Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/180

168 prose as well as verse, opens with the twelfth century. It was indeed the great literary period of the Middle Ages. For the vernacular literatures flourished as well as the Latin. Provençal literature began as the eleventh century closed, and was stifled in the thirteenth by the Albigensian Crusade. So the twelfth was its great period. Likewise with the Old French literature: except the Roland which is earlier, the chief chansons de geste belong to the twelfth century; also the romances of antiquity, to be spoken of hereafter; also the romances of the Round Table, and a great mass of chansons and fabliaux. The Old German—or rather, Mittel Hochdeutsch—literature touches its height as the century closes and the next begins, in the works of Heinrich von Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. The best Latin writers of the century lived, or sojourned, or were educated, for the most part in the France north of the Loire. Not that all of them were natives of that territory; for some were German born, some saw the light in England, and the birthplace of many is unknown. Yet they seem to belong to France. Nearly all were ecclesiastics, secular or regular. Many of them were notables in theology, like Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard, Alanus de Insulis (Lille); many were poets as well, like Alanus and Hildebert and John of Salisbury too; one was a thunderer on the earth, and a most deft politician, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some again are known only as poets, sacred or profane, like Adam of St. Victor, and Walter of Chatillon—but of these hereafter. The best Latin prose writing of this, or any other, mediaeval period, had its definite purpose, metaphysical, theological, or pietistic; and the writers have been or will be spoken of in connection with their specific fields of intellectual achievement or religious fervour. Here, without discussing the men or their works, some favourable examples of their writing will be given.

In the last passage quoted from Anselm, the reader must have felt the working of cloister rhetoric, and have noticed the antitheses and rhymes, to which mediaeval Latin lent itself so readily. Yet it is a slight affair compared with the confounding sonorousness, the flaring pictures, and