Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/63

 Rh are examples of this tendency. Homer, i.e., Dictys and Dares, Virgil, and other writers of classical antiquity, furnished the materials for the writers of the middle ages, who drew upon them largely, only altering them, so that from Greek and Latin they became French and English.

The crusades had furnished further new themes for the fancy of the trouveur of the time. The whole world was stirred to its innermost depth by that general upheaving; the exploits of the first and second crusade had already begun to belong to the history of the past, when Chrestien began his poem. How many oriental legends were brought home and circulated by various pilgrims, especially such as were in Jerusalem, now once again in the hands of the infidels? The highest aim of the Christian world of that epoch was to regain possession of those sacred places; and the Order of the Templars represented the most ideal aspirations of the time—to live a chaste life, and to be found worthy to keep watch over the Lord's sanctuary.

Rumours of a great Christian kingdom in the far East, the kingdom of Prester John, reached Europe at the time, and like lightning these tidings spread from country to country, reviving the hopes of the crusaders by announcing help from an unexpected quarter in the deadly fight against the Mahommedan power.

At the same time a great dogmatic change was taking place in the teachings of the Church. The theory of Paschasius Radbertus found many adversaries, but no less adherents, and the twelfth century is the time when that dispute reached its climax, and the dogma of Transubstantiation was finally settled. The mystery of the sacrament, and the more than symbolic meaning of the Eucharist, was the central point of this dogma which has profoundly altered the Catholic Church, and was in later times one of the principal elements of discord between the Reformed church and the Church of Rome.

In naming these factors, classical literature, so to say