[Footnote 220: At Poitiers, at the end of the ninth century.]
[Footnote 221: At Sienna.]
[Footnote 222: In 1050, Thibaud de Vernon, canon at Rouen.]
[Footnote 223: The monks of England and Ireland.]
[Footnote 224: Tenth century.]
They did not confine themselves to the defensive. In studying the ancient writers they were inspired to imitate them, and they went forth into the open field and vied in a thousand works of the imagination—fiction, poetry—(hymns, poems of the eleventh century, and history.) What is more, they undertook fatiguing and dangerous expeditions into far-off and almost unknown countries— archaeology, which had not then a name, (see "the valuable manuscripts of the tenth century, discovered by Mabillon at Einsiedeln, which treat of Roman inscriptions;") cosmography, in which they divined truths of the highest importance. The Irish monk Virgilius taught in Bohemia the antipodes, and consequently that the earth is round. He was not comprehended: they supposed him to believe there were other lands under our earth, with another sun, another moon, and inhabitants for whom Christ did not die, and he was excommunicated. He went to Rome, where he was permitted to explain his theory; the pope withdrew his anathema and elevated him to the episcopacy. [Footnote 225] Finally, the drama, into which was infused a new and original character. Whilst the monk Virgilius taught the true form of the earth, the nun Roswitha composed her tragedies, the first specimens of the Christian drama, at once full of the reminiscences of antiquity and the spirit of the gospel.
[Footnote 225: Quatrefages, Peuplement de l'Amérique, which proves:
1. The geographical knowledge of the times.
2. The perpetuity of tradition.
3. The intercourse of different nations.
4. The tolerance of the church.
Bouillet, in his Dictionnaire universelle d'Histoire et de Géographie, is deceived on this point.]
You will see by all this activity, this animation, and these names, "that the tenth century has been unjustly accused of barbarism" (Magnin)—that age in which there was such a taste for classical studies that "many Christians," says Roswitha, "preferred the vanity of pagan books to the utility of the Holy Scriptures, on account of the elegance of their style," and that, far from meriting the appellation of the Iron Age, it should rather be called "a great centre of light." [Footnote 226]
[Footnote 226: Dom Pitra, Rapport sur une Mission scientifique. To all these works add the memoir of Ozanam, Des Ecoles et de l'Instruction publique en Italie au Temps barbares, in which he clearly demonstrates that letters never ceased to be cultivated.]