Poems On Religious Traditions:
les Machabées, la Passion, les Trois Maries, Barlaam et Josaphat, Lives of the Saints and Miracles.
Poems On Modern Subjects:
Godefroi de Bouillon, le Voeu du Paon, (the Vow of the Peacock,) Songs, Fabliaux, collections of stories, such as the Dolopathos, allegorical compositions, as la Rose, le Renart, la Poire, l'Escoufle, instructive compositions like l'Image du Monde, le Livre de Charité, les Bestiaires, les Lapidaires, books of hunting, etc.
Many of these volumes were richly bound, and liberally paid for. The Duchess of Brabant, in 1369, paid to Maitre Jean six sheep for binding a French book. In 1376, Godfrey Bloc (suitable name!) charged his patron, the Duke of Brabant, seven sheep and a half for binding Meliadus, and in 1383, twelve sheep for binding the Saint Graal, called in the bill by its other title, Joseph of Arimathea.
In the age of which we are treating Greek was little studied or known. The scholars were ignorant of the Greek historians, of the dramatic poets, even of Homer, of whom the poet Petrarch said, when his eyes first rested on a copy, "Your Homer is dumb to me, or rather I understand him not." Boccaccio, when young, attempted to translate him. Some Dominicans studied the language, but it was for the sake of their sermons, not to be able to peruse Homer, or even St. Chrysostom or St. Basil. The Greeks were schismatics, and everything coming from them was liable to a moral quarantine. The works of Aristotle and some others were accessible in Latin translations.
It is time to glance at the other subjects which, along with the classics and the romances in the native tongue, occupied the minds of the scholars of the fourteenth century, and filled the books they produced with such care and patience.
The Educational Cursus of the Fourteenth Century.
All the humanities of the day were included in the Trivium and the Quadrivium, the first comprising grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, and the second, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This was apparently a strait circle for human intelligence to move in at freedom, but the prime masters in the intellectual craft endeavored to enlarge the various compartments to their widest extent. Thus into rhetoric crept poetry, epistolary correspondence, didactics, and translation. With dialectics came in philosophy entire. "Aristotle and his numerous interpreters," among whom were many saints, authorized free discussions on the highest abstractions of thought, on the natural sciences, on physiology and the curative art, on politics, and even on common law. Thus, without going out of the Trivium, see what a vast amount of facts were lugged in, analyzed, and discussed. In dialectics no subject was let drop till it was turned in every point of view, analyzed, and established in true or fancied relation to every other thing.
Grammar.
They were not at all scant—these earnest seekers—in grammatic manuals. They had their "Large Donatus," their "Small Donatus," and the commentary on Donatus by Remy of Anxerre; Priscian, entire and in abridgments; Bede's metres, and several modern works. Those not content with the mere enunciation of the old rules, would moralize them something in this style:
"'What is a prenomen?' [Footnote 126] Man is thy nomen, sinner is thy prenomen. So when you pray to God, make use only of thy prenomen, and say, 'O Heavenly Father, I invoke not thy name as man, but I implore thy pardon as sinner.'"