Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/425

 THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 375 j with the Christmas and Easter services, but which devel- I oped later into the important mystery and morality plays. dove stories in which celibacy, not marriage, is considered I "a happy ending." In Gaul Gerbert was the greatest scholar of the tenth I century. He studied grammar in a monastery in Auvergne, land then went to the county of Barcelona in northern Spain and imbibed some mathematics, 1 a field in which he later wrote treatises. He became school- i master in the cathedral at Rheims and for a year was abbot I of a monastery in Lombardy. Afterwards he twice tried to I obtain copies of scientific manuscripts which he had seen in its library. Gerbert was an attractive letter- writer and his I correspondence is important for the history of the times, ! with whose rulers, especially the last Carolingians, the first Capetians and the emperors, Otto II and Otto III, he was closely connected. He became an archbishop and finally I Pope Sylvester II, which indicates that the age at least respected scholarship. Later medieval legend made of him a magician and necromancer, but he seems to have done nothing more wonderful than to construct an abacus and build a pipe organ. Gerbert's clever letters dealing with contemporary events I lead us to note an improvement in the writing of history , which became manifest in the late tenth and Improve- early eleventh century. Several writers now dis- historical played a more animated and individual style writing than the ordinary dry and meager monastic annals of the ' early Middle Ages or than the empty rhetoric of the tenth- century poets. Widukind narrated with spirit and vigor the story of his own Saxon people. Liutprand the Lombard tells of his trips to Constantinople and has a good grasp of the , general state of Europe in the middle of the tenth century. i Thietmar records the story of the German kings and of about the middle of the eleventh century, entertains us 1 hugely by his pot-pourri of portents and disasters, marvels
 * Hrosvita's plots are either legends of Christian martyrs or
 * his Bishopric of Merseburg to 10 18. Raoul Glaber, writing