Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/116

98 system of dogmatical formulas. While the scholastic investigations were pursuing these formulas down to the most subtle deductions, they can only be regarded as mental exercises, in which definitions and distinctions were of primary, and the living and essential contents of merely secondary importance. The instruction imparted in the convents and cathedral schools in Denmark was of course of the same kind and quality, as far as it was not limited to the Latin and to the poorest elementary training needed for the service of the church. It is hardly necessary to add that the Latin language was cultivated in a manner corresponding to the general intellectual life of the clergy. During the best period of the church, learning was held in high honor and the study of the Roman authors was pursued with great zeal, and both in the convents and by private individuals there were made valuable collections of books. But in a later period of the middle age there occurred in this as in all other matters a sad collapse.

It is a most characteristic fact in regard to the part which the church and all that is connected with it played in Denmark from the beginning of the middle age, that the oldest work of any importance, of which we are certain that it was written in Denmark, contains the apotheosis of a man whose whole life had been devoted to the advancement of clerical interests. It is a biography of Knud the Saint (Historia ortus, vitae et passionis S. Canuti, regis Daniæ), written by the English monk Ælnoth, who lived in Denmark from the close of the eleventh to the beginning of the twelfth century. He was preacher to St. Alban's church in Odense, in which the afterward canonized King Knud was murdered by rebellious peasants.

It was natural that the conventual literature should by preference occupy itself with subjects belonging to the re-