6. ASTRONOMY. In astronomy the chief purpose of the instruction was to explain the seasons and the motions of the planets, to set forth the wonders of the visible creation, and to enable the priests "to fix the time of Easter and all other festivals and holy days, and to announce to the congregation the proper celebration of them." (R. 74 g).
[Illustration: FIG. 46. AN ANGLO-SAXON MAP OF THE WORLD
(From a tenth-century map in the British Museum)
This is one of the better maps of the period. Note the mixture of Biblical and classical geography (Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Pillars of Hercules), and the animal life (lion) introduced in the upper corner. The Mediterranean Sea in the center, the Greek islands, the British isles, the Italian peninsula, the Nile, and the northern African coast are easily recognized. Western Europe, the best-known part of the world at that time, is very poorly done.]
Even after Ptolemy's Mechanism of the Heavens (p. 49) and Aristotle's On the Heavens had filtered across the Pyrenees from the Saracens, in the eleventh century, the Ptolemaic theory of a flat earth located at the center of the heavenly bodies and around which they all revolved, while a very pleasing theological conception, was absolutely fatal to any instruction in astronomy worth while and to any astronomical advance. All mediaeval astronomy, too, was saturated with astrology, as the selection on the motion of the heavenly bodies reproduced from Bartholomew Anglicus shows (R. 77 b), and the supernatural was invoked to explain such phenomena as meteors, comets, and eclipses. The Copernican theory of the motion of the heavenly bodies was not published until 1543, and all our modern ideas date from that time.
Physics was often taught as a part of the instruction in astronomy, and consisted of lessons on the properties of matter (R. 77 a) and some of the simple principles of dynamics. Little else of what we to-day know as physics was then known.
7. MUSIC. Unlike the other studies of the Quadrivium, the instruction in music was quite extensive, and from early times a good course in musical theory was taught (R. 74 f). Boethius' De Musica, written at the beginning of the sixth century, was the text used. Music entered into so many activities of the Church that much naturally was made of it. The organ, too, is an old instrument, going back to the second century B.C., and the organ with a keyboard to the close of the eleventh century. This instrument added much to the value of the music course, and the hymns composed by Christian musicians form an important part of our musical heritage. [11] The cathedral school at Metz and the monastery at Saint Gall became famous as musical centers, and of the work of one of the teachers of music at Saint Gall (Notker) it was written by his biographer: "Through different hymns, sequences, tropes, and litanies, through different songs and melodies as well as through ecclesiastical science, the pupils of this man made the church of God famous not merely in Alemannia, but everywhere from sea to sea."
[Illustration: FIG. 47. AN EARLY CHURCH MUSICIAN
(From a fourteenth-century manuscript, now in the British Museum)]
THE GREAT TEXTBOOKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. While the textbooks mentioned under the description of each of the Liberal Arts formed the basis of the instruction given, most of the instruction before the twelfth century was not given from editions of the original works, but from abridged compendiums. Six of these were so famous and so widely used that each deserves a few words of description.
1. The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written by Martianus Capella, between 410 and 427 A.D., was the first of the five great mediaeval textbooks. Mercury, desiring to marry, finally settles on the learned maiden Philology, and the seven bridesmaids—Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music—enter in turn at the ceremony and tell who they are and what they represent. The speeches of the seven maidens summarized the ancient learning in each subject. This textbook was more widely used during the Middle Ages than any other book.
2. Boethius (475-524) was another important mediaeval textbook writer, having prepared textbooks on dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and ethics. Nearly all of what the Middle Ages knew of Aristotle's Logic and Ethics, and of the writings of Plato, were contained in the texts he wrote. His De Musica was used in the universities as a textbook until near the middle of the eighteenth century.