But what, in the grand scheme of things, did Vincent’s Great Mirror reflect? It showed its readers everything of themselves. It shone a light both pagan and Christian, its author expressing a preference for neither. Vincent spoke of his work as valuable ‘for preaching, for lecturing, for resolving questions, and generally for explaining almost any sort of matter from every art’. It also reflected the late-medieval desire for ordering, for the organised setting down of a universe. The work was divided into three parts: Speculum Naturale (science and natural history, including chapters on astronomy, anatomy, agriculture, light and colour); Speculum Doctrinale (medicine, the mechanical arts, theology – based on the resurrection of man after banishment from Eden); and Speculum Historale (from Creation to the Last Judgement). A fourth section was added after Vincent’s death and appears in printed versions from the fifteenth century: Speculum Morale was largely copied from the work of Thomas Aquinas, and was an attempt by Vincent’s followers (and later printers) to attune the work to a more modern philosophy and Christian theology.
Vincent’s own moral instruction continues to excite debate. He was a modest editor, claiming little credit for his vast encyclopaedia (indeed apologising for its shortcomings in its preface, a recurring theme), crediting instead the vast army of writers upon which he drew. But his modesty was inherently false: while he very rarely adopted the outspoken role of ‘auctor’, or learned scholar expressing his own views, his selection from his sources was nonetheless pointed, politically and morally.
Vincent was particularly intrigued by the role of women, although he may not quite fit the role of medieval progressive some have assigned him. He made an educational distinction between the sexes, but it was very much the traditional one. ‘You have sons?’ he quotes from the Book of Ecclesiasticus. ‘Train them and care for them from boyhood. You have daughters? Watch over their bodies and do not show yourself joyful to them.’ But Vincent also displayed a rare acceptance in the Middle Ages of the view that women might be worthy recipients of his collation of knowledge. In France he was exposed to several instances marking the ascendancy of women, not least the regency of Blanche of Castile, and the chivalrous concept of courtly love. There are sections in his Great Mirror highlighting specific crafts suitable for women (all non-physical, all domestic as one might expect), and he places much emphasis on the value of women reading (albeit for religious guidance). The education scholar Rosemary Barton Tobin has observed that while another of Vincent’s works, De Eruditione Filiorum Nobilium (The Education of Noble Children), had the last ten of its fifty-one chapters devoted to young women, the instruction he suggests concentrates on the promotion of abstinence and the protection of chastity. Vincent opposed all forms of cosmetic beautification, for this would deflect focus from the soul. Moreover, Professor Tobin notes, a woman would always be required to uphold more virtuous standards than a man: ‘The girl is responsible for both her own behaviour and whatever interpretation others may place upon that behaviour. It is a severe burden which only adds to the heavier responsibility Vincent gives to girls as opposed to boys in the sphere of moral action.’*
COOK’S TALE
But Chaucer was a fan. He once referenced ‘Vincent, in his Storial Mirour,’ and he may have drawn on his Great Mirror for The Canterbury Tales.*
Chaucer’s great work is in itself encyclopaedic, his twenty-four tales covering all manner of occupations and daily pursuits – the Physician, the Monk, the Prioress, the Friar, the Merchant. But his range of fictional forms also suggests a catalogue, spanning, in the words of one middle-English specialist, every possible style: ‘Romance, moral prose allegory, the comic and bawdy fabliau, penitential manual, beast fable, Breton lai, sermon, fictional autobiography, parody, dramatic monologue, tragedy, exemplum, satire and hagiography, to name but a few.’*
Professor Helen Cooper compares The Canterbury Tales to the compendiums of Vincent of Beauvais, not least in its fully rounded exploration of human character: strengths and weaknesses, reality and imagination, abstract thought and intellectual rigour. She believes the work was intended to be read as an entire literary expression of life, with some narrative cross-referencing, and to address one story alone would be to miss the point, ‘like reading the Murder of Gonzago without Hamlet.’*
The characters in the tales are broadly divided into three social groups – those who fight, those who work and those who pray – while the range of the stories would indeed have been familiar to anyone versed in the thematic groupings of a medieval encyclopaedia, for they form a complete presentation of the world: the exotic world of romance and chivalry, the everyday practical world and the spiritual and cosmic world. And in a similar vein to many religious entries in early compendiums, the tales are morals: the stories test the extent to which the pilgrims live up to or fall short of an ideal. The main difference between Chaucer’s work and the encyclopaedia is that there is no attempt at universal or empirical ‘answers’. Every character strives for their own truths.
* A Social History of Knowledge (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000).
* The earliest universities in England, Italy, France and Spain (Bologna and Oxford in the eleventh/twelfth century, Modena in the twelfth century and Paris at the start of the thirteenth) evolved from cathedral schools and monastic schools, all of which followed the Latin Catholic theistic tradition.
* ‘Gervase of Tilbury’ by H.G. Richardson, History, 1961, vol. 46, no. 157. ‘The age of scepticism was not yet,’ Richardson observes. The Otia being billed as ‘an entertainment’ now comes into focus: though convincingly told, Gervase did not necessarily believe all the more fanciful stories in his work, but included them as one might use Shakespeare to describe the monarchy – history as drama.
* Otia Imperialia edited and translated by S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2002).
* There is much debate in medieval scholarship over whether Gervase’s work was intended as a textual accompaniment to the famous Ebstorf map, the 12ft-square, thirty-goatskin mappa mundi made sometime between 1234 and 1240 (and destroyed by the Allied bombing of Hanover in the Second World War). The controversy hinges on whether Gervase of Tilbury was the same Gervase as Gervase of Ebstorf. There is convincing evidence either way; the more extreme examples of fiery paradise quoted above, for example, are certainly redolent of some of the more fearful descriptions on the map.
* Although there may be as many as 300 manuscripts with portions of the whole.
* See ‘Vincent of Beauvais on the Education of Women’ by Rosemary Barton Tobin, Journal of the History of Ideas, July–September, 1974, vol. 35, no. 3. Also Astrik Gabriel, The Educational Ideas of Vincent of Beauvais (Notre Dame, 1956).