Rewriting Medieval European History in 1936

A while back, I was discussing the history of higher education with a tenured historian of European thought.  I was talking about the rise of co-education in the United States in the 19^thcentury, a history beautifully explored by Andrea Turpin, as one of America’s signal contributions to higher education.  My interlocutor made two startling claims in response.  First, he claimed that the University of Bologna had been from the beginning a co-educational university.  (Sorry, Charlie, but the occasional appearance of an utterly exceptional “woman worthy” in the university’s annals every two or three centuries does not a “co-educational university” make.)  Next, he claimed, a propos of literally nothing I had said in our conversation, but probably in response to the look of utter incredulity on my face when he claimed that Bologna had always been a co-ed university, “Western Civilization owes nothing – absolutely nothing– to Africa or to the Arab world.  Our heritage is built upon the philosophy of the Greeks, and they were utterly original.  The West didn’t borrow its greatness from any outside influences; it didn’t need to.”  I guess he is not a big fan of Herodotus.

I thought of that historian recently when I revisited some passages in Rashdall dealing with the primacy of Salerno as a medical school.  In the 1936 edition, Rashdall makes this claim:  “The origin of the School of Salerno is veiled in impenetrable obscurity” (76). He notes that there are textual traces suggesting that medicine was practiced at Salerno as early as the ninth century, and by the middle of the twelfth century the medical school that existed there was assumed to have ancient origins. But he very quickly dismisses the idea that those origins could in any way be due to the influence of Islamic scholars.  “It is no doubt at first sight tempting to trace the medical knowledge and skill of Salerno to contact with the Saracens of Southern Italy or Sicily….The theory which attributes the rise of the School of Salerno to the introduction of Arabic writings by Constantinus Africanus, towards the end of the eleventh century, is a legend of the same order as the legend (to which we shall have to return hereafter) about the discovery of the Roman law at the capture of Amalfi, and is as completely inconsistent with facts and dates as the theory which assumes the northern Renaissance of the eleventh century to begin with the introduction of Arabic translations of Aristotle” (77).

There’s a lot going on here. But simply note one key verbal trick: Rashdall begins by talking about origins (which, he argues, cannot be known), but then shifts to talking about the riseof the school – its emerging prominence as a center of medical knowledge – and asserts emphatically that Islamic scholarship had nothing to do with it.  A few paragraphs later, Rashdall doubles down:  “the School was in it is origin, and long continued to be, entirely independent of Oriental influences” (80).

The old don doth protest too much, methinks.

And his 1936 editors seemed to think so as well.  For, as soon as Rashdall asserts Salerno’s independence of “Oriental influences,” he must contend with the traditions surrounding the well-traveled and well-read Constantinus Africanus, a figure he has already mentioned and whose influence he has already dismissed. Rashdall characterizes this Carthaginian refugee-scholar who became a monk at Monte Cassino as “one of those misty characters in the history of medieval culture whom a reputation for profound knowledge and Oriental travel has surrounded with a halo of half-legendary romance.”  Rashdall goes on to tick off a checklist of highlights from C. Africanus’s “legendary” life, though he is not willing to credit the veracity of any of these adventures.

Rashdall’s 1936 editors, though, are less dismissive of Constantinus Africanus as a significant historical figure. Their significant editorial additions / emendations to Rashdall’s work, whether in the body of his text or in the footnotes, are indicated in brackets.  And here, where Rashdall introduces the “half-legendary” Africanus, they include a bracketed addition which begins, “There is an extensive literature on Constantinus and his writings:  see the note at the end of this chapter…” (80).

The “note” at the conclusion of the chapter was not a simple footnote, but a significant bibliographic intervention.  Titled “Additional Note to Chapter III,” the comments, again bracketed to indicate that they are not Rashdall’s, begin as follows:  “Recent investigation, notably that of K. Sudhoff, enables us to discuss the early history of Salerno and the significance of Constantinus the African in firmer detail and a better perspective.  In the tenth century the four streams of tradition, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish, which were to combine at Salerno, can be traced…” – and then the note proceeds to trace those traditions as they were reflected in the careers of leading practitioners at Salerno since the 9^thcentury. The bibliographic mini-essay ends a few hundred words later with the following observation:  Although, as Rashdall says, the influence of Salerno…gave way later to that of Montpellier and Bologna, its significance in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as a centre of Greek and Arabic medicine, of surgery and anatomy, was very great” (85-86).

The sources Rashdall’s editors cited to substantiate and elaborate on that claim were quite extensive. So, the state of the field since 1936 – at least as reflected in the revised edition of the standard historical survey of Europe’s medieval universities – has been that the first great center of medical and scientific knowledge in Europe, the medical school at Salerno, drew from four traditions of knowledge: Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish.

It strikes me that this was a particularly important addition for these scholars to be making in 1936. There were all kinds of claims being made about the greatness of Europe’s cultural heritage, a greatness built upon an imagined ethnic and intellectual purity.  In 1936, it was important to acknowledge that “Western civilization,” as symbolized by the medieval university, did not spring fully-formed from the soil of Europe, nor even from the soil of ancient Greece and Rome.  If it had “greatness,” it was a greatness forged from the intermingling of diverse intellectual and cultural and religious sources.

That was an important clarification to make in 1936.  It is no less important today.  And, as long as senior historians like my interlocutor have a hand in the hiring decisions of their institutions, it will continue to be important to emphasize the mutual interdependency and interconnectivity of multiple streams of human thought and experience running through every era, including our own.