Even after the series of demonstrations which we have given that the great thinkers and teachers at the medieval universities were deeply interested in the problems of what we now call natural or physical science, most people will still not be open to conviction that interest in nature was quite as lively in the Middle Ages as at any subsequent period, even our own. In spite of the fact that the scholastics faced scientific questions in nearly the same mood as we do ourselves, and, curiously enough, anticipated very closely many of the doctrines now current in science, not a few of those who are most interested in the history of education will continue to think that science occupied the minds of the students at the medieval universities very little, and that while the great thinkers may have known something about it, the rank and file of the university men of the time gave scarcely any thought to it. Besides, they will be almost sure to conclude that, whatever they did think was likely to be inept, and in most cases quite ridiculous. Such thoughts are a part of that unfortunate educational tradition which stamps the Middle Ages as neglectful of nature study, as we would call it now, and as lacking in interest in natural phenomena. Nothing could well be less true, and it will require, I think, but the simple tracing of the life and erudition of a single well-known student of these medieval universities, to show how utterly absurd and unfounded is the popular belief.
I have chosen Dante for this purpose, mainly because so much more is known about the personal details of his life than of anyone else, and we are able to glean from his writings and the contemporary comments on them, a good idea of what the general information on scientific subjects of the educated man of his period was. The fact that Dante was a member of the Guild of the Apothecaries in Florence, an association that included also the physicians of the city, has added an adventitious interest to his attractions as one of the few greatest of poets of all time, and has made details of his career and evidence of the breadth of his education and culture of special import, so that I have frequently taken occasion to call the attention of physicians to the honor implied by Dante's fraternal relation to us. His membership in the Guild of the Apothecaries, however, did not call for any special knowledge of science on his part. He had nothing to do with the sale of drugs, much less with the science of medicine. Originally the Italian apothecaries, as the Greek origin of the word indicates, were shop-keepers selling all sorts of things--edible, adorning, or useful for personal service. They sold drugs also, and as some of these were imported from the East, they commonly added to their stock certain other Eastern specialties--perfumes, gems and the like. In this way they soon became wealthy, as a rule, and indeed the name of the rich Florentine family who came eventually to rule their native city--the Medici--is said to be derived from similar connections. It was the sons of these men who became the upper middle classes in Florence. Perhaps one should say they became the upper classes, for Florence had no nobility, in the proper sense of the word, and men made their own positions. Their [{342}] descendants became the men of culture, until finally the Florentine Guild of the Apothecaries represented the most intelligent class of the population of the city. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then, most of the artists, the literary men, the architects, the sculptors, were members of the guild. Dante's occupation when he was a peaceful citizen of Florence was, according to tradition, that of architect, and one building designed by him is supposed to be still in existence in Florence.
Dante should represent for us, then, what an architect in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century knew about natural science, as the result of his school and university training. In our time, architects are likely to know more about certain forms of physical science than most other people, and due allowance would have to be made for this in Dante's case. It will be found, though, as we discuss his erudition, that the sciences in which he was particularly interested--astronomy and various phases of biology with physical geography--were not those which appeal especially to an architect, and certainly have no relation to his occupation. His knowledge of flowers might be thought to be due to his wish to use floral forms for structural decorative purposes, but Dante is rather weak for a poet in the matter of the description of flowers, and it is only from the side of their color that they made any special appeal to him.
Most people have been led to think of Dante as not a student of nature, because that impression would inevitably be gathered from certain passages of John Ruskin with regard to him. Ruskin was so faithful and loving a student of Dante that he would be expected not to be [{343}] mistaken in such a matter, nor is he; but he has dwelt overmuch on certain phases of Dante's lack of interest in nature, until the great Florentine's devotion to creation as he saw it around him is obscured. It is not difficult to show, from Dante's own writings, how much he was interested in nearly every phase of nature and natural phenomena. In the "Westminster Review" for July and August, 1907, Mr. George Trobridge, in articles on Dante as a Nature Poet, has furnished abundant evidence to prove his thesis, though he too has felt the necessity for apologizing for even apparently differing from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic Dante student as Ruskin. Dante's works, however, themselves can be the only appeal in this matter, and Mr. Trobridge has used them with good effect and in such a way as to carry to anyone the conviction that Dante was a profound student of nature in all her moods and tenses. Mr. Trobridge says in the introduction:
"It will appear presumptuous in the present writer to differ from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic student of Dante as Ruskin, but it seems to him that the author of Modern Painters has done scant justice to the intense insight of the poet into the beauties of the world we live in and his wonderful power of expressing what he saw. There are few even modern poets who have taken so wide a view of the field of nature, and even Shakespeare himself scarcely excells the great Florentine in felicity and concentration of expression. The Divina Commedia is full of vivid pictures covering the whole range of natural phenomena. As these pass before our eyes, we can scarcely realize that the painter of them is not of our own day, so thoroughly does he enter into the spirit of modern landscape art. [{344}] Sometimes his pictures are momentary impressions--studies of effects painted with a large brush; at others his touch is of a Preraphaelitic nicety, and now and then he gives us a studied composition full of doubtful detail like one of Turner's landscapes. He was one with Wordsworth in his sincere delight in every form of natural beauty. Like him, he lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves; with him he saw the 'splendor in the grass' and the 'glory in the flower.' He could 'feel the gladness of the May' and rejoiced in 'the innocent brightness of a new day.'"
In the matter of science as distinct from poetic interest in nature, quite as much can be said for Dante. This greatest of Italian poets is a fair example to take of the university man of the thirteenth century in this respect. He was thirty-five before the first century of university existence properly so-called closed. He may be considered a typical product of university life. It is true he had had the almost inestimable advantage of the schooling and culture of his native Florence, where at the end of the thirteenth century there were more children, it is said, in attendance at the schools to the number of the population than there is at the present moment even in most of our American cities. Brother Azarias in his Essays Educational, [Footnote 43] said:
[Footnote 43: Essays Educational, by Brother Azarias, with Preface by His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. Chicago, D. H. McBride & Co., 1906.]
"In the thirteenth century, out of a population of 90,000 in Florence, we find 12,000 children attending the schools, a ratio of school attendance as large as existed in New York City, in the year of Grace 1893." This ratio, it may be said, is as great as is ordinarily to be found anywhere, and this fact alone may serve to show [{345}] how earnest were these medieval burghers for the education of their children. Dante had the advantage of this, and in addition, of the training at two or three of the universities at least of Italy, besides spending some time at Paris, and probably a visit at least to Oxford.
Lest it should be thought that perhaps Brother Azarias gave too favorable an estimate in his account of the schools in Florence, though he quotes as his authority Villani, and other authorities are readily available, it seems worth while to give a very interesting reference to this subject of education in one of the notes in Prince Kropotkin's chapter on Mutual Aid in the Medieval City, from his book Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, a work that we have placed under contribution a number of times already in this attempt to picture medieval conditions as they were in reality, and not in the foolish imaginings of outworn traditions. Kropotkin's studies in what the free cities accomplished by the union of the guilds for every fraternal purpose, and the coordination of their citizens for every detail of the commonweal, has made him realize that common or public school education was an important feature of medieval free city life, and strange as that fact may appear to many modern minds, that such public school education occupied at least as prominent a position as it does with us in our own time. In the quotation from him it will be seen that he considers that Florence was not alone in this matter, and he ventures to place Nüremberg on a level with her. Doubtless other German cities, as certainly other Italian cities, provided similar facilities for general education.