From the sources 8: Guibert de Nogent’s schooldays and timeless insights into good pedagogy

 

A much later (early fourteenth century?) satirical image of a medieval schoolroom featuring monkeys!

So when we last left Guibert, he was seven-years-old or thereabouts (he doesn’t specify his age) and struggling to learn the basics of Latin grammar – all those declensions and conjugations back in the days before you had all those handy noun and verb tables to memorise and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, the Cambridge Latin Course or whatever textbook you think is best for beginners (though nowadays very few people start learning as young as Guibert did). Now Guibert seems to have reflected a lot on what his education was like and the difficulties that came with learning and memorising a new language. In the process he came up with some ideas that felt uncannily familiar when I was reading just a few weeks ago – like the theories of cognitive neuroscience we covered as part of our learning and memory sessions in September for the PGCE.

Now I must admit here that I will be engaging in a certain degree of anachronism in my reading of Guibert, which some medievalist scholars would find immediately off-putting. Obviously, psychology as an academic discipline didn’t exist in the early twelfth century, nor would it until more than 750 years after Guibert’s death, and so Guibert would not have used the terms I will be using to refer to what he was describing. If a time-travelling cognitive neuroscientist were able to have a conversation with Guibert, it would take a long time before they could reach some mutual comprehension, since all the technical language of modern psychology would be completely alien to him. Even then, this hinges on the whole meta-question of how mentally similar were medieval people to us. This is an issue that is super-divisive to medievalists, who basically fall somewhere along a spectrum on this. At one end of the spectrum, you have those who think medieval people were basically people exactly like us – they just had swords, horses, heavy-ploughs, parchment and candles rather than automatic firearms, cars, combine-harvesters, laptops and electrical lighting. At the other end of the spectrum, you have medievalists who argue that medieval people were so mentally different from us that they might as well be Martian visitors – according to them, medieval people were incapable of thinking rationally like we do except according to their own weird logic, and their worldview is incomprehensible unless understood completely in its own terms. Both extremes in my view are unhelpful – the first is essentially the costume drama version of history. The latter is basically a postmodern repackaging of old stereotypes about medieval people as violent, uncouth, superstitious, prejudiced and lacking in individuality. Most medievalists, including myself, however, sensibly fall somewhere in the middle. And Guibert I feel nicely illustrates that. All his talk of sin, demons and God’s providence feels very alien to us and very evocative of the culture of twelfth century France, which was indeed very different to that of twenty-first century Britain. But strip those layers of paint away, and one can see a deeply insecure but highly intelligent mind trying to make sense of his own abnormal life experiences and the rapidly changing world around him.

But let’s get back to the classroom with Guibert. Guibert was, as we established in the previous post, in a class all by himself. He was taught by a private tutor called Solomon who, as we saw last time, had received his own education quite late in life (how late exactly we don’t know) and was probably not a very competent teacher – Guibert perhaps exaggerates this somewhat; indeed, as both Paul Archambault and Jay Rubinstein note, Solomon is deliberately made out by Guibert to be a negative inversion of the ideal schoolmaster described by the first century AD Roman educator Quintilian. Guibert makes it very clear to his readers that his school days were an unhappy time for him.

For starters, Guibert was placed under the complete authority of his tutor, who essentially controlled his upbringing and daily schedule from then on. This was not uncommon for that time. Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) was given the same kind of power over Heloise when her uncle, Fulbert, hired him to be her private tutor and, because he already had a crush on her, he accepted the contract for this very reason. This one of the reasons why a lot of twenty-first century readers of Abelard and Heloise’s story find it less romantic and more creepy. What this kind of arrangement meant for Guibert was that he couldn’t live the same lifestyle as the other children growing up at his family castle. Guibert recounts that:

I wasn’t even allowed to play the usual games. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, couldn’t eat outside the house, couldn’t accept a gift from anybody without his consent. I couldn’t do anything “intemperate”, whether in thought, word, or deed. He seemed to expect me to behave more like a monk than a cleric. The other boys of my age could come and go as they pleased and, at times, with no constraints at all. I, on the other hand, was scrupulously guarded from such behaviour. I would sit in my cleric’s garb and watch the squads of players like a trained animal. Even on Sundays and saints’ feast days I had to put up with the constraints of this scholastic system. There was not a day, not a moment, when I was allowed a holiday. It was study, study, study all the time. Besides, when he had accepted my tutorship, my master was not allowed to take on any other student.

Guibert was thus, from the age of seven or possibly even six, allowed no school holidays, no play-time and no friends. For the time, that was weird enough, and nowadays child protection agencies would doubtless get involved. And in Guibert’s estimation, all of this relentless studying was all for naught, because Solomon was an awful teacher – a stern disciplinarian, yet completely incompetent when it came to his own subject knowledge (Latin language and literature). Guibert relates:

Because he worked me so hard everybody who watched us was convinced that with so much perseverance he would considerably sharpen my fledgling mind. Alas! This didn’t happen. My master was completely ignorant of the techniques of composition or metrics. Meanwhile I was deluged everyday with a hail of blows and whippings. This man was trying to force me to learn what he couldn’t teach!

Guibert’s brilliant sense of irony really does become apparent here! Now, if we measure Solomon up to the areas of professional learning used by my PGCE programme to assess student teachers like myself, Solomon would be strong (indeed, too strong) on behaviour management, but incredibly weak on pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours. Back in the eleventh century there weren’t really any teacher training programmes, but today Solomon definitely wouldn’t be awarded Qualified Teacher Status. And his use of punishments, seen as unnecessarily severe by eleventh century standards, would be regarded today as professional misconduct/ child abuse. So, by the standards of the time, Solomon was frankly not worth the money, and by the standards of the present, he would be barred from the teaching profession.

This being said, Guibert’s view of Solomon isn’t entirely negative. On the contrary, he says that he taught him “everything pertaining to modesty, chastity and good manners.” So at least he got something out of his education, but not what his mother paid for.

Guibert reflects quite deeply on this, and in the process comes up with some theories of how the education of children should work.

Any person’s nature, let alone a child’s, ends up being blunted if it has to submit to too much intellectual work. The more a mind is fired up by extended study, the more the spirit cools as the energies become overexerted. Energy dissolves into apathy.

How cognitive neuroscientists think memory works

What Guibert is describing here sounds a lot like what neuroscientists and educational theorists call “cognitive overload.” The theory of cognitive overload is essentially that new information has to be processed through the brain’s working memory before it can be committed to the long-term memory. The working memory can typically only process seven things at a time. Giving too much information to students at any one stage in the lesson, or getting them to do too many tasks, leads to cognitive overload as there’s just too much information for them to process. Therefore, what’s recommended to trainee teachers like myself is to chunk knowledge and tasks between different stages of the lesson/ different lessons to make it more manageable and easier to take in. Unnecessary or distracting information, meanwhile, gets cut out and scaffolds for complex tasks like prompts, instructions broken down into stages, templates, tables and other tools are provided so that not too much mental effort has to be made at any one time. Most people see cognitive load as cutting-edge educational theory, but Guibert was already thinking about this in the early twelfth century. Guibert then writes:

If, as Scripture puts it, “there was silence in heaven for half an hour [Revelation 8:1],” even the gift of contemplation cannot be sustained unceasingly. It is the same thing for any activity of the mind: it cannot be maintained without interruption. It is my belief, then, that any mind concentrating on a specific object should use varying degrees of attention. Alternately thinking about one thing, then another, we should be able to come back to the one that our mind is most interested in, as if renewed by the recreation we have given ourselves. Nature, too, tends to get tired and should find its remedy in a variety of activities. We must remember that God did not create a uniform world but allowed us to enjoy time changes – days and nights, spring and summer, autumn and winter. People who call themselves schoolteachers should find ways of varying the education of children and young people. Even students who have the seriousness of old people about them should not be treated any differently, in my opinion.

In a sense, what Guibert is recommending here is now enshrined in the modern school day timetable. In mainstream English schools, you will typically have five to eight lessons a day, each of them typically between 40 and 60 minutes in length. Normally, you will have all these lessons in different subjects – at most, you will have two in the same subject in the same day. You will also have an approximately 20-minute morning breaktime and a 40-to-60-minute lunch period. But many educational theorists see that as not providing enough variety, rest and focus in itself. Instead, they have argued for things like spaced learning and interleaving. Spaced learning is when a topic is spread out over a long period of time – rather than learning it all in one lesson, you instead spread it out over several lessons or even several weeks while mixing it in with unrelated stuff. As Guibert might have been hinting at here, it requires students to immediately commit things to their long term memory rather than try and hold them in their working memory and then retrieve them as and when required – its quite good for retrieval practice (being tested on previously learned content – something I try and do a lot in my lessons) and revision. Interleaving is when, during a lesson, you take a break from the current content to look at a slightly different but related topic within the same subject area, before coming back to the topic you’re currently studying. Both the structure of the modern school day, interleaving and spaced learning sound very similar to what Guibert was recommending, and are based on the same logic.

Guibert sums up thus how shambolic the education he received was, and in doing so imparts some truly timeless wisdom:

While my master was taking it out on me for not knowing what he himself did not know, he might have been well advised to consider the harm he had done by squeezing out of my frail little head what he had never put there in the first place. Lunatics’ words can be barely understood by the sane, if at all; similarly the utterances of people who are ignorant but pretend to know something, and who pass on their “knowledge” to others, become even murkier when they attempt to explain what they are saying. There is nothing harder than trying to hold forth on something you cannot understand. It is obscure for the speaker, and even more so for the hearer; it is really as if both were being turned to stone. I’m saying this, O Lord, not because I want to stigmatise this man who, all things considered, was a good friend, but in order to let the readers know, whoever they might be, that we must not be entitled to teach as truth anything that crosses our minds. Let us not lose other people in the clouds of our own theories.

Sources cited:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated and with an introduction by Pail J Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996), pp 16 – 19

Jay Rubinstein, Guibert de Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind, Routledge (2013), p 13

Education Endowment Foundation, Cognitive Neuroscience in the Classroom: A Review of the Evidence (2021)

From the sources 7: childhood and going to school in the 1060s

 I can’t tell you how great it feels to be writing a blogpost now. The last two weeks have been absolutely hectic for me with the PGCE and my mental health has taken a toll for the worse. But now I’m ahead with my lesson planning and have realised that I’m doing very well in the taught part of the course, I can sit down and write a blogpost. Given my current focus in life is “education, education, education” to quote Tony Blair (honestly though, with the possible exception of last year, when has it ever been otherwise), lets return to Guibert and have look at his education

But first, lets hear a bit about his birth and early upbringing. As I said in the previous post, Guibert’s parents were from the lower rungs of the Northern French warrior aristocracy. I also mentioned that Guibert and his mother were very close, if not in an entirely healthy way and that he struggled to relate or sympathise with his father, who was a knight. Guibert remarks eloquently in his autobiography that “in two sense of the word I was the last of her children” – Guibert was the youngest out of his several brothers and sisters, and by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1110s, when he was in his sixties, he was the only one of them left alive. Guibert also says that he was his mother’s favourite child, though he doesn’t try and make himself out as special for it – “aren’t mothers usually more affectionate with their last born.” Guibert also imagines his mother watching over him lovingly in Heaven, as well as sighing with despair whenever he strays from the path of virtue that she set out for him.

Guibert’s mother had gone through a terrifying experience to give birth to him. The perils of premodern childbirth are often exaggerated in popular history. While concrete statistics from the Middle Ages can’t be obtained, from the much better sixteenth and seventeenth century parish register evidence it seems more likely to have been in the realm of 2 - 3 in 100 women dying in childbirth rather than 33 in 100, as some people might imagine it to be so when they think of “ye olden days.” In other words, you were more likely to have a couple of women in your village or neighbourhood die in childbirth than close family members. Still, let’s not downplay it. Death from childbirth was a real enough and accepted possibility before modern medicine that, as we know from, again, early modern sources, women would make plans for how their husbands would honour their memory and their surviving children’s upbringing if something did go horribly wrong either when they went into labour or immediately after delivery, to say nothing of the extreme pain that would have been felt in any case in an age before modern anaesthetics. And in the case of Guibert’s mother things almost did go horribly wrong for her. Guibert relates them in chapter 3:

As she approached the end of her pregnancy my mother had been in the most intense pain throughout the season of Lent. How often she reproached me in later years for those pangs of childbirth when she saw me straying and following the slippery downhill path! Finally Holy Saturday, the solemn vigil of Easter, dawned. My mother was wracked with continuous pain. As the hour of delivery approached, the pains increased, but they were presumed to lead to a natural delivery. Then I turned around in her womb, with my head upward. My father, his friends, members of the family, all feared for both our lives. The child, they thought, was hastening the mother’s death; and the offspring’s exit from the world at the very moment he was being denied an entrance to it added to their sense of pity. On that day, except for the solemn liturgy that is celebrated at a certain hour, the offices usually sung for members of the household were not scheduled. The family held an urgent meeting. They rushed to the altar of the Mother of God. To the one who was, and ever will be, the only Virgin to give birth, they made the following vow and left it as an offering at our Lady’s altar: if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in God’s service and hers; if the child were of the lesser sex, it would be given over to a corresponding religious vocation.

At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking almost like an aborted fetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a most miserable being, and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had been saved. The tiny human being that had just seen the light was so lamentably frail that it looked like the corpse of a stillborn baby. The little reeds that sprout in mid-April in this part of the country are fuller by comparison than were my little fingers. On the same day, as I was brought to the baptismal font – this was often related to me as a joke when I was a child, and even during my adolescence – a woman kept rolling me from one hand to the other and saying “Do you think this little creature is going to live? I guess mother nature never quite finished this one. She gave him an outline more than a body.” All of these things foreshadowed the way I am living own.

(Source: “A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996), pp 10 – 11)

This is all trademark Guibert de Nogent – gloomy and self-deprecating, yet lively and well-written. And sure enough, the circumstances of Guibert’s birth did set him on his general trajectory in life. Because of that vow made when his mother was in labour, Guibert was destined for a career in the church. Had he been a girl, he would have had to become a nun. Because he was a boy, he therefore had to be trained up to become a priest or a monk. This wasn’t altogether unusual in a medieval aristocratic family. Normally, though depending on how many children there were in the family, at least one child, male or female, would be given a religious vocation. Having one of your children serve in a church or monastery dedicated to a powerful saint would enable them to pray for their patron saint to petition God to have mercy on your family’s souls and grant them a place in Heaven. In a way it was a kind of insurance. Also, to have a relative occupy a high-enough position in the church (a deacon, an abbot/ abbess or bishop) was always advantageous given the wealth, authority and connections that came with those offices. A mixture of piety and family strategies were always in the equation.

Guibert claims that his mother was most committed to this plan for Guibert, while his father had doubts about whether a religious vocation was the best plan for him when, as it turned out, baby Guibert wasn’t so sickly after all. But fate intervened to keep Guibert on the path that had been set out for him before his birth:

I was hardly born, I had scarcely learned to grasp my rattles, when you made me an orphan, dear God, you who were my father-to-be. Yes I was just eight months old when my physical father died: thank you so much for having permitted this man to die in a Christian state of mind. Had he lived he unquestionably would have tried to block the providential design you had for me. My physical build, combined with an alacrity of spirit natural for my age, seemed, in fact to direct me towards a worldly vocation; so nobody doubted that my father would break the vow he had made when it came time for me to begin my education. O good provider, you have managed a resolution that worked well for the well-being of both of us: I was never deprived of the rudiments of your teachings, and he never broke the oath to you.

 (Source: Ibid, p 14)

Once again, we have to be careful as to whether Guibert is being strictly truthful about all this. Not only is there the obviously parallel with Augustine, but also it was a hugely common trope in early medieval saints’ lives, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, to claim that the mother was always supportive of their child’s religious vocation, whereas the father was sceptical or outright opposed to it. The Life of St Gertrude of Nivelles, an early Carolingian hagiography of a Merovingian-era saint, is a case in point, and given that Guibert wrote about saints he was probably familiar with this literature. At the same time, there’s no good reason to be dismissive of his testimony. But anyway, Guibert’s father died in 1056 when he was only eight months old, and so his mother, who did not remarry, was left in complete charge of his upbringing. To give due thanks to Jesus and the Virgin Mary for saving her life, she was insistent that her son grow up to be a monk or a priest.

If Guibert was going to be a monk or a priest, he would need to be able to read and write, and of course that meant reading and writing in Latin. Latin was of course not Guibert’s mother tongue, which would have been the Picard dialect of Old French. By Guibert’s day, learning Latin wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire evolved into the earliest versions of the modern Romance languages. But everyone would more or less agree that this had happened everywhere by about 900, so more than a century and half before Guibert was born. Arguably, Latin would have been in some respects easier to grasp for Guibert as Frenchman than if he were a Dane, an Irishman or an Anglo-Saxon, given the similarity of most of the vocabulary, but the grammar, spelling and pronunciation wouldn’t have come naturally at all. Indeed, about 100 years before Guibert was born, an Italian cleric and grammarian called Gunzo got mightily offended when he visited the monastery of St Gall (in modern Switzerland) and the German monks there corrected him for using a noun in the accusative case instead of the ablative after a particular preposition like he was some ignoramus. Learning Latin in the eleventh century was thus something that didn’t come naturally to anyone (other than linguistic geniuses), just as is very much the case today. Since this was an age before printing, it was very hard to produce large numbers of standardised Latin textbooks, dictionaries and other indispensable teaching tools. How much Latin anyone was able to learn, and to what standard, thus varied a lot in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, you could find plenty of priests and monks who only really knew enough Latin to recite prayers and hymns, draft basic legal and administrative documents like charters and read bits of the Vulgate Bible. On the other hand, a sizeable minority had an almost perfect knowledge of Classical Latin and were well-versed in ancient Roman literature. Guibert was closer to that end. He quotes Sallust and Virgil on a number of occasions in his autobiography and he was clearly comfortable with writing in it about deeply personal subjects. But that doesn’t mean he found learning Latin easy:

I began to study Latin. Some of the basics I learned as best as I could, but I could hardly make sense of it. My dear mother, who really wanted me to be a scholar, decided to turn me over to a private tutor. In the recent past, and even during my childhood, there had been such a shortage of teachers that you could find hardly any in the towns and really any in the cities. When one did happen to find some, they knew so little that they couldn’t even be compared to the wandering scholars of the present day. The man that my mother decided to send me to had been studying grammar late in life, and he was all the more incompetent in his art for having absorbed so little of it in his youth. He was a very modest man, though, and he made up in honesty for what he lacked in literary knowledge.

(Source: Ibid, p 14)

Guibert leaves it quite ambiguous as to how he received his earliest schooling. But clearly it didn’t work very well and so he required a private tutor if he was to get to grips with Latin grammar. Guibert speaking about the shortage of teachers in his childhood (the 1060s) compared to at the time of writing (the 1110s) shows just how aware he was of the huge social changes taking place in his lifetime. This period saw a massive expansion of secondary and higher education in Western Europe as new urban schools, typically based in cathedrals, took shape. Some cathedral schools had existed since the mid-ninth century, but their number greatly increased in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and they marked a significant change from the school system of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, based around royal courts and monasteries. Why so many sprung up in this period cannot be answered here, because it would basically mean tapping into all the major changes (political, economic, social and cultural) taking place in the period 1060 – 1215. But its effect was that there were more graduates around who were in need of employment. And like with the great expansion of secondary and higher education in Britain in the period 1945 – 1970, but unlike with the post-1997 expansion, this was easily found. That was in part because the number of local churches, which needed priests, was growing across western Europe, but also because landed aristocracies were growing in size across Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside the proliferation of castles, which we talked about before. It’s likely that Guibert’s family had only been part of the knightly class for a couple of generations before him. These aristocrats needed educated men to act as their personal secretaries and administrators on their estates – written documents were a much more powerful tool for squeezing higher rents out of peasant tenants than just sending a bunch of men on horses with iron helmets and swords into the village at harvest-time, which was why bishops and monasteries were always the most ruthlessly efficient landlords. They also needed private tutors to educate their children, as was the case for Guibert’s mother who was quite ahead of the curve for the 1060s.

Chartres Cathedral, home of one of the most famous schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

How Guibert’s mother found his tutor is a very interesting story in itself. Of course, she didn’t leave an advert of Gumtree or visit an online agency. Instead, having consulted her household chaplains, she headhunted the private tutor of Guibert’s cousin. He was quite comfortable in his job – the boy’s parents got on well with him and gave him room and board (pretty good employment benefits). But his pedagogy, whatever its virtues, was wasted on Guibert’s cousin:

The boy for whom he was responsible for was handsome and aristocratic-looking, but allergic to the liberal arts, recalcitrant to any form of discipline, and for his age quite a liar and a stealer. He could put up with no form of supervision, seldom came to school, and could be found hiding in the vineyard just about every day.

(Source: Ibid, p 15)

Every secondary school teacher will have encountered someone like this boy. I have yet to personally encounter anyone like that, as someone who is only one term into a PGCE, but at my first placement school I have regularly heard my colleagues talking about such individuals with despair. Mutatis Mutandis. Thus, Guibert’s mother was able to snap him up, admittedly after the teacher had a strange dream. How did young Guibert find his new teacher? We’ll hear more about that next time.

From the sources 6: why write an autobiography in the twelfth century?

 

Meet Guibert de Nogent (1053 – 1125), the abbot of a monastery in Picardy, northern France. Guibert’s seventy years of life coincided with some pretty tumultuous and exciting events – the Norman Conquest of England, the ideological struggle between the German emperors and the popes that is somewhat misleadingly called the Investiture Controversy (the right to invest bishops was part of it, but far from the whole story), the First Crusade, the explosion of new monastic movements like the Carthusians and Cistercians, a campaign across the whole of Catholic Christendom to reform clerical morality and the emergence of urban self-government in the West for the first time since classical antiquity.

A self-portrait of Guibert de Nogent from his Tropologies of the Prophets shows Guibert (in his black Benedictine robes) offering his book up to Christ enthroned, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Lat 2502, folio 1

 Guibert had opinions on all of these things going on in the world, despite never leaving his corner of northeast-France save for one brief trip to Burgundy, as is attested in his writings, even if some of them are written from a quite parochial angle. He wrote a treatise on saints and relics, a history of the First Crusade called The Deeds of God through the Franks and an autobiography called the Monodies, which includes within it a history of his abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy and an account of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Laon against their bishop in 1112 which resulted in a short-lived urban republic called the Laon commune. Guibert is quite a household name among crusades historians, but arguably he’s most significant as the author of the Monodies, written between 1108 and 1115. Guibert called them the Monodies (Latin: Monodiae) because that term meant a song sung by one person. As Isidore of Seville (560 – 636) explained in his early seventh century encyclopaedia Etymologies:

Original Latin: Cum autem unus canit, Graece monodia, Latine sincinnium dicitur; cum vero duo canunt, bicinium appellatur: cum multi, chorus.

My translation: When one person sings, while in Greek it is said to be a monodia, in Latin it is said to be a sincinnium; indeed, when two people sing, they call it bicinium, and when many people sing, they call it a chorus.

The Monodies were the first complete autobiography to have been written in the West since St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c.400). Indeed, it is the shadow of St Augustine that lurks behind Guibert de Nogent’s work. Like St Augustine, who was hugely influential, Guibert believed that the human mind and soul were locked in a constant struggle against their own pride and the various corrupting forces present in the material world and this is the central theme that runs throughout his autobiography. He also believed that demons could assist in leading humans down the path of pride, temptation and corruption, and this will essentially be the focus of this series. And like Augustine in the Confessions, Guibert’s story is that of a boy who starts out with promise, goes down the path of sin in adolescence but later relents thanks to God’s boundless compassion and patience – indeed, both deliberately echo the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 431): Guibert de Nogent's personal hero and inspiration

One could also say that Guibert was to some degree writing in an established genre of religious writing, one which revolved around using “experiences (experimenta)” as “examples (exempla)” to teach good or bad morals. Many monks had written works in this vein, which could get quite intimate and personal, such as Otloh of St Emmeram (1010 – 1072) in his letter to his friend, William of Hirsau. Indeed, beyond Guibert’s youth, his autobiography essentially reads like a collection of anecdotes with moral lessons, in many of which Guibert himself is just a side-character.

Nonetheless, while this is a carefully curated autobiography, Guibert de Nogent as a teenager had been taught by Anslem of Bec, the great theologian and future archbishop of Canterbury, and had fully internalised his trademark saying “If I look within myself, I cannot bear myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself.” Also, if this was all just a moralistic exercise, or a story of faith and devotion to God being tested, why did Guibert focus on himself? Surely, he could have just focused on Bible stories for his experimenta, as Otloh had done, or the lives of the saints in providing instruction on how to live a good life and avoid evil, as these were more than sufficient for that purpose. There’s little doubt that Guibert saw himself as a unique somebody with distinctly personal challenges to overcome as well as ones that spoke to the experiences of your regular medieval monk. But note that he did not see himself as a unique somebody in a positive, celebratory way. This was a man who never learned to be happy with himself, and while a moderate amount of self-deprecation was de rigueur for a medieval monk or cleric (there’s plenty of that in the writings of Guibert’s mentor, St Anselm of Canterbury) Guibert takes it to excessive levels in the Monodies. Yet despite his crippling insecurities and anxieties was able to accomplish all that could have been expected of him and more in life and was not driven to depression and suicide.

Now, to get a sense of the general tone of the text, lets see first how Guibert begins his autobiography:

I confess to your majesty, O God, the innumerable times I have strayed from your paths, and the innumerable times you inspired me to return to you. I confess the iniquity of my childhood and my youth, still boiling within me as an adult. I confess my deep-seated penchant for depravity, which has not ceased in spite of my declining strength. Lord, every time I recall my persistence in self-defilement and remember how you have always given me the means of regretting it, I can only marvel at your infinite patience. It truly defies the imagination. If repentance and the urge to pray never occur without the outpouring of your spirit, how do you manage to fill the hearts of sinners so liberally and grant so many graces to those who have turned from you and who even provoked you?

Now, in a sense, Guibert is following St Augustine’s Confessions, by giving a meditation on the nature of God and his relationships with humans. His theological training from St Anselm of Canterbury is also much in evidence here – two of St Anselm’s great specialisms were in ontology (the study of the nature of God as a cosmic being) and moral theology or, in GCSE RS/ A Level Philosophy terms, “the problem of evil” (why does God allow bad things to happen in the natural world and humans to sin). But even if a lot of the language, very eloquent nonetheless, is quite generic, Guibert unlike Augustine in the first five chapters of the Confessions, makes it explicit that this isn’t about God and man generally, its about God and him. Right from the start, Guibert is making it clear that this is about him as a unique somebody, and a uniquely wretched and sinful somebody, who God with his infinite power and goodness somehow manages to redeem. To while Guibert is undoubtedly taking his lead from one of the greatest of the Church Fathers of ancient Christianity, and one of the most prominent Catholic theologians of his own day, he is from the start writing something original.

Later on in the first chapter, Guibert says:

O good God, when I come back to you after my binges of inner drunkenness, I don’t turn back from knowledge of myself, even though I don’t otherwise make any progress either. If I am blind in knowing myself, how could I possibly have any spark of knowledge for you? If, as Jeremiah says, “I am the man who has seen affliction” [Lamentations 3:1], it follows that I must look very carefully for the things that compensate for that poverty. To put that differently, if I don’t know what is good, how am I to know what is bad, let alone hateful? Unless I know what beauty is I can never loathe what is ugly. It follows from this that I try to know you insofar as I can know myself; and enjoying the knowledge of you does not mean that I lack self-knowledge. It is a good thing, then, and singularly beneficial for my soul, that confessions of this sort allow my persistent search for your light to dispel the darkness of my reason. With steady lighting my reason will no longer be in the dark about itself.

This beautifully written passage neatly expresses Guibert’s purpose in writing the book – to try and understand himself in order to be able to understand God. Right from the outset this is a deeply religious exercise, but Guibert doesn’t want a generic understanding of what God is like and what he does? He wants to understand him through his own personal experiences.

In the second chapter, Guibert goes on to think about the gifts God has given him in life. This is echoing St Augustine, who in Confessions 9.6 says:

Original Latin: Munera tua tibi confiteor, domine deus meus, creator omnium et multum potens formare nostra deformia.

My translation (bit ropey, but here goes): I demonstrate many of your gifts to me to you, my lord God, creator of all and with much power to shape our many deformities.

Here, Guibert remarks that all the things we have materially in life are gifts from God and thus we shouldn’t boast of them because whatever they might do for us in this world, they’ll do nothing for us in the next:

The more fleeting they are, the more their very transitoriness makes them suspect. If one can find no other argument to despise them, it is enough to point out that one’s genealogy, or physical appearance, are not of one’s choosing.

Some things can sometimes be acquired through effort: wealth, for example, or talent … But the truth of my assertion here is only relative. If the light, which “enlightens the way for every man coming into the world” [John 1.9] fails to enlighten reason – and if Christ, the key to all science, fails to open the doors of right doctrine – then, surely, teachers are fighting a losing battle against clogged ears. Any person, then, is unwise to lay claim to anything except sin. But let me drop this and get on with my subject.

Guibert then goes on name the first and foremost of those gifts God has given him, namely his mother “who is beautiful yet chaste and modest and filled with the fear of the Lord”, which nicely summarises Guibert’s view of what womanhood should be (he most certainly wasn’t alone in it!). Guibert’s mother is a very important recurring character in the Monodies, as we’ll see, and it is she who plays the most important role, after God of course, in steering him down the right path and away from sin and ruin. It becomes quite clear from the Monodies that Guibert was very close to his mother (even after he become a cloistered novice monk, she lived as a hermit in the monastery grounds and he would visit her), and that she had a very important influence on his personality, both positive and negative. It was no doubt his recollections of his mother that led to Guibert identifying a lot with St Augustine, who also had a mother (Monica) who was devout and modest, whom he was very fond of and who did a lot to try and steer him down the right path, in Augustine’s case towards Christianity (Augustine’s father was a pagan and in youth Augustine became firstly a Manichaean and then a Neoplatonist sceptic).  

Guibert uses his mother to illustrate the points he’s just made earlier:

Mentioning her beauty alone would have been profane and foolish if I didn’t add (to show the vanity of the word “beauty), that the severity of her look was sure proof of her chastity. For poverty-ridden people, who have no choice about their food, fasting is really a form of torture and is therefore less praiseworthy; whereas if rich people abstain from food, their merit is derived from its abundance. So it is with beauty, which is all the more praiseworthy if it resists flattery while knowing itself to be desirable.

Sallust was able to consider beauty praiseworthy independent of moral considerations. Otherwise, he would have never said about Aurelia Orestilla that “good men never praised anything in her except her beauty. Sallust seems to have meant that Aurelia’s beauty, considered in isolation, could still be praised by good people, while admitting how corrupt she was in everything else. Speaking for Sallust, I think he might as well have said that Aurelia deserved to be praised for a natural God-given gift, defiled though she was by the other impurities that made up her being. Likewise, a statue can be praised for the harmony of its parts, no matter what material it is made of. Saint Paul may call an idol “unreal” from the point of view of faith, and indeed nothing is more profane than an idol, but one can still admire the harmony of its limbs …

… If everything that has been designed in the eternal plan of God is good, every particular instance of beauty in the temporal order is, one might say, a mirror of that eternal beauty. It is created things that make the eternal things of God intelligible,” [Romans 1:20] says Saint Paul …

In his book entitled On Christian Doctrine (If I am not mistaken) Saint Augustine wrote something like this: “a person with a beautiful body and a corrupt soul is to be more pitied than one whose body is also ugly.” If therefore we lament beauty that is blemished, it is unquestionably a good thing when beauty, though depraved, is improved through perseverance in goodness.

Thank you God, for instilling virtue in my mother’s beauty. The seriousness of her whole bearing was enough to show her contempt for all vanity. A sober look, measured words, modest facial expressions hardly lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors. O God of power, you know what fame your name had inspired in her from earliest years, and how she rebelled against every form of allurement. Incidentally, one rarely, if ever, finds comparable self-control among women of her social rank, or a comparable reluctance to denigrate those who lack self-control. Whenever anyone, whether from within our outside her household, began this sort of gossip, she would turn away and go, looking as irritated as if she were the one being attacked. What compels me to relate these facts, O God of truth, is not a private affection, even for my mother, but the facts themselves, which are far more eloquent than my words could ever be. Besides, the rest of my family are fierce, brutish warriors and murderers. They have no idea of God and would surely live far from your sight unless you were willing to show them your boundless mercy as you so often do.

"Fierce and brutish warriors and murderers" with "no idea of God": knights torment the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius in this highly imaginative eleventh century manuscript of the Consolations of Philosophy from France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 6401

There’s so much to talk about here. The first is Guibert’s methods of argumentation. He always starts from his own personal reflections on human character, which he seems to have a keen awareness of, or on God and then elaborates on them with references to revered authorities – a standard method of argumentation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, given how much tradition and ancient wisdom was valued in premodern thought. Most of the intellectual authorities Guibert cites are the Biblical, or else St Augustine, though notably he does cite the first century BC Roman historian Sallust, specifically his discussion of Aurelia Orestilla, the wife of the wicked Catiline, the Roman aristocrat who attempted to overthrow the Republic in 63 BC, in his On the Conspiracy of Catiline. We might assume, based on our preconceived modern stereotypes, that a devout medieval monk would be hysterically opposed to pagan literature, but as I’ve written before such stereotypes are largely unwarranted. Instead, the pagan Romans were regarded by most medieval intellectuals as the best guide to skilled rhetoric and fine writing, and as deeply insightful if sometimes flawed guides to the natural world, the human condition and history. Sallust himself was a standard classroom text in medieval monasteries and cathedral schools, and so many medieval historians roughly contemporary to Guibert including William of Poitiers, Bruno of Merseburg, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon were intimately familiar with both his Catilinarian Conspiracy and his Jugurthine War. In citing Sallust, Guibert was both showing that the ancients had made the similar observations on human character to him, despite their differing religious worldviews, as well as also demonstrating that he was a well-educated man.

We can also see that Guibert wasn’t dogmatic in how he chose to follow authorities. While he agrees with Saint Paul that idols, by which he means physical objects that are worshipped by people presuming them to be living, physical manifestations of deities, are bad, he also says that they can nonetheless be pleasing to look at from an aesthetic standpoint. This also reflects part of his personality – as I’ll show you in a future post, Guibert did have something of a proto-archaeological interest in pagan antiquities, and even excavated a more than one thousand-year-old holy-site in the grounds of his monastery.

The final lines concerning his mother in this chapter really give us a sense of why Guibert wrote the Monodies. These “facts” about his life do more than any abstract theological reasoning or fine rhetoric could do to illustrate his arguments, by showing how it all works out in the here and now.

Guibert also has a very negative attitude towards his own family background and social class. As we’ll see, both his parents came from the lowest echelons of the Northern French warrior aristocracy – his mother was a minor noblewoman and his father a knight who owned his own castle. While undoubtedly this background helped Guibert get to where he was, as abbot of Nogent, Guibert sees it as nothing praiseworthy and disdains what he sees as the highly secular, materialistic and violent culture of this social group. Guibert was not alone here. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot and the most influential religious leader of the twelfth century, was full of denunciations of the vanity, vainglory, lustfulness and violence of nobles and knights – in 1115, a year after Guibert finished the Monodies, Bernard condemned the new craze for mock battles among young knights that were coming to be known as tournaments. And Guibert’s contemporaries, Orderic Vitalis and Abbot Suger, wrote invective-laden narratives about borderline psychopathic feudal lords who habitually terrorised churches and kidnapped and tortured merchants, men like Robert de Belleme and Thomas de Marle (who also appears in Guibert’s Monodies). At the same time, Guibert is a helpful reminder that churchmen and warrior aristocrats weren’t from two different worlds – a lot of the time, they were brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins! And the First Crusade gave Guibert a flicker of optimism for the warrior elite, while his contemporary St Bernard of Clairvaux tried to spiritually reform them and channel their martial energies to higher causes by setting up the Knights Templar with Hugh de Payens between 1118 and 1127.

Finally, Guibert gives us such a brilliant insight into the ascetic mindset, which can be really hard to grasp in twenty-first century Britain where the idea of going off to live in a monastery, giving up all personal property, abstaining from sex and living a life of prayer, hard work, study, contemplation and fasting to get closer to a divine being seems very alien and transgressive to most people. Particularly revealing is that paragraph about poor people fasting as opposed to rich people fasting, the latter deserving more praise than the former for doing so. A recurring theme throughout many medieval hagiographies is the wealth, noble pedigree and physical attractiveness of the saints (male and female) that are their subject matter being stressed – the point being that they could enjoy political power, luxurious living and sexual pleasure, yet they chose to spurn it all to pursue a higher cause. Perhaps then the closest analogues to medieval ascetic saints and monks today would be certain members of the environmental movement, like Greta Thunberg.