are true). It does, however, leave unresolved the problem of how to describe their undeniable structure, influence and effects accurately and adequately.

The suggestion is not that evacuating ‘intellectual schools’ of all explanatory power whatsoever provides a satisfactory solution to either problem. Sensitivity to one’s own and others’ membership of an intellectual group evidently could shape scholars’ self-identification and political outlook. This is most readily explored by looking at recent analysis of Parisian intellectual groupings, on which much recent work has focused. For instance, William Courtenay’s study of the seals of Parisian theology masters between 1190 and 1308 analyses master William of Bardenay’s 1211 seal bearing the slogan ‘ex impossibili quidlibet’, a logical position identifying him as a member of the ‘Parvipontani’, that is to say, as a pupil of Adam of Balsham (or Petit Pont) or of one of his disciples.⁸⁶ This is both an intellectual position and a group affiliation: the inscription refers to the logical position that from an impossible premise any conclusion may follow. Mews and Zahora, meanwhile, have drawn attention to two early fourteenth-century anonymous treatises on the last things, of mendicant origin and probably produced in the French royal court, which evince a meticulous attempt to synthesize Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s approaches to the intellect, will and grace, in order to overcome mendicant factionalism⁸⁷ – hardly worthwhile if ‘school’ divisions had no concrete importance in informing individuals’ actions beyond the studia.

We think the solution to these problems lies instead in a re-framing of intellectual schools, grounded in questioning the ways in which the politics of group identification, and institutions more generally, did, or did not, constrain, enable and inflect the substantive thinking of individuals, rather than in attempting to track doctrine primarily and per se. Two relatively recent major studies deserve particular attention for suggesting just such an agenda for further work on medieval intellectual schools, namely Steven Marrone’s The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and the Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (2001); and Russell Friedman’s Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: the Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among Franciscans and Dominicans (2013). Both Marrone and Friedman reconstruct intellectual schools as traditions of thought which were shaped first and foremost by the politics of group identification rather than rigid adherence to distinct sets of doctrinal details and which kept their integrity in spite, or perhaps because, of the creativity of the individuals within them.

Tracing thirteenth-century theologians’ various metaphysical and epistemic interpretations of the notion of ‘divine illumination’ derived from Augustine, Marrone argued for an ‘Augustinian school’, which is primarily politically rather than doctrinally defined. According to Marrone’s model, which he evidently intends to be applicable more generally, one’s particular political affiliation or group identification would in practice restrict the range of stances one could take for or against a particular theoretical position just enough to result in an ‘intellectual consanguinity’ between thinkers over the decades, although within ‘an especially elastic set of formal boundaries or constraints’. Such affiliations, Marrone argued, would have been perceptible to contemporaries, whether evoked and expressed ‘in a tendency to call upon a common fund of models and metaphors for analysis’ consciously or unconsciously by scholars themselves.⁸⁸ In this way, theologians almost a century apart and as divergent in the fine-grained detail of their thought as Robert Grosseteste and John Duns Scotus emerge equally as members of Marrone’s ‘Augustininan school’.

Where Marrone focused mostly but not exclusively on Franciscans, Friedman examined the oppositional politics of the Dominican and Franciscan orders (c.1250–c.1350). Friedman conceived of intellectual traditions in a way which is broadly compatible with Marrone, but goes much further in drawing out the implications of such an approach. The cut and thrust of scholastic debate at precise moments of intense opposition between the orders could shape the content of individuals’ arguments in quite an exact way. Franciscan and Dominican mutual opposition thus worked as a motor, pushing philosophical and theological debate along for scholars both within and outwith the two orders themselves. The history of scholastic theology in this hundred-year period, it emerges, cannot be understood without taking into account ways in which the thinking of individuals at the cutting edge of debate was inflected by the politics of these rival intellectual traditions and the internal politics of these orders:

Taking Marrone and Friedman together, then, membership of an intellectual school or tradition would consist not in the mere recapitulation of the thinking of one’s intellectual antecedents, but in the use made of it, specifically its positioning to reaffirm one intellectual identity within one tradition precisely in opposition to another tradition. Fitzpatrick’s chapter in the present volume is a case study of the effect of these oppositional dynamics in thirteenth-century theological discussions of the central philosophical problem of the composition of human nature. Hence, Dominicans in the 1280s came up with interpretations of the theory which diverged quite far in their detail from Aquinas’s own, precisely to counter Franciscans’ inaccurate caricature of his thought.

While Marrone and Friedman offer models for intellectual schools which are both doctrinally sensitive and politically astute, they both still propose a certain hardening of intellectual lines c.1250 at the universities of Paris and Oxford. Recent work by Constant Mews strikes at this assumption, questioning whether the acceptance of a full Aristotelian curriculum at the faculty of arts in 1255 in itself had any radical effect at all on patterns of intellectual affiliation. Mews’s argument, in short, is this: the twin tendencies in historical writing on scholasticism – to treat Aquinas as the quintessence of scholastic thinking; and to place an implicit emphasis upon the basic curricular unity of Paris in the mid thirteenth century – stem ultimately from the papal encyclical of Aeterni patris (1879) and have been seriously distorting of both scholasticism’s institutional and its intellectual history. Mews does concede, along lines suggested by Van Steenberghen, that the various ‘Logico-Theological Schools’ (nominales, reales, Porretiani, Meludinenses and Montani, as well as the Parvipontani mentioned above) appearing in Parisian records from c.1150 well into the thirteenth century were probably relatively unsystematically defined, or ‘as slippery as “deconstructionists” and “post-modernists” today’.⁹⁰ Up to 1255 there was a low degree of uniformity in the study of arts and theology.⁹¹ The point, however, is that Parisian intellectual pluralism lasted beyond Courson’s decree of 1215, and even beyond 1255, precisely as a function of complex institutional politics.

The university of Paris was not a single, centralized institution and at no point did its scholars actually study one uniform, coherent curriculum. Rather, the university’s intellectual life was characterized by ‘the competition between different communities of learning’, struggling ‘to define a vision of synthesis’, of their own, underpinned by their own curriculum and serving as a symbol of their group’s identity.⁹² Here, Mews is indebted to Boureau’s use of Brian Stock’s notion of a ‘textual community’ as defined by a group’s interpretation of a particular text.⁹³ Yet, crucially, Paris’s rival ‘communities of learning’ were shaped just as much by parameters of place and loyalties associated with precise political networks as they were by their selection of their own specific range of texts for study.

After 1255 it is not the competition between the mendicants as such but rather the competition between the secular college of the Sorbonne (1257) and the College of the Treasurer (1266) which best exemplifies the complex political dynamics in which Mews is interested. The former was established for students of theology of any nation and no religious order, under the authority of the bishop of Paris and with close connections to the royal court.⁹⁴ The latter was regional, established for poor students from Rouen for the study of both arts and theology, enabling Norman students to study theology free of the bishop’s supervision. However, for Mews the ‘Averroist Crisis’ of 1272 to 1275 in the faculty of arts is best explained by the politics surrounding Siger of Brabant’s bid for the rectorship of the faculty rather than by his supposed ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ and commitment to Averroes’ belief in humans sharing a single external intellect.⁹⁵

Marrone, Friedman and Mews all emphasize the primacy of ‘political’ factors in delineating communities of learning and intellectual frameworks of endorsement and critique in the late thirteenth century. Even so, there would still appear to have been a particular quality of thought among the mendicants which demanded self-definition and counter-definition with respect to doctrinal minutiae, such as was not produced by other clusters of interests within faculties. If, therefore, it is the opposition of the Franciscan and Dominican religious orders which provides the crucial stimulus to this quality of thought, then what is it about religious orders that produces this result? The institutional similarities between the Franciscan and Dominicans, and their resulting (and ever increasing) direct competition for benefactions, chairs and recruits, might go some way towards explaining the dynamics involved, along with contingent facts about the way in which regent masterships develop, so that the mendicants appear to gain a de facto monopoly c.1250. Whichever way one looks at it, the formation of theological traditions and intellectual schools in Paris after c.1250 appears as a function of organizational development.

Other ways of grouping: constellations and networks

Schools in themselves are an important but limited analytical prism through which to tell the whole story of patterns of learning and thought in the period which our essays address. Shaped by contextual factors other than curricula and extending beyond the theology faculties of the major universities, there were complex regional and temporal patterns of intellectual debate, influence, approbation and disapprobation. Thus, Blaise Dufal’s chapter in this volume argues that the self-conscious use of Augustine as an authority, in particular in commentaries on De civitate Dei, could extend beyond the mere exigencies of positioning oneself in live academic debate and become a means of self-identification in relation to a range of institutions from religious order to kingdom.

This wider insight that ideas can never be properly understood apart from the places, spaces and located networks in which they emerge has been well-taken.⁹⁶ The idea of Konstellationsforschung (constellation research) in German historiography, meanwhile, has developed a more granular set of axes for thinking about the networks linking individuals both in terms of external organizational links, affiliations, social groups, shared publishers, patrons and the like. The metaphor of constellation does not imply fixity but stresses fluidity and development over time.⁹⁷ From other quite different disciplinary perspectives have come deep mappings of the sociologies of particular intellectual cadres – such as Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the fields structuring Parisian homo academicus at the time of the student rebellions in 1968.⁹⁸ Another sociologist, Randall Collins, has sought to map literally the sociology of all philosophy, stressing the ‘interaction rituals’ between individuals whose friction produces new thought.⁹⁹ However, it is hard for historians to see how, for example, this produces new insights into Franciscan and Dominican rivalries between 1200 and 1335.¹⁰⁰ There are obvious limits to how far one can reconstruct past networks anyway.¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to point towards rich studies of medieval intellectual networks and patterns in the development of ideas which do not burnish especial methodological credentials.¹⁰² This is not to imply that there are no useful heuristics through which our understanding of intellectual groupings in our period can be deepened. We analyse below some which seem especially helpful (some have influenced contributors here). These comprise: Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘traditions’; Weberian ‘conviction rationalities’ and d’Avray’s extension of them; and Niklas Luhmann’s ‘systems thinking’.

Traditions

Collins’s Sociology of Philosophy includes, but is not especially galvanized by, consideration of medieval thought. By contrast, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has for decades placed medieval philosophy – specifically Aquinas’s – at the heart of his project to re-describe the terms on which viable (modern) ethical thought might be constructed. Our interest here, however, is not so much in the accuracy of MacIntyre’s account of that medieval thought as in the model he develops to account for its integrity – the idea of ‘tradition’.¹⁰³ For MacIntyre a:

Traditions here are construed very much as practices or ‘crafts’ within a magisterial context: that is, an apprentice is instructed in the terms of a craft by a master. The rationality and excellence of the craft (furniture making, philosophy) is internal to the craft and also directed out to its worldly purpose (telos). This emphatically Aristotelian model is also emphatically based in a group (a ‘moral community’) and placed in time (the tradition develops itself under the impetus of successive generations):¹⁰⁵ ‘The craft is justified by its history so far, which has made it what it is in that specific time, place, and set of historical circumstances, such rationality is inseparable from the tradition through which it was achieved’.¹⁰⁶ The rationality of the tradition, that is, is relativistic within the overall arc of the tradition but also an objective achievement at any single point in time. Matthew Kempshall’s chapter in this volume explores this in relation to the very discipline of history itself, arguing that as historiographically sophisticated a thinker as the Dominican Nicholas Trevet produced surprisingly annalistic histories, not because of any inherent limitation in his analytical abilities but rather as a function of an epistemological tradition which drew sharp barriers around what he thought history was competent to explain.

MacIntyre counterpointed traditions against ‘encyclopaedic’ and ‘genealogical’ modes of enquiry. The latter two, he argued, give poor accounts of how knowledge is both social and develops over time. For the former, the ‘external’, social aspects of its intellectual content are in fact part and parcel of its intellectual standing.¹⁰⁷ By contrast, the encyclopaedist wishes to elevate thinking for him-her-self and to assert that knowledge rests on generally accepted (commensurable) grounds in a way which no longer seems credible. The genealogist, meanwhile, wishes to unearth the disreputable descent of all intellectual knowledge since knowledge is always compromised by the ulterior wilfulness it masks (as Nietzsche argued in The Genealogy of Morals).¹⁰⁸ Yet how can the genealogist sustain any sequence of unmaskings over time which are not equally open to having their own disreputable genealogies unearthed (and hence their case undermined)? If they avoid this implosion, how can they do so without implying an unacknowledged tradition of truthfulness to give sense and continuity to their claims as a whole, thus undermining the premises of their entire genealogical model?¹⁰⁹ Traditions, then, are MacIntyre’s alternative model, offering an approach with which historians can think in many ways, especially medieval historians. His central medieval exemplification is Aquinas, whom he takes to exemplify the thirteenth-century reconciliation of two apparently immiscible and contradictory traditions, an indigenous Augustinian one and a recently interpolated Aristotelian one.¹¹⁰

Whether one wishes to amend or reconstruct MacIntyre’s account of this conflict, his three characteristic models of enquiry raise interesting questions. First, Southern, we have seen, stressed the unitary ambitions of what he called scholastic humanism, the desire for a complete ‘system’ of knowledge. That sounds more similar to MacIntyre’s encyclopaedic enquiry than his tradition-based one, yet for MacIntyre it is scholastic practices which pre-eminently exemplify the open-ended, moral-community learning of tradition. MacIntyre is insistent that Aquinas’s method of intellectual progression was inherently provisional: ‘[W]hen Aquinas has reached his conclusion, the method always leaves open the possibility of a return to that question with some new argument’.¹¹¹

One might wonder whether Southern (b. 1912) was back-projecting a nineteenth-century encyclopaedic model onto his scholastic humanists. MacIntyre’s quintessential exemplification of encyclopaedic knowledge is, after all, the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1873–88). However, second, one might wonder whether MacIntyre’s account of encyclopaedism is sufficient in the first place. There was, after all, a massive medieval tradition of encyclopaedism, well before either this Victorian one or, indeed, Diderot and D’Alembert’s. It is hard not to see how Vincent of Beauvais’s (d. c. 1264) still-unedited encyclopaedia, the Speculum maius, could not be considered an encyclopaedia which was also part of a tradition in MacIntyre’s terms.¹¹² Genealogy, third, may unmask intellectual affiliations less straightforwardly as well. In scholastic thought more than anywhere else one might expect to unearth unedifying intellectual genealogies in which institutional affiliation pre-determines intellectual/credal positions. Yet, pace Mews, as several chapters here show (notably Linde’s and Fitzpatrick’s) the positions taken might be quite different from what one would expect given institutional affiliations. That is to say: MacIntyre’s three versions of moral enquiry are particularly instructive for specialists on scholasticism to think about even – perhaps especially – when they appear not to work or call their own categories of analysis into question. Whether that has any bearing back on MacIntyre’s own ethical thought may be a question more for philosophers than historians.

Conviction rationalities and thought styles

MacIntyre’s account is philosophical and historical, but not especially sociological. In fact, it describes a semi-permeable style of thinking similar to the account of ‘conviction rationalities’ which David d’Avray has developed from Max Weber.¹¹³ Like Macintyre’s traditions, conviction (or value) rationalities are socially embedded modes of reasoning with internal standards of rational justification, but, unlike Macintyre’s traditions, conviction rationalities encompass any world-view or system of conviction. As an ‘ideal type’ of rationality, systems of conviction have two principal features.¹¹⁴ First, there is interconnectedness. The individual values or convictions which comprise the system form a logically interlocking web, a unique Gestalt. Individual components can take the form of ‘is’-, as well as ‘ought’-convictions when the former are phenomenologically very similar to the latter (to use one of d’Avray’s own examples, the conviction ‘there is a God’ is phenomenologically similar to the belief ‘polygamy is wrong’). Each individual conviction is thus rendered rational in the context of the system; and the interconnectedness of values strengthens the structure as a whole. Different value systems may overlap, but cannot be simultaneously correct. What it is crucial to note is that they can all be rational by their own internal standards.

Second, there is concreteness. Social practices, emotional experience and strong mental images bear out, reinforce and justify values and beliefs, functioning as ‘concrete’ arguments which enter into and cement the overall structure of the system. Medieval Christianity provides an excellent example of how value rationalities work. As d’Avray explains, one could illustrate ad infinitum the thickly and precisely interconnected and interdependent nature of various doctrinal convictions (the Trinity, Christ’s suffering humanity, the resurrection) and the institutions, rituals and other practices and experiences in which they were embodied and which gave them force (the liturgy; the mass; prayer; interaction with images of Christ’s passion; confession; penance; and the apostolic penitentiary; and so on).¹¹⁵

Conviction rationalities have considerable explanatory as well as illustrative power. When systems of values compete, individuals rarely abandon their convictions when confronted with logical counter-arguments they cannot easily answer. The model just outlined explains why it may be rational for individuals to hold onto their values in this way, even when they basically understand one another’s positions and share a great deal of overlap in their general world-view.¹¹⁶

The example of competing Franciscan and Dominican intellectual traditions illustrates this point. We have met the work of Russell Friedman, which explains the resilience of these traditions as a matter of the politics of group identification. This leaves fairly open the question of any deeper intellectual conviction. It is true that, even following the mendicant legislation of the 1280s which sought to direct their scholars’ output either for or against Aquinas, it was possible for Franciscans and Dominicans either to dissent from the ‘party line’ on any one issue or range of issues, or just to appear less than fully convinced of it.¹¹⁷ Still, there is enough of a pattern discernible in the later middle ages of Franciscans and Dominicans consistently failing to convince one another on a whole variety of issues to suggest that competing systems of intellectual conviction were in play and that these systems, even if internally flexible, remained fundamentally resistant to attack by one another over time.¹¹⁸

The tenacity of convictions can be explained in part by their interconnectedness: one axiom cannot be easily extricated from the set; rather, several, perhaps all, stand or fall together.¹¹⁹ This applies in the case of the mendicants. Scholastic theology was a purposefully holistic mode of thinking; and the basic theses about which Franciscans and Dominicans argued were embedded in thick webs of interlocking positions on fundamental metaphysical issues about which the two traditions also disagreed. Although positions within each tradition could be developed, it would have had hugely disruptive consequences for a scholar’s entire metaphysical apparatus suddenly to change his mind with respect to any individual major thesis. There was little motivation, then, to be convinced by objections from the other tradition targeted against any one basic metaphysical position. Rather, the support provided for any disputed thesis by the supposed truth of several related theses would have reduced the perceived likelihood that the individual thesis under attack was false; while thoroughly debating all the relevant theses at once would have been impracticable: according to the internal standards of the tradition it was rational to be unconvinced by individual objections.

Furthermore, the intellectual convictions associated with their tradition would have derived psychological support from mendicant scholars’ concrete, everyday experiences as members of their order: self-identification as Franciscan or Dominican; material dependence on the order; the interrelated sentiments of loyalty towards order, minister general and schoolmaster; and so on. In light of this it becomes less difficult to understand why Franciscans and Dominicans appeared prone to argue so fiercely about the orthodoxy of abstract metaphysical details as well as the more concrete issue of the correct definition of apostolic poverty.

Systems thinking

A final powerful, universally applicable set of tools for thinking about the dynamics involved in the patterning of social action is Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Of particular relevance here is Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which offers a way of understanding how individuals can change wider institutions. A basic introduction to the central ideas is as follows.¹²⁰ The function of all social systems, which are all systems of communication (including action as a form of communication), is to reduce complexity, fulfilling humans’ need to orientate themselves in the world in a suitably planned and structured way. A taxonomy of social systems takes in not just social organizations but time-limited interactions and conversations (teacher-pupil; doctor-patient; students in a classroom; partners in a household) and whole societies (comprehensive social systems which contain functionally differentiated sub-systems).¹²¹ Any social system defines itself with reference to what is outside it, namely its environment, which, from the perspective of the system, is unstructured and exceedingly complex. The system stabilizes expectations regarding the range of communications or actions which can take place within it through channelling communication between social actors. This channelling maintains the boundaries between communication system and uncontrolled environment. Pietro Pomponazzi, working within the arts faculties of Paris and Bologna universities, is accordingly enabled to present what appears to be a highly sceptical Aristotelian account of the mortality of the soul. As John Marenbon shows in his chapter in this volume, however, one risks seriously misunderstanding Pomponazzi’s wider position by extracting from within one social system of communication arguments which are not intended to be viable within other social systems of communication. Marenbon does not frame his account in Luhmann’s terms, but the usefulness of the framework is demonstrated precisely by the fact that Pomponazzi’s position can be explicated by it.

To view social systems as static and/or closed would be to miss the fundamental point about the relationship between system and environment. The continuing, stabilizing operations of a system involve constant reference to the system itself and to that extent entail continual reference to what lies outside it. The environments relative to systems are continually changing; and changes in the external environment of a system (which includes other sub-systems to which it will be necessary to react, for instance) will introduce changes into that system. This is where individual agents come in. Insofar as they subsist between individual agents, systems have a life of their own, but changes and adaptations in social systems are driven by the individuals who connect with and make use of them, who continually recreate the boundary between system and environment by actively selecting and/or rejecting new operations as pertaining to the system. John Sabapathy’s interpretation of the master of theology Robert of Courson (d. 1219) can be seen in this light. His focus is the internal logic of Courson’s attitude to the pastoral problems which he addressed in his Summa. This was systematic – but not really in Southern’s sense of a complete and formalistically consistent set of answers. Rather, what unites Courson’s solutions seems to be a pragmatic, relativistic system which asked what was spiritually damaging for particular communities in specific contexts. Courson’s systematic logic seems keyed to a relative sense of what would damage community X specifically. It can itself be seen as the articulation of a particular idea of a ‘social system’ in the period. The particular tradition stemmed from the ‘school’ of Peter the Chanter itself and seemed rather short-lived – perhaps as a consequence of the difficulty of extending such an approach on any scale. As such, it exemplifies the need to grasp the sometimes quite rapid ways in which particular social systems, and ways of institutionalizing them, wax and wane. Cornelia Linde’s chapter offers an analogous example over one hundred years later when she argues that the Dominican Robert Holcot’s (d. c.1349) writings regarding the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council’s rule on confession were strongly influenced not only by the glosses of Aquinas and Albertus Magnus on this rule, but also by the need to respond to contemporary Parisian intellectual debates and practical social concerns. The social system continued to draw on its ‘rule base’ while remaining responsive to contemporary context.

Groups may generate their social systems in quite distinct ways using quite distinct tools, however. In his work on the Dominicans (and in his chapter here) Gert Melville has explored how monastic rules interact with other means of creating social groups. In an early essay Melville suggested three striking hypotheses in relation to institutions-as-organizations which still reward reflection. They will, first, seek to perfect themselves through an increasingly precise and detailed set of procedural and proscriptive rules, a process which may very well be self-destructive through hypertrophy or impossible demand setting. Second, the principle of guaranteeing institutional stability provides grounds against change, thus external changes can threaten the organization’s arrangement, either its functions or its meaning. As a result, it may develop a new role and become a new organization. Internal change within an organization may, third, also seek to re-stabilize it by either seeking to return to an earlier state or an adjustment to present needs.¹²² All this will need to be legitimized in relation to the organization’s own history and values. For religious orders, how this plays out will depend on whether the originating norms came from a founding text or the words of a charismatic leader.¹²³ Even in the latter case, however, there will need to be some written routinization of that charisma (in Weberian terms) for the institution to endure beyond the first generation. The balance between rules and a charismatic legacy can produce very different outcomes for religious orders. ‘Rules’ may be usefully differentiated between a rule itself (the articulation of a binding message for right-living), customs (self-ratifying descriptions of established practice glossing the rule) and statutes (in principal consensual documents generated by a community for engineering its self-regulation to a greater degree).¹²⁴ The Dominicans are a key example for Melville of religious order as institutional system – both in terms of the practices and organization. The case exemplifies his approach. What is striking about the Dominicans, he argues, is their ‘total fixation’ on their preaching purpose. The Paris-educated Dominican master general Humbert of Romans’s commentary on the order’s Constitutiones illustrates this. Other values were subordinated to securing its preaching purpose through dispensations or re-orientated to strengthen it. Hence fasting could be dispensed with if it was hindering preaching; and poverty was endorsed because a poor preacher was likely to get a better reception than a rich one. The relative relation of religious values, authoritative regulations and charismatic totem-founder played out in a very different way for the Franciscans, whose later thirteenth century was riddled with disputes precisely about their founding values, rules and the meaning of their founder. Whether, however, the Franciscans as an institution were any less successful in the long run for all that remains an interesting question. In his chapter Sylvain Piron offers a very different – almost antithetical – approach to that of the Dominican Humbert of Romans by analysing the Franciscan Peter John Olivi. For Olivi it is not the Franciscans’ Regula bullata which is central to being a Franciscan but the individual Franciscan’s vow – a vow constantly and perpetually renewed in action and which simply cannot be settled by a prescriptive stipulation. Melville’s chapter in this volume offers a further way of reading how the founders of religious orders made use of themselves as symbols to construct a more enduring legal authority for their organizations. Both chapters show a plurality of ways through which institutions may express their social systems.

Institutions and institutionalization

These reflections on traditions, rationalities and systems-thinking have already led us into a consideration of institutions. To be sure, these ‘institutions’ do not look like the traditional objects of institutional history. That is the point. ‘Institutional history’ from its heyday up to the first half of the twentieth century generally concerned itself with organizations and their rules, often within a more or less Whiggish teleological framework (parliamentary developments were perhaps the British acme of this historiography). Today the landscape is refreshingly altered, both because historians have re-evaluated their hierarchy of historical ‘objects’ and because they have revised how to think about institutions, notably under the influence of philosophy, sociology and anthropology.

The historian Jacques Revel rightly argued that institutionalization can be treated as a spectrum. At one end lies the institution as the ‘juridical-political reality’ of traditional institutional history; at the other lie institutions at their most diffuse: ‘every form of social organization which links values, norms, models of relation and conduct, roles’. Here ‘every social form that presents some regularity can be subject to an institutional analysis’. In the middle of the spectrum Revel places ‘every organization functioning in any regular way within a society, according to explicit and implicit rules, and where one assumes that it responds to a particular collective demand’ (family, school, hospital, etc.).¹²⁵ Revel thus argued for an ‘open definition of the institution that is plastic and relational. It [the institution] formalizes an ensemble of conventions which are the regularized forms of exchange [formes réglées de l’échange] (whence constraint and conflict play a role). At the same time one needs to understand the relationship which actors sustain with them as being based in practice’.¹²⁶

As mentioned above, we are principally interested in the relationship between the softer and harder forms, between institutions-as-practices and institutions-as-organizations and the role of individuals within this. Institutions-as-organizations are simply the hardest form humans ever give to the social practices they most want to protect and mark off – but they must always contain institutions-as-practices: these are their content. The metaphor of slugs and snails may show what we mean: the snail’s extruded shell is the structure of traditional institutional analysis, but still requires the organism within to give it life. The shell has to be understood as an expression, an outgrowth, of those practices. Likewise, while the shell per se structures and protects the organism, it is neither impregnable nor a sufficient explanation for that life. Slugs, after all, lack shells. One has to go further. A good illustration of this is Dominique Iogna-Prat’s analysis of the medieval Church, the quintessential medieval institution marrying both hard and soft forms as a ‘total institution’.¹²⁷ On the one hand, we naturally today think of the Church as its buildings and human hierarchies. Iogna-Prat argued, however, that it was only between c.800 and c.1040 (esp. 800–880) that there occurred, within medieval thinking, a basic conflation of churches (ecclesiae) with an idea of The Church (Ecclesia) itself, when Ecclesia as a body could stand for the whole of rightly ordered European society by definition, becoming both ‘container and content’.¹²⁸ From 1050 to 1200 further micro-institutionalizations occurred whereby the Church itself became a person and clearly thought-through answers were offered to how Christians were contained in their churches.¹²⁹ This happened above all, he argued, through the re-ordering of sacramental practices which were increasingly rendered valid by their attachment to physical churches.¹³⁰ Both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ institutionalization occurred but they had a history which was not at all inevitable.

As noted, much work on medieval intellectual thought and ‘institutionalization’ has invariably and intelligibly denoted the formal organizational structures within which that thought was produced: universities and their faculties above all, but also monastic schools, mendicant studia and their attendant organizational structures. As is clear, here we wish to expand, differentiate and integrate ‘institutionalization’ in order to accommodate both organizational forms (universities; faculties; colleges; studia; legal courts) and intellectual practices (dialectic; syllogistic reasoning; quodlibets; disputed questions; commentaries; summae; as well as disciplinary forms). It was the latter which gave intellectual substance and raisons d’être to the former. It was the former which provided a protected, constraining environment for the latter’s development. Even in cases in which intellectual practices developed at arm’s length or free from such organizational-institutional influence, they developed in ways deeply inflected by them (as with the notable generations of lay, multi-disciplinary, politically active Italian scholars of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries).¹³¹ Understanding their differences and the relationships between these two different senses of ‘institutional’ seems to us only to increase our understanding of both.¹³²

One of the aims of this book is to encourage historians to think harder about how these forms shape one other. It is encouraging that important recent works in English, French and German are convergent in doing so.¹³³ Still, it remains a gross, but generally valid, observation that much work on scholasticism has tended to stress either the content (the thought) or the form (the organizational setting in which it was produced) and sometimes the practice (particular intellectual techniques, such as the disputed question), but seldom how one informed the others. We have already argued that this can be illustrated in relation to Southern’s work. Other great historians of scholasticism illustrate the same division of labour. Palémon Glorieux wrote on the ‘hard’ institution of the Sorbonne and on the ‘soft’ institution of quodlibets, and on the ideas of an individual, Jean Gerson, but the levels of analysis tended to separation not integration.¹³⁴ By focusing on the figure of Gerson, Isabel Iribarren demonstrates, in fact, how deeply in Gerson’s own thought intellectual practices meshed with institutional ones through her close reading of his epic poem the Josephina, composed during and at the council of Constance as both a devotional text and a political work of reform. It is necessary now, therefore, to turn to ways of explaining how institutions work.

Articulating institutions

Many analysts of institutionalization risk dizzying heights of abstraction, so it is helpful to start with John Searle’s approach, which does not.¹³⁵ A philosopher, his is an ordinary language tradition via J. L. Austin, not a sociological or anthropological one, although he engages with some of this material.¹³⁶ Searle argues that the fundamental logic underlying all human institutions can be clearly stated. He begins with language as the foundation of institutionalization. ‘Innocent III is a man’, describes a reality (what Searle calls ‘word-to-world fit ↓’) – we describe a world with words. ‘Let us go on crusade’ describes a reality Innocent III hopes to achieve through his words (what Searle calls a ‘world-to-word fit ↑’) – he wants to change the world to match the word. Institutions are different: they point in both directions. With institutions we collectively agree to grant certain functions to certain practices in certain contexts. By allowing this we actually create these powers. Our words change our world. This can be put as ‘X counts as Y in context C’. ‘The Albigensian Crusade is a crusade’ is a nice medieval example (because the standing of non-Holy Land crusades were argued about). To use one of Searle’s, ‘playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord with the rules [of chess]’.¹³⁷ These sets of constitutive rules are fundamental in his explanation: the functions to which we put X (the chess piece) only exist within the constitutive terms of those rules (what counts as a crusade or chess).¹³⁸ Hence Searle defines an institution as ‘a system of constitutive rules, and such a system creates the possibility of institutional facts’.¹³⁹ What seems especially powerful in Searle’s account is the role which social assertion plays (‘X counts as Y’) within a particular context (‘in context C’). As noted, these sorts of speech act combine both word-to-world fit ↓ and world-to-word fit ↑: ‘[T]hese are cases where we change reality to match the propositional content of the speech act and thus achieve world-to-word direction of fit. But, and this is the amazing part, we succeed in so doing because we represent the reality as being so changed’. Such ‘declarations’ (Searle’s name for such speech acts) ‘change the world by declaring that a state of affairs exists and thus bringing that state of affairs into existence’: ‘this is a church’, ‘this is a valid marriage’, ‘this is a quodlibet’, ‘this is a religious order’s rule’ are all examples of this.¹⁴⁰ Searle further states: ‘The phenomena in question are what they are in virtue of being represented as what they are’.¹⁴¹ Searle nicely captures the circular, problematic social nature of this through a quotation from Marx: ‘One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king’.¹⁴² Explaining the ostensibly circular logic through which concrete historical institutions are formed, persist, mutate and die is one of the historian’s great tasks (we suggest). It is, indeed, as the historian John Bossy put it, a ‘social miracle’.¹⁴³ Further (says Searle), all these institutions entail obligations, duties or powers – reasons for doing things which do not depend on our desires. Indeed, Searle suggests, their owning such powers is how to tell whether a phenomenon is actually institutional: it should carry those consequences socially for it to count as such.¹⁴⁴ Emily Corran’s chapter in this volume offers an exemplary instance in the way the institution of private confession produced sophisticated and practical moral thought in trying to systematize and rationalize the issues arising from concrete pastoral problems.

For a historian there are several attractions to Searle’s approach. First, and fundamentally, it makes very clear just how basic institutions are to social life and how important its histories should be. Second, and analytically, it recognizes the role of both power and group consent or acceptance of the institutions. Being able to represent ‘X as Y’ is a fact of power and communication (not of truth) and one which is contingent on others accepting (willingly or not) that it is such. It also enables a group to have a church, or a crusade, or a quodlibet, all of which do jobs within the societies which have them.¹⁴⁵ However, because the status of these things as churches, crusades, or quodlibets is constructed through social acceptance, that status can be gradually acquired, lost, contested, ignored or become redundant (like MacIntyre’s traditions). The institutions do make claims on us – but those claims are not necessarily efficacious; they depend on our recognition of them and the possibilities they offer.¹⁴⁶ Explaining the process of how this happens – and stops happening – is the business of historians; being clearer about what is going on institutionally makes clearer what the general shape of this historical task is.¹⁴⁷ Peter Biller’s chapter in this volume is an exemplary case study of how theological, legal and medical thinking from Paris and Montpellier was transmitted and instrumentalized by Rolando of Cremona into the Dominican studium at Toulouse, where it seems to have played a key role in the early institutionalization of inquisitorial practices against heretics. This occurred through the sorts of ‘declarations’ Searle analyses, although how such processes begin is something theory struggles to clarify.

Establishing institutions: habits, practices, games

Is this only relevant for those institutional objects which are at the ‘hardest’ end of Revel’s spectrum? Not really, since the ‘received’ norms of institutions should be statable at a push (‘Abelard does not behave as an early twelfth-century teacher ought because …’).¹⁴⁸ How does this explain, however, how a group acquires or follows rules when they do not do so consciously? One answer is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games (Sprachspiele). Another is anthropologist-sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (see below). Yet another is Searle’s own idea of the ‘background’.¹⁴⁹ Although it has been the least influential on historians it is also the clearest one with which to start.

Abelard had a background understanding of how to cope with his world and apply his intentions in it: what, in the twelfth century, a city was; what a school was; what private tutoring was; what marriage was; what humiliation was, etc. Like us, he had a background ‘of all those abilities, capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-how that enable us to carry out our intentions and apply our intentional states generally’.¹⁵⁰ Rule-following at this level, Searle suggests, is an unhelpful way of thinking about what is going on: ‘[W]e should not say that the man who is at home in his society … is at home because he has mastered the rules of the society, but rather that the man has developed a set of capacities and abilities that render him at home in the society; and he has developed those abilities because those are the rules of his society’.¹⁵¹ This looks like a problem but it is precisely what makes institutions so invaluable socially. They enable order and reduce effort. (This is also why it is enormously easy to take them for granted.) The mathematician Alfred North Whitehead’s arguments about mathematical notation seem exactly applicable to institutions:

This runs in tandem, too, with Luhmann’s thinking, which stresses the role of social systems in reducing the white noise of human life into some sort of bounded, manageable order.

Searle’s stress on intuited background understanding meshes very well with the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, especially the latter’s ideas of practice and habitus. Bourdieu’s habitus operates at the same level as Searle’s background and, while more sociologically concrete, can be analytically diffuse. It is the internal logic produced and shared within a given social group, a reflex logic which springs from and reproduces the social structures which have produced it and in turn produces a set of social practices whose logic it structures (e.g., marriage, inheritance, kin relations). For its adherents this shared subjective logic produces an ostensible objectivity in the norms and practices they apply. It is a shared subjective grid through which the world is objectively and practically ordered.¹⁵³ To seek to represent the resulting social practices theoretically is to misunderstand their essentially practical, concrete nature for those enacting them. The practice is the only theory one needs. Hence the religion of medieval knights was a practical, corporal one of ritual practices – and such logic is best ‘seized in the act’.¹⁵⁴

The example of the medieval knights is one Bourdieu himself borrowed from historians; and, in fact, he ostensibly derived his central idea of habitus from Erwin Panofsky’s argument that there was a deep underlying concordance behind the logic of both gothic architecture and scholastic thought and that this derived from the shared habitus of those who thought this architecture and reason.¹⁵⁵ Habitus itself was a technical, but straightforward, term of scholastic art, defined by Aquinas as ‘principally bringing order to an act’.¹⁵⁶ Panofsky applied this. Scholastic thought sought clarification; gothic architecture, transparency. Scholastic thought sought definitional differentiation and distinction; gothic architecture spatial differentiation of form. Scholastic thought sought the reconciliation of received authorities; gothic architecture sought that of authoritative buildings and motifs.¹⁵⁷ It is this underlying logic which led thinkers and architects to say of their institutions, ‘this counts as a summa’, ‘this counts as a church’ (‘X counts as Y in context C’). While striking and evocative, Panofsky’s parallelisms risk oversimplification.

A powerful and still useful way of thinking about how this happens comes from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein might say there was a match here between the pattern of the ‘language game’ (Sprachspiel) played by scholastics and gothic architects. He, too, famously thought about these issues with a medieval (or late antique) example: Augustine’s account of how children acquire language from the Confessions, which Wittgenstein found far too narrow. Wittgenstein suggested that languages are communicative, social games of plural types whose tacit rules can be extraordinarily complicated yet navigable. ‘The limits of my language’, he had argued, ‘mean the limits of my world’: the games construct the world’s meaning for its participants.¹⁵⁸ Language games only makes sense within their own terms and as an ensemble rather than a linear series: the elements of the game hang together. Language, like institutions, builds a cumulative, enveloping world:¹⁵⁹

The coherence of Wittgenstein’s language-game institutions comes from how they hang together and we are entirely justified in scaling them up into institutional registers (just as Searle does).¹⁶¹ Anthropologists argue that social institutions work in precisely this way, too. Mary Douglas suggested that the reliability of social institutions arose from strong connections between groups’ ideas of their world and those institutions themselves: ‘for a convention [say a form of worship] to turn into a legitimate social institution [say a church] it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it [say, ‘this idea of right worship confirms and conforms to this idea of a church]’.¹⁶² Returning to Panofsky, his account of gothic architecture and scholastic thought suggested that the homology between two quite distinct traditions can derive from a hidden water table they both share. The logic of one language game (scholastic thought) informed another one (gothic architecture) in that society. This is, in practice, a version of what David d’Avray has elsewhere called the ‘weak Zeitgeist principle’: without projecting a singular spirit of the age one can perfectly respectably examine actual structural similarities between historical phenomena.¹⁶³

***

Panofsky’s analysis brought together institutions ‘hard’ (church) and ‘soft’ (scholastic textual practices) – two very different ends of the institutional spectrum. Thus it fits entirely with our argument in this introduction and the volume as a whole that institutional history should occupy itself with the full range of the institutional spectrum. Without re-summarizing ourselves, what we have sought to do here is to offer an introduction to major, useful ideas about how institutionalization, individualization and intellectual grouping happen. Some are individually familiar to historians, but showing how they can connect with one another helps to strengthen the historian’s analytical arsenal. The chapters which now follow illustrate the explanatory benefits of thinking about the relationship between individuals and institutions more widely.

_____________

* Our thanks to David d’Avray for comments on a earlier draft of this.

¹ See the last quarter of R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), St. Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge, 1963); and the unfinished trilogy on Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (2 vols, Oxford, 1995–2001). For Southern see A. Murray, ‘Richard William Southern’, Proc. Brit. Academy, cxx (2003), 413–42; A. Boureau, ‘Richard Southern: a landscape for a portrait’, Past and Present, clxv (1999), 218–29; and R. Bartlett’s introduction to History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. J. Bartlett (Oxford, 2004), pp. 1–10.

² The quotations are taken from subheadings in the books.

³ I. P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100– 1330 (Cambridge, 2012), ch. 3.

⁴ It would also have included a final, post-medieval ‘renewal’ of scholasticism.

⁵ Southern, Scholastic Humanism, i. 6.

⁶ Southern, Scholastic Humanism, ii. 145.

⁷ Southern, Scholastic Humanism, ii. 152. A synecdoche for what would have been Southern’s later judgement on the happiness of the marriage between learning and government in the 13th century can be found in his Robert Grosseteste: the Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (2nd edn, Oxford, 1992), pp. 270–81, 285–91.

⁸ As volume 3 was previewed on the hardback cover of Scholastic Humanism, ii.

⁹ Scholastic Humanism, ii. 54.

¹⁰ Respectively: Scholastic Humanism, ii. 23, 130, 118.

¹¹ R. W. Southern, ‘The changing role of universities in medieval Europe’, Hist. Research, lx (1987), 133–46, at p. 138.

¹² Southern, Scholastic Humanism, ii. 47, on the biblical Glossa ordinaria.

¹³ A. Boureau, La Raison scolastique (4 vols, Paris, 2006–16); J. Marenbon, ‘Humanism, scholasticism and the school of Chartres’, Internat. Jour. Classical Tradition, vi (2000), 569– 77.

¹⁴ C. König-Pralong, Le bon usage des savoirs (Paris, 2011), pp. 290–4.

¹⁵ Summarizing R. Quinto, Scholastica. Storia di un concetto (Subsidia Mediaevalia Patavina, ii, Padua, 2001), pp. 416–17. See further D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Religious Rationalities: a Weberian Analysis (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 70–6. Translations in this chapter are by the authors unless otherwise specified.

¹⁶ See also Emily Corran’s comments on Quinto in her chapter in this volume at pp. 220, 233–4; and David d’Avray’s comments in his afterword at pp. 271–2.

¹⁷ D’Avray’s comments on preaching in the afterword to this volume at p. 276 may also be thought of in this context.

¹⁸ C. König-Pralong, ‘L’histoire de la philosophie médiévale depuis 1950: méthodes, textes, débats’, Annales, lxiv (2009), 143–69; É. Anheim, A. Lilti and S. van Damme, ‘Quelle Histoire de la philosophie?’, Annales, lxiv (2009), 5–11.

¹⁹ D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 258–9.

²⁰ Given its most ‘institutional’ form in Anglophone historiography in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: from the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg, with E. Stump (Cambridge, 1982); and in a slightly different way in its successor volume The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. R. Pasnau with C. van Dyke (2 vols, Cambridge, 2010).

²¹ N. Gorochov, Naissance de l’université: les Écoles de Paris d’Innocent III à Thomas d’Aquin (v. 1200–v. 1245) (Paris, 2012), p. 23.

²² P. Biller, ‘Intellectuals and the masses: oxen and she-asses in the medieval Church’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. J. H. Arnold (Oxford, 2014), pp. 323–39, at pp. 335–6. See also J. L. Nelson, ‘Organic intellectuals in the Dark Ages?’, History Workshop Jour., lxvi (2008), 1–17 (on Gramsci).

²³ There is plainly work which does this (e.g., R. I. Moore’s), but it seems to us there remains room for further differentiation of intellectuals with respect to different forms of power.

²⁴ J. Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1957). For Gramsci’s further influence here see G. Tabacco, ‘Gli intellettuali del medioevo nel giuoco delle istituzioni e dalle preponderanze sociali’, in Storia d’Italia, Intelletuali e potere, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Annali, iv, Turin, 1981), pp. 7–46.

²⁵ A. Boureau, ‘Intellectuals in the middle ages, 1957–1995’, in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. M. Rubin (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 145–55, at p. 147. For a variant stressing earlier ‘colour’ and plasticity, see F. Rexroth, Fröhliche Scholastik. Die Wissenschaftsrevolution des Mittelalters (Munich, 2018).

²⁶ A. de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1991), pp. 12–13, 349–51. For the role of censure and self-policing in shaping Parisian thought between 1200 and 1250, see Gorochov, Naissance de l’université.

²⁷ Pointed out by Boureau, ‘Intellectuals in the middle ages’, pp. 150–1.

²⁸ See de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, p. 75.

²⁹ König-Pralong, ‘L’histoire de la philosophie médiévale’.

³⁰ J. Marenbon, Le temps, l’éternité et la prescience de Boèce à Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 2005), ch. 6. The quotations are from pp. 164, 168.

³¹ Summarizing J. Marenbon, ‘Why study medieval philosophy?’, in Warum noch Philosophie? Historische, systematische und gesellschaftliche Positionen, ed. M. van Ackeren, T. Kobusch and J. Müller (Berlin/New York, 2011), pp. 65–78, at pp. 66–72.

³² Southern’s ‘author response’ to D. L. d’Avray, ‘Review of Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Volume I: Foundations’, Reviews in History, xiii (1996) <http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/13> [accessed 13 June 2016]. Cf. Gorochov’s reflections in Naissance de l’université, pp. 15–22.

³³ Southern, Robert Grosseteste, p. lvi.

³⁴ Southern, Robert Grosseteste, pp. lix–lx.

³⁵ Southern, Robert Grosseteste, p. xxviii.

³⁶ N. Schulman, ‘Husband, father, bishop? Grosseteste in Paris’, Speculum, lxxii (1997), 330–46.

³⁷ John Marenbon’s article in this volume is an especially subtle exploration of the limits and promise of ‘institutional’ explanations in this spirit.

³⁸ É. Anheim, ‘Le pape et les artistes au milieu du XIVe siècle. Réflexions sur les notions d’actueur et d’institution’, Circé, i (2012) <http://www.revue-circe.uvsq.fr/le-pape-et-les-artistes-au-milieu-du-xive-siecle-reflexions-sur-les-notions-dacteur-et-dinstitution/> [accessed 11 July 2019].

³⁹ É. Anheim, Clément VI au travail. Lire, écrire, prêcher au XIV e siècle (Paris, 2014), p. 352.

⁴⁰ Anheim, ‘Pape et les artistes’, developing an idea of Jean Coste.

⁴¹ Anheim, ‘Pape et les artistes’.

⁴² S. Piron, Dialectique du monstre. Enquête sur Opicino de Canistris (Brussels, 2015), p. 174.

⁴³ Cf. K. Achams’s statement: ‘We are always already in institutions’ (Wir sind immer schon in Institutionen), cited in G. Melville, ‘Institutionen als geschichtswissenschaftliches Thema’, in Institutionen und Geschichte. Theoretische Aspekte und mittelalterliche Befunde, ed. G. Melville (Norm und Struktur, i, Cologne, 1992), pp. 1–24, at p. 17.

⁴⁴ U. Kypta, Die Autonomie der Routine. Wie im 12. Jahrhundert das englische Schatzamt entstand (Historische Semantik, xxi, Göttingen, 2014). What follows draws on J. Sabapathy, ‘Review, Ulla Kypta, Die Autonomie der Routine. Wie im 12. Jahrhundert das englische Schatzamt entstand’, German Hist. Institute London Bull., xxxviii.1 (2016), 40–6.

⁴⁵ F.-X. Putallaz, Insolente liberté. Controverses et condamnations au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1995), pp. 58–64, 82–91. For the intellectual coherence of Tempier’s 1277 condemnations, see S. Piron, ‘Le plan de l’évêque. Pour une critique interne de la condamnation du 7 mars 1277’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, lxxviii (2011), 383–415.

⁴⁶ J. Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170–1300 (Oxford, 2014), with wider historiographical comment on the ‘new administrative history’ at pp. 10–19. Important reflections on institutions and intellectuals include É. Anheim, ‘L’histoire intellectuelle du moyen âge, entre pratiques sociales et débats doctrinaux. Revue critique de la collection ‘Vestigia’ (Éditions du Cerf )’, Médiévales, xxxvii (1999), 151–63; and É. Anheim and S. Piron, ‘Le travail intellectuel au moyen âge’, Revue de Synthèse, cxxix (2008), 481–84, part of a special issue which we have found very helpful.

⁴⁷ One product was: Diverging Paths? The Shapes of Power and Institutions in Medieval Christendom and Islam, ed. J. Hudson and A. Rodríguez (The Medieval Mediterranean, ci, Leiden/Boston, 2014).

⁴⁸ As was defined on the project website <http://pimic.eu/what/>. This is no longer live. For one successor development see the St Andrews Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research <https://ilcr.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk> [accessed 11 July 2019].

⁴⁹ Kypta, Autonomie der Routine.

⁵⁰ J. Berenbeim, The Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England (Toronto, 2015).

⁵¹ M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (3rd edn, Chichester, 2013 [1979]).

⁵² A valuable recent contribution is L’art médiéval du registre: Chancelleries royales et princières, ed. O. Guyotjeannin (Paris, 2018).

⁵³ The debate and positions are set out in Cathars in Question, ed. A. Sennis (Woodbridge, 2016).

⁵⁴ For the 1860s see, of course, J. Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1990), on which see below; for the 2010s see, e.g., L. Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: the Origins of Western Liberalism (London, 2014). One exception to this general rule is J. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005).

⁵⁵ de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, pp. 65–8.

⁵⁶ de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, p. 67.

⁵⁷ de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, p. 356.

⁵⁸ A. Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, trans. K. Judelson (Oxford, 1995), p. 130.

⁵⁹ Discussed in Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, p. 143; M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: a Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), pp. 18, 339–40.

⁶⁰ Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, p. 142.

⁶¹ Clanchy, Abelard; see also J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997), p. 36.

⁶² Clanchy, Abelard, p. 332.

⁶³ C. W. Bynum, ‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual?’, Jour. Eccles. Hist., xxxi (1980), 1–17. See also C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (Toronto, 1972), with which Bynum partly disagreed. Morris responded in ‘Individualism in twelfth-century religion: some further reflections’, Jour. Eccles. Hist., xxxi (1980), 195–206.

⁶⁴ Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, p. 144.

⁶⁵ See Bynum, ‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual?’.

⁶⁶ The point about reductive and essentializing characterizations of what Christianity inherently represses or enables is also made by J.-C. Schmitt, ‘La “découverte de l’individu”: une fiction historiographique’, in J.-C. Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps. Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Paris, 2001), pp. 241–62, at p. 246.

⁶⁷ Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, p. 150.

⁶⁸ This is to compress Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, pp. 98–119. See also Schmitt, ‘“Découverte de l’individu”’, pp. 242–4.

⁶⁹ Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 98.

⁷⁰ Contrast the reading of the ‘Montaillou’ deposition material of J. Fournier (e.g., on Arnaud de Verniolles) in J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, Pa., 2001), ch. 5; and E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou. Village occitan, de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1975).

⁷¹ Piron, Dialectique du monstre.

⁷² L. Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’ideologie moderne (Paris, 1983), stresses the modern form and its medieval origins. See also D. Iogna-Prat, ‘Introduction générale: la question de l’individu à l’épreuve du Moyen Âge’, in L’individu au Moyen Âge. Individuation et individualisation avant la modernité, ed. B.-M. Bedos-Rezak and D. Iogna-Prat (Paris, 2005), pp. 7–32.

⁷³ E.g., R. G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 2012).

⁷⁴ É. Anheim, ‘Une lecture de Pétrarque. Individu, écriture, et dévotion’, in Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat, L’individu au Moyen Âge, pp. 187–209, at pp. 206–7.

⁷⁵ Bynum, ‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual?’, p. 3. See also Schmitt, ‘“Découverte de l’individu”’, p. 255. Bynum was partly responding to Morris, Discovery of the Individual. Morris’s response in ‘Individualism in twelfth-century religion’ (esp. pp. 199–205) generally accepted the importance of thinking about groups. Cf. Rexroth, Fröhliche Scholastik, for stress on group relations and their instrumental affinities in transforming early scholasticism.

⁷⁶ Iogna-Prat, ‘La question de l’individu à l’épreuve du Moyen Âge’.

⁷⁷ For an interesting demonstration, see G. Rosser, The Art of Solidarity: Guilds in England 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015).

⁷⁸ Bynum, ‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual?, p. 16.

⁷⁹ R. W. Southern, ‘Beryl Smalley (1905–1984)’, Proc. Brit. Academy, lxxii (1986), 455–71, including the photo of that group; repr. in Bartlett, History and Historians, pp. 235–9, at p. 238.

⁸⁰ Personal information from Michael Clanchy and R. W. Southern, ‘Vivian Hunter Galbraith (1889–1976)’, Proc. Brit. Academy, lxiv (1978), 397–425; repr. in Bartlett, History and Historians, pp. 168–92, at p. 191. See also R. I. Moore, ‘Southern and the sinews of power’ <http://rimoore.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/R.W.-Southern.pdf> [accessed 11 July 2019].

⁸¹ R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), p. 29.

⁸² F. Van Steenberghen, La Philosophie au XIIIe siècle (2nd edn, Louvain, 1991), pp. 169– 76, 405–11.

⁸³ This paragraph and the last compress S. P. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 2 vols, Leiden, 2001), i. 1–10.

⁸⁴ For reflection by members of the ‘Cambridge School’, see Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. A. Brett, J. Tully and H. Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge, 2006); for Annales see, e.g., S. Clark, ‘The Annales school’, in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1990 [1985]), pp. 177–98.

⁸⁵ Marenbon, ‘Humanism, scholasticism and the school of Chartres’. Rexroth’s Fröhliche Scholastik is an interesting recent interpretation stressing a more colourful, flexible, ‘joyful’ scholasticism between c. 1070 and 1250, in contrast to the straitjacketing ‘conservative revolution’ which made a golden cage for university scholasticism (Rexroth, Fröhliche Scholastik, pp. 20, 320–50).

⁸⁶ W. J. Courtenay, ‘Magisterial authority, philosophical identity, and the growth of Marian devotion: the seals of Parisian masters, 1190–1308’, Speculum, xci (2016), 63–114, at pp. 75–7.

⁸⁷ C. J. Mews and T. Zahora, ‘Remembering the last things and regulating behaviour in the early fourteenth century: from the De consideratione novissimorum to the Speculum morale’, Speculum, xc (2015), 960–94. See also B. Kent, Virtues of the Will: the Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995).

⁸⁸ Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance, ii. 571–2.

⁸⁹ R. L. Friedman, Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: the Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans, 1230 – 1350 (Leiden, 2013), pp. 21–2.

⁹⁰ C. J. Mews, ‘Communities of learning and the dream of synthesis: the schools and colleges of thirteenth-century Paris’, in Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Identity in Europe, 1150–1500, ed. J. N. Crossley and C. J. Mews (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 109–35, at p. 112. See also Y. Iwakuma and S. Ebbesen, ‘Logico-theological schools from the second half of the 12th century: a list of sources’, Vivarium, xxx (1992), 173–210.

⁹¹ S. E. Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris: Theologians, Education and Society 1215 – 1248 (Cambridge, 2014) makes this point and affirms the significance of master–pupil intellectual filiation in the theology faculty.

⁹² Mews, ‘Communities of learning’, p. 135. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre on modern intellectual disagreements and affiliations: ‘It is always important not to confuse the consequences of intellectual positions with those of institutional arrangements. What appears to be an impasse resulting from theoretical commitments of those involved in debate may sometimes, in part at least, be one brought about by institutional arrangements and social habits’ (A. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London, 1990), p. 6).

⁹³ B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1983); A. Boureau, L’Empire du livre. Pour une histoire du savoir scolastique (1200–1380) (La Raison scolastique, ii, Paris, 2007).

⁹⁴ On the Sorbonne’s group identity see J. Sabapathy ‘Regulating community and society at the Sorbonne in the late thirteenth century’, in Legalism: Justice and Community, ed. F. Pirie and J. Scheele (Oxford, 2014), pp. 151–76; and D. Gabriel, La ‘Maison des pauvres maîtres’ de Robert de Sorbon. Les débuts de la Sorbonne (1254–1274) (Paris, 2014).

⁹⁵ Mews, ‘Communities of learning’, passim.

⁹⁶ E.g., Lieux de savoir, ed. C. Jacob (2 vols, Paris, 2007–11), i: Espaces et communautés (Paris, 2007); ii: Les mains de l’intellect (Paris, 2011). For a medieval application with this model partly in mind, see C. J. Mews, ‘Communautés de savoirs. Écoles et collèges à Paris au xiiie siècle’, Revue de synthèse, cxxix, 6th ser., iv (2008), 485–507.

⁹⁷ M. Mulsow, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une constellation philosophique? Propositions pour une analyse des réseaux intellectuels’, Annales, lxiv (2009), 81–109, at pp. 84–8.

⁹⁸ P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. P. Collier (Cambridge, 1988). In so far as it is sociological, Bourdieu’s analysis is less personal and more structural than the historical reconstitution of particular intellectual constellations Mulsow has in mind.

⁹⁹ R. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: a Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), sketches the approach and key terms at pp. 1–53, esp. at pp. 20–4, 28–9, 35–6.

¹⁰⁰ For Collins’s map of Franciscan/Dominican rivalries, see Sociology of Philosophies, p. 470. Cf. Mulsow’s comments on Collins’s Sociology of Philosophies in Mulsow, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une constellation philosophique?’, pp. 90–3.

¹⁰¹ Mulsow, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une constellation philosophique?’, pp. 98–9.

¹⁰² E.g., J. Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre (Cambridge, 1981); D. E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, n.s., xiv, Cambridge, 1969); M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999), E. Coccia and S. Piron, ‘Poésie, sciences et politique. Une génération d’intellectuels italiens (1290–1330)’, Revue de synthèse, cxxix, 6th ser., iv (2008), 549–86.

¹⁰³ For a critique, see J. Coleman, ‘MacIntyre and Aquinas’, in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. J. Horton and S. Mendus (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 65–90.

¹⁰⁴ A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory (2nd edn, London, 1985), p. 222. J. Porter argued he does not define the term, but this seems a de facto definition (J. Porter, ‘Tradition in the recent work of Alasdair MacIntyre’, in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. M. C. Murphy (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, Cambridge, 2003), pp. 38–69, at p. 38).

¹⁰⁵ These ideas are developed in MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 59– 66.

¹⁰⁶ MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 65, 116.

¹⁰⁷ MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 117.

¹⁰⁸ F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge, 1994).

¹⁰⁹ For these arguments, see MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 32–57. B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J., 2002) is a very sophisticated genealogist’s case.

¹¹⁰ MacIntyre’s successive accounts of this conflict and the reconciliation of it are found in After Virtue, pp. 165–80; A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, 1988), pp. 164–208, but also chs. VII–IX; and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 82–126.

¹¹¹ MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 124–5.

¹¹² See Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand Miroir du monde, ed. M. Paulmier-Foucart and M.-C. Duchenne (Turnhout, 2004); and Atelier Vincent de Beauvais <https://ateliervdb.hypotheses.org> [accessed 11 July 2019]. See, more widely, Die Enzyklopädie im Wandel vom Hochmittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit. Akten des Kolloquiums des Projekts D im Sonderforschungsbereich 231 (29.11.–1.12.1996), ed. C. Meier-Staubach (Munich, 2002); B. Ribémont, Littérature et encyclopédies du Moyen Âge (Orléans, 2002); B. Ribémont, La ‘Renaissance’ du XIIe siècle et l’encyclopédisme (Paris, 2002); and the SourcEncyMe project <http://sourcencyme.irht.cnrs.fr> [acccessed 11 July 2019].

¹¹³ D. L. d’Avray, Rationalities in History: a Weberian Essay in Comparison (Cambridge, 2010); and Medieval Religious Rationalities: a Weberian Analysis (Cambridge, 2010). The first volume develops the analytical model which the second volume applies. D’Avray noted the similarity of MacIntyre’s traditions with his conviction rationalities in Rationalities in History, p. 100.

¹¹⁴ Following d’Avray, Medieval Religious Rationalities, pp. 21–3.

¹¹⁵ d’ Avray, Medieval Religious Rationalities, ch. 2: ‘Medieval values: structures’.

¹¹⁶ A philosophical presentation is G. A. Cohen, ‘Paradoxes of conviction’, in G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re so Rich? (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 7–19, discussed by d’Avray in Rationalities in History, pp. 66, 73.

¹¹⁷ E.g., I. Iribarren, Durandus of St. Pourçain: a Dominican Theologian in the Shadow of Aquinas (Oxford, 2005). On the Franciscan Richard de Mediavilla, see S. Piron, ‘Franciscan quodlibeta in southern studia and at Paris, 1280–1300’, in Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: the Thirteenth Century, ed. C. Schabel (Leiden, 2006), pp. 403–38, at pp. 417–18.

¹¹⁸ Alongside Friedman, Intellectual Traditions, see B. Gaspar, ‘The immaculate conception, 1100–1700: para-magisterial powers and their politics’ (unpublished University College London PhD thesis, 2012) on Franciscan and Dominican disputes over the immaculate conception; and A. Fitzpatrick on the issue of the unicity versus plurality of forms in Franciscan and Dominican thought (A. Fitzpatrick, ‘Mendicant order politics and the status of Christ’s shed blood’, Hist. Research, lxxxv (2012), 210–27).

¹¹⁹ See d’Avray, Rationalities in History, pp. 70–7.

¹²⁰ Useful studies are: N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz Jr., with D. Baecker (Stanford, Calif., 1995); N. Luhmann, ‘Differentiation of Society’, Canadian Jour. Sociology, ii (1977), 29–53; R. Muench, Sociological Theory (3 vols, Chicago, Ill., 1994), iii: Development since the 1960s, pp. 273–95.

¹²¹ Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 2 for a diagram of the taxonomy of systems.

¹²² Melville, ‘Institutionen als geschichtswissenschaftliches Thema’, pp. 18–20.

¹²³ G. Melville, Die Welt der mittelalterlichen Klöster. Geschichte und Lebensformen (Munich, 2012), pp. 294–6; trans. now by J. Mixson as The World of Medieval Monasticism: its History and Forms of Life (Collegeville, Penn., 2016), pp. 343–5.

¹²⁴ Melville, Welt der mittelalterlichen Klöster, pp. 290–4, summarizing his earlier work (= Melville, World of Medieval Monasticism, pp. 338–42).

¹²⁵ J. Revel, ‘L’Institution et le social’, in J. Revel, Un Parcours critique. Douze exercices d’histoire totale (Paris, 2006), pp. 85–110, at p. 86. For a parallel analysis, see Melville, ‘Institutionen als geschichtswissenschaftliches Thema’.

¹²⁶ Revel, ‘Institution et le social’, p. 106.

¹²⁷ The phrase partly originates in M. Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïquès’, L’Année Sociologique, n.s., i (1923–4), 30–186, at p. 179. It was developed further by Erving Goffman ( Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York, 1961); see also Blaise Dufal’s comments in ‘The fathers of scholasticism’ in this volume). Dominique Iogna-Prat borrows the phrase from Anita Guerreau-Jalabert (D. Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200) (Paris, 2006), p. 265). See A. Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘L’ ecclesia médiévale, une institution totale’, in Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Âge en France et en Allemagne. Actes des colloques de Sèvres (1997) et Göttingen (1998), ed. J.-C. Schmitt and O. G. Oexle (Paris, 2002), pp. 219–26. For religious orders as total institutions, see G. Melville, ‘L’institutionalité médiévale dans sa pluridimensionalité’, in Schmitt and Oexle, Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Âge, pp. 243–64.

¹²⁸ Iogna-Prat, Maison Dieu, passim, esp. pp. 107–8, 155, 309–14, 613–15.

¹²⁹ Iogna-Prat, Maison Dieu, pp. 314, 323 and ch. 6.

¹³⁰ Iogna-Prat, Maison Dieu, chs. 8–9.

¹³¹ E.g., de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge; Coccia and Piron, ‘Poésie, sciences et politique’.

¹³² Interesting analyses of medieval social and religious life in a parallel vein are being developed by I. Forrest, ‘The transformation of visitation in thirteenth-century England’, Past and Present, cci (2013), 3–38; ‘Power and the people in thirteenth-century England’, Thirteenth Century England, xv (2015), 17–33; Trustworthy Men: how Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton, N.J., 2018).

¹³³ Respectively, Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris; Gorochov, Naissance de l’université; and, most recently – as this volume was being edited – Rexroth, Fröhliche Scholastik. A mould-breaking work of cross-thinking remains A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978).

¹³⁴ E.g., P. Glorieux, Aux origines de la Sorbonne (2 vols, Paris, 1965–6); P. Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique (2 vols, Paris, 1925–35); J. Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux, (10 vols, Paris, 1960–73).

¹³⁵ Particularly useful are J. R. Searle, Intentionality: an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 141–59; The Structure of Social Reality (London, 1995); ‘What is an institution?’, Jour. Institutional Economics, i (2005), 1–22; Making the Social World: the Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford, 2010). For discussion of Searle, see Searle, Making the Social World, pp. xi–xii; the whole issue of the journal Anthropological Theory, vi (1) (2006); Tracés, xvii (2009), the issue entitled Que faire des institutions?, esp. the interview at pp. 243–58. We sketch here only those parts most relevant for historical analysis.

¹³⁶ J. R. Searle, ‘Lukes and “substantive social scientific work”’, Anthropological Theory, vi (2006), 122–5.

¹³⁷ Searle, Structure of Social Reality, p. 28.

¹³⁸ For functions and the status we assign them, see Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 58–60, 94–5; Structure of Social Reality, pp. 13–23.

¹³⁹ Searle, Making the Social World, p. 10; Structure of Social Reality, pp. 54–5.

¹⁴⁰ Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 11–12 (the examples are ours); this can only be done with language, according to Searle (pp. 68–9). On the deontology internal to language for which Searle argued, see Making the Social World, pp. 80–6. It was a criticism of Austin’s approach to speech acts that it did not attend to their social context (P. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980), p. 54).

¹⁴¹ Searle, Making the Social World, p. 85. For parallel lines of medieval thought which had implications for phenomena such as the sacraments, see I. Rosier-Catach, La parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré (Paris, 2004).

¹⁴² K. Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (3 vols, London, 1976), i. 149 n. (the section on the commodity and the relative form of value); quoted by Searle, Making the Social World, p. 107.

¹⁴³ J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 57–75; see also J. Bossy, ‘The mass as a social institution 1200–1700’, Past and Present, c (1983), 29–61.

¹⁴⁴ These are known as ‘deontic’ powers in the jargon (Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 91–2, 105–6). On desire-independent reasons, see Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 123–32.

¹⁴⁵ Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 105–6, 118–19, 123–32.

¹⁴⁶ Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 140–1; Searle, Construction of Social Reality, pp. 117–19.

¹⁴⁷ In Making the Social World Searle does go on to explain certain ‘big’ institutions like the state (pp. 160–98), but as he becomes more concrete his examples – to a historian – seem to include more value judgements (from a modern, secular, liberal, democratic perspective) and therefore become less historically useful, generally speaking.

¹⁴⁸ Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 158 and 167.

¹⁴⁹ Searle argued that he, Bourdieu and Wittgenstein mean the same thing (Construction of Social Reality, p. 132). Wittgenstein himself talks about the background (Hintergrund) but Searle means something much wider in their affinity. For the Hintergrund, see L. Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit/On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. P. and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1974 [1969]), §§ 94, 461; Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte (4th edn, Chichester, 2009), §§ 102, 422.

¹⁵⁰ Searle, Making the Social World, pp. 31, 155–60; Searle, Construction of Social Reality, pp. 127–47.

¹⁵¹ Searle, Construction of Social Reality, pp. 143–7.

¹⁵² A. N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (Oxford, 1948 [1911]), pp. 41–2; in the same vein but a different discipline, see M. Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986), pp. 76–7 on energy-saving.

¹⁵³ Bourdieu, Sens pratique, pp. 87–109; and in relation to Béarnaise inheritance practices, p. 270.

¹⁵⁴ Bourdieu, Sens pratique, pp. 152–65, quotation at p. 155. The example of the knights is borrowed by Bourdieu from G. Duby, Temps des cathedrals (Paris, 1976), p. 155 n. There are useful comments on ritual at pp. 161–4. The stress on practice is entirely consonant with Searle’s. Practices are also important in MacIntyre’s thinking but they enact particular virtues for him: MacIntyre After Virtue, pp. 187–91, 275–7. Cf. also Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit, § 601; Philosophische Untersuchungen, §§ 150–5.

¹⁵⁵ E. Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, trans. and afterword P. Bourdieu (Paris, 1967), pp. 142, 151–67 (Bourdieu’s gloss). On Panofsky’s thesis today, see P. Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350 (New Haven, Conn., 2014), passim and particularly pp. 43–4, 50, 142, 278.

¹⁵⁶ Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 4, a. 3c., cited by Panofsky, Architecture gothique, p. 83, although in a slightly different form. Panofsky did not invest the term with the same explanatory power as Bourdieu (Panofsky’s original English was ‘mental habitudes’).

¹⁵⁷ Panofsky, Architecture gothique, pp. 83–7, 102, 117–21.

¹⁵⁸ Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, § 5.6.

¹⁵⁹ Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen. Specifying these general features in the work is almost pointless but see §§ 25–32, 150–5. A critique of the transposition of such terms to topics such as religion or science is G. Graham, Wittgenstein and Natural Religion (Oxford, 2014), ch. 3, esp. pp. 35–42. Graham’s critique of this over-interpretation seems more justified in relation to the uses made of Lebensform [form of life] compared to Sprachspiele. However, since, following Bernard Williams, Wittgenstein’s use of ‘language game’ was ‘notoriously generous’, it does seem to permit the application of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to historical/empirical material (B. Williams, ‘Wittgenstein and idealism’, in B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 144–63, at pp. 154 and 155–6).

¹⁶⁰ Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit, §§ 139–142; discussed by d’Avray in Rationalities in History, p. 175 n. 19

¹⁶¹ Wittgenstein says so: Philosophische Untersuchungen, § 7.

¹⁶² Douglas, How Institutions Think, p. 46. The square brackets are the editors’; see above the discussion of Iogna-Prat’s Maison Dieu.

¹⁶³ Since this very useful idea of d’Avray has been insufficiently noted, it is worth quoting (it refers to E. H. Gombrich’s 1967 lecture ‘In search of cultural history’): ‘Taken in this strong sense, the Zeitgeist is a sort of central principle to which the various aspects of a period’s culture all lead back – an essence, as it were, in which art, religion, customs, politics, etc. all really participate. If one is not a conscious or unconscious Hegelian there seems no reason why this should be the case, and Gombrich suggested that cultural historians would do better to look for cultural “syndromes”, such as the association at a particular time of anti-realistic painting with Catholicism. Since there is no intrinsic relation between the style and the religion this is quite different from the search for essential structural similarities between apparently diverse phenomena … Gombrich remarked that to criticize the Zeitgeist principle proper is not “to deny that such structural likenesses between various aspects of a period may be found to be interesting”; and by the “weak Zeitgeist principle” I mean no more than this. There is no “iron law of such isomorphism” (that is, of structural similarity), and of course “ages” do not have “essences”. So far as periods are concerned, almost everyone now believes in a plurality of forms. When a structural similarity emerges empirically, however, it need not be ignored, and there is indeed a sort of “isomorphism” between the relation of secularity to eschatology in the sermons and in the political world around 1300’ (D. L. d’Avray, Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 223–4).