Jason Carr
Reaction to Friedrich Heer's The Medieval World.

     Friedrich Heer's offering is, in my opinion, the best text
we have read this semester.  It seems that all the other books
are held within this one; all their subjects are addressed in
some detail.  Of course this makes for somewhat dense reading. 
One reads a chapter and feels he has finished a great deal more.

     Heer seems to have made himself a historian for everyman. 
There are chapters devoted to class differences, religion,
science, literature, courtly love, historiography, science,
politics, minorities, and art.  Much was uninteresting to me, and
I  found myself skipping pages in some of the areas that
disinterested me ("The New State and The New Church," for one). 
This is not unexpected, however, in a study that addresses so
many fields.

     I find the interaction between Araby and Europe fascinating,
and so I was a little disappointed to see Heer's opinion on the
local and psychosocial origins of courtly love.  "Intellectualism
and the Universities" reintroduced the Arab influence, in an
unexpected way.  I had previously limited the Arab intellectual
influence to the transmission of classical manuscripts, and
scientific matters (mathematic theory, astronomy, medicine).  i
had completely overlooked the possibility that Islamic teaching
methodology was influential.  With this new insight, however, it
is easy to imagine the seminal influence of the madrasa (school-
mosque) on the university.  Here were teachers in a non-dedicated
architecture, seated and surrounded by students.  The students
and teachers were not bound to each other, or their physical
location.  Compare this with the description given by Heer:  
     "A professor at Bologna was really a kind of private
     tutor, employed by an independent group of students
     whose ages might be anything between seventeen and
     forty and who owed their masters no moral or spiritual
     obedience (page 244)."
     
Heer's treatment of art and architecture was certainly welcome,
although his Jungian emphasis may be too heavy for some. Also, in
his quest to show church architecture as the reconciliation of
the often contradictory medieval forms, he neglects one obvious
cause for this eclecticism:  the churches were built piecemeal,
each part by particular artisans.
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