America's Mediaeval Academy
Tatlock, John S. P.
April 21, THE COMMONWEAL 653 AMERICA'S MEDIAEVAL ACADEMY By JOHN S. P. TATLOCK EVERYONE likes romance. Many people who look sensible live on it, and the most hardboiled of us may...
...The world has wished to keep the middle-ages as a romantic playground...
...For a century and a half the middle-ages have meant romance...
...a more prosaic and workaday one, which has been partly realized already...
...Their literature makes easy that willing suspension of disbelief which, as Coleridge says, constitutes poetic faith...
...Is romance to be driven out of the middle-ages by these scholars with clipped mustaches and rubbertired spectacles...
...But one man has been working his plot regardless of his neighbors...
...The president is Professor E. K. Rand of Harvard, a mediaeval as well as classical Latinist...
...As we know them through their own art and the modern art inspired by it, they seem picturesque and adventurous, and release us from the cold fetters of fact...
...We see ornamental people doing decorative things for motives which we only half understand...
...and the clerk is Dr...
...But some, less indolent, have wished to learn the truth about the ages which have charmed them so...
...What about the jungle-grown temples and pyramids of Honduras and Cambodia, the savage solidity of Copan and the fantastic grace of AngkorVat...
...We like to stop the night there now and then...
...Large enterprises are needed, to be planned by a few and executed by many —dictionaries, bibliographies, editions, series of studies...
...They are only playing puss-in-the-corner with her...
...They represent universities from Massachusetts to California, Harvard and Chicago especially, and such branches of mediaeval learning as philosophy, history, language, literature, and art...
...Whether students of litera^ ture or of history are the right hand of mediaeval study we are not prepared to say, but the evangelical injunction has been well observed not to let your right hand know what your left hand does...
...F. P. Magoun of Harvard University...
...a boyish liking for Ivanhoe and cathedrals has made many a man into an historian...
...A group of men has lately seen anpther vision, a 654 THE COMMONWEAL April 21, 1926 vision for the future...
...The moderate dues of an active member include a subscription to Speculum...
...Maay a man has...
...The romantic interest in the middle-ages which became common a century and a half ago, has borne a goodly fruit of scholarship...
...there are the desert-buried cities of Turkestan, with palm-leaf copies of the Buddhist scriptures preserved for centuries under the dead sand...
...Just so the French used to be disposed of as a people fond of frogs' legs and dancing...
...Perhaps no one knows enough yet about some of these even to spin romance, only enough to stand speechless a moment and then forget...
...They would rather have their half-acre in the Middlesex of the Roman Forum than an empire in the mediaeval Utopia, and chant: "Better twenty years of Athens than a cycle of Camelot...
...We find devotion to an ideal more frankly and intensely expressed than in the modern world...
...a touch might release incalculable powers for bane or blessing...
...But beyond even our family interest, it will illuminate us quite as much to see history as a whole as to see the outer universe as a whole...
...unless he is an abandoned sentimentalist, he will sacrifice his ideal picture to know the actuality...
...The editorin-chief is Professor Rand, and the managing editor is Dr...
...Its announced purposes are: "to conduct, encourage, promote, and support research, publication, and instruction in mediaeval records, literature, languages, arts, afchaeology, history, philosophy, science, life, and all other aspects of mediaeval civilization by publications, by research and by such other means as may be desirable, and to hold property for such purpose...
...It publishes not only the fruits of close scholarship, but also such fresh interpretations of larger matters and such fresh glimpses of mediaeval literature, art, thought, and life as concern the active-minded layman as well as the special student...
...Information may be obtained from the office of The Mediaeval Academy of America, 248 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts...
...But even if we could—the mediaevals are our own ancestors according to the flesh, and the mind and spirit as well...
...The most classic-minded of eighteenth-century bishops sported his Augustan wig between his mediaeval mitre and cope...
...And the task calls for cooperation...
...The mediaeval historian has often been better acquainted with the work of the modern historian than with that of the student of mediaeval literature...
...Have no fear, we shall know all there is to know long before romance is banished from the middle-ages...
...When we come a little closer to mediaeval life as it actually was, we still find it picturesque and adventurous...
...The central language of the middle*ages was Latin, in Latin are preserved most of its records, and in Latin flowed the central current of its intellectual life...
...Professor Ryan, of the philosophy department of the Catholic University of America...
...Mediaeval society, more unified in aim and spirit than modern,, needs to be understood on all sides to be understood at all...
...The Mediaeval Academy of America was incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts in December, 1925...
...what they realized they ought to learn about and didn't want to, they dismissed as unimportant...
...Much of the Church's usage and organization, in origin older than mediaeval* has come to us in mediaeval forms...
...The blurring of the whole middle period of man's history by ignorance and prejudice and sentimentalism has given us a false picture of human nature and the trend of human events...
...Writers whose interests began with the renaissance yielded to a common temptation...
...Mediaeval studies have long received the cold shoulder from one group of men who are peculiarly qualified to advance them...
...the vice-presidents are Professor Manly of Chicago, Professor Haskins of Harvard, and Professor Willard of Colorado...
...People got their ideas from Bacon and John Addington Symonds...
...Their architecture, by springing column and flying arch, lead* our eye up into dim vaults...
...sub invocatione Sancti Bernardi" (may I say...
...When it has sufficient endowment it will afford subventions for promising work...
...What about the mysterious colossal images on Easter Island...
...The Academy has already established an organ, Speculum, a journal of mediaeval studies, the first issue of which appeared in January, 1926...
...This is the port of rest from troublous toyle, The worldes sweet inn from paine and wearisome turmoyle...
...turned botanist because of a childhood love of flowers, or lived to be railway president became he once liked to push tin locomotives about...
...So the world has persisted in not taking the middleages seriously, and has been content with a few catchwords of knowledge about them...
...However far we push the realm of light into the vast dark, there will always be the penumbra, which is the realm of romance...
...The underlying conceptions and forms of the law are mediaeval, and for the legal scholar the middle-ages have been not a romantic playground but a familiar part of the real world of sealing-wax and sign-manual...
...and Professor Porter of Harvard, eminent in the study of mediaeval art...
...yet most classical scholars (with some notable exceptions) have preferred to disregard everything later than Saint Augustine...
...Even in the middle-ages, every old matter explained reveals three new unknown ones...
...We cannot sweep it away, however much plain truth we may discover...
...There are other forms of membership, involving a contribution to endowment...
...We do not like the middle*age$ the less when they clash with pur idea of common sense...
...For years all that most people knew about mediaeval philosophy is that it was divided over nominalism an4 realism (whatever those might be) and was said to have debated how many angels could stand on the point of a needle...
...the treasurer is John Nicholas Brown of Providence...
...Beyond even this is the preciousness of things which the middle-ages stand for and which we see slipping away day by day...
...The officers of the Academy include not only professional scholars, but men of liberal culture in other pursuits, including one of the most distinguished of American architects and one of the most scholarly and prominent of publishers...
...Many people who look sensible live on it, and the most hardboiled of us may privily indulge a weakness for it now and then...
...It would seem that anything might happen in the middle-ages...
...and Professor Coffman of Boston University, a fruitful student of mediaeval Latin...
...Membership in the Academy is open to anybody anywhere who is interested in its purposes and is nominated by a member of the corporation...
...Ralph Adams Cram of Boston...
...With their tales, fictitious or real, of magic and marvel and miracle, we fancy their life as like being in the next room to a huge dynamo...
...There are the palaces of Mycenae and Crete, as silent now as after the departure of the latest recruit for Troy...
...The first issue contained, for example, articles on the spread of ideas in the middleages, on the poems ascribed to the Emperor Frederick II, and on public reading of new works in mediaeval universities, besides short reviews of significant new books in the mediaeval field...
...Never mind...
...They seize one of her refuges, but she will slip into others, which are opening all the time...
...We should like to draw near them and know them, like a child with a long-lost parent...
...it rests and refreshes us, and perhaps opens our eyes to realities or, at any rate, possibilities which we overlook on our matter-of-fact day's journey...
...Professor Paetow of California, a writer on mediaeval education and bibliography...
...the more since it has reluctantly accepted the word of the learned that the Romans and Greeks in some ways were wiser than we...
...Figures dancing to a music which we don't hear may look a bit fantastic, but it pleases our fancy and perhaps flatters our vanity to think the mediaevals childish, and to believe ourselves a great improvement over our forefathers...
...Sentiment has led to study—"Itaque lex paedagogua noster fuit in Christo, ut ex fide justificmiiur...
...fresh gems of art turn up, and new picturesque happenings and practices and traditions...
...since the organization was perfected on his festival...
...The council, of twelve members, includes G. A. Plimpton, president of the firm of Ginn and Company...
...And literary and historical scholars and the interested layman, on getting back into the middle-ages as they really were, have found other learned folk there before them...
...Really, we don't want to go on thinking our ancestors were simpletons just because they are dead...
...of a body which shall integrate all studies in the middle-ages, and steadily advance its lines into the no man's land of the unknown...
...Further, Professor Maurice de Wulf of the University of Louvain and of Harvard, distinguished historian of mediaeval philosophy, has had from the first an informal relation to the Academy, as have also prominent scholars elsewhere in Europe...
...But the middle-ages have been studied in a holeand-corner sort of way...
...It aims to diffuse knowledge of the middleages, to serve as a clearing-house for information as to what is being done and needs to be done in the study of them, and to promote further investigation by all possible means...
...The chief of these is a sense of values...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 24
