Often bibulous and erotic, the Goliardic verse contains a large amount of parody and satire. Appealing to a public familiar with scripture and liturgy, its authors parody anything—the Bible, hymns to the Virgin, the canon of the mass, as in the “Drinkers’ Mass” and the “Office for Gamblers.” One of the best-known pieces is a satire on the Papacy under the caption of “The Gospel according to Mark-s of silver.” This is only one of many bitter attacks on Rome, while the pride, hardness, and greed of the higher clergy are portrayed in “Golias the Bishop.” The point of view in general is that of the lower clergy, especially the looser, wandering, undisciplined element which frequented the schools and the roads, the jongleurs of the clerical world, familiar subjects of ecclesiastical legislation since the ninth century.
Poetry of this sort is so contrary to conventional conceptions of the Middle Ages that some writers have denied its mediaeval character. “It is,” says one, “mediaeval only in the chronological sense,” while others find in it close affinities with the spirit of the Renaissance or of the Reformation. It would be more consonant with the spirit of history to enlarge our ideas of the Middle Ages so as to correspond to the facts of mediaeval life. The Goliardi were neither humanists before the Renaissance nor reformers before the Reformation; they were simply men of the Middle Ages who wrote for their own time. If the writings of these northern and chiefly French clerks seem to anticipate the Italian Renaissance, it may be that the Renaissance began earlier and was less specifically Italian than has been supposed. If the authors are more secular, even more earthy, than we should expect clerks to be, we must learn to expect something different. In lyric poetry, as in the epic and the drama, we are now learning more of the close interpenetration of the lay and ecclesiastical worlds, no longer separated by the air-tight partitions which the imagination of a later day interposed. And whether their spirit was lay or ecclesiastical, the Goliardi were certainly human; they saw and felt life keenly, and they wrote of what they knew.
It is time to redress the balance with a word about a less obtrusive element, the good student. “The life of the virtuous student,” says Dean Rashdall, “has no annals,”[13] and in all ages he has been less conspicuous than his more dashing fellows. Thus the ideal scholar of the sermons is a bit colorless but obedient, respectful, eager to learn, assiduous at lectures, and bold in debate, pondering his lessons even during his evening promenades by the river. The ideal student of the manuals is he who practices their precepts. The typical student of the letters has already described himself as devoted wholly to study, though somewhat short of money. The good student of the poems—there is no such person! Student poetry was “not all bacchic or erotic or profane,”[14] but much of it was, and we must not look here for the more serious side of academic life. Jean de Hauteville’s account of the poor and industrious scholar is representative of a large class of students but not of a large body of poetry. The good student’s occupations are best reflected in the course of study, his assiduity best seen in his note-books and disputations. The documents which concern the educational side of the university are also a source for student life! It has been observed that the alumni reunions of our own day are often more prolific in recollections of student escapades than of the daily performance of the allotted task. The studious lad of today never breaks into the headlines as such, and no one has seen fit to produce a play or a film “featuring the good student.” Yet everyone familiar with contemporary universities knows that the serious student exists in large numbers, and it has been shown conclusively that the distinction he there achieves reflects itself in his later life. So it was in the Middle Ages. The law students of Bologna insisted on their money’s worth of teaching from their professors. The examinations described by Robert de Sorbon required serious preparation. Not only was the vocational motive a strong incentive to study in the mediaeval university, but there was much enthusiasm for knowledge and much discussion of intellectual subjects. The greater universities, at least, were intellectually very much alive, with something of that ‘religion of learning’ which had earlier called Abelard’s pupils into the wilderness, there to build themselves huts that they might feed upon his words. The books of the age were in large measure written by its professors, and the students had the advantage of seeing them in the making and thus drinking of learning at its fountain-head. Then as now, the moral quality of a university depended on the intensity and seriousness of its intellectual life.
If we consider the body of student literature as a whole, its most striking, and its most disappointing, characteristic is its lack of individuality. The Manuale Scholarium is written for the use of all scholars who propose to attend universities of students. The letters are made as general as possible in order to fit the need of any student who wants money, clothes, or books. Even the poems, where we have some right to expect personal expression of feeling, have the generic character of most mediaeval poetry; they are for the most part the voice of a class, not of individuals.
At the same time it must be remembered that this characteristic of the student productions, if it robs them of something of their interest, increases their historical value. The historian deals with the general rather than the particular, and his knowledge must be built up by a painful collection and comparison of individual facts, which are often too few or too unlike to admit of sound generalization. In the case of these student records, however, that labor has already been performed for him; in the form in which they come down to us they have lost, at the hands of the students themselves, what is local and peculiar and exceptional, and have become, what in view of the nature of our information no historian could hope to make them, the generalized experience of centuries of student life.
It is this broadly human quality that gives the productions of the mediaeval student a special interest for the world of today. In substance, though not in form, many of them are almost as representative of modern Harvard or Yale as of mediaeval Oxford or Paris. The Latin dialogue and disputation, the mud of Bologna, and the money-changers of the Grand-Pont, belong plainly in the Middle Ages and not in our time; but money and clothing, rooms, teachers, and books, good cheer and good fellowship, have been subjects of interest at all times and all places. A professor of history once said that the greatest difficulty of historical teaching lay in convincing pupils that the events of the past did not all happen in the moon. The Middle Ages are very far away, farther from us in some respects than is classical antiquity, and it is very hard to realize that men and women, then and now, are after all much the same human beings. We need constantly to be reminded that the fundamental factors in man’s development remain much the same from age to age and must so remain as long as human nature and physical environment continue what they have been. In his relations to life and learning the mediaeval student resembled his modern successor far more than is often supposed. If his environment was different, his problems were much the same; if his morals were perhaps worse, his ambition was as active, his rivalries as intense, his desire for learning quite as keen. And for him as for us, intellectual achievement meant membership in that city of letters not made with hands, “the ancient and universal company of scholars.”