The title of Dr Schonhardt’s important book suggests something highly specialized and geographically restricted, yet he is highly attuned to the widest perspectives of his topic. For he is one of those seeking to modify, perhaps even overturn, the Haskins-Southern view of the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” as something that began and received its earliest impetus from the schools of northern France, especially Paris. On this view, its great figures were Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury; Germany played a minor, catch-up role. For Schonhardt, an important part of this movement, “The Discovery of Nature,” had its beginnings and was for long situated primarily in the great monasteries within the dioceses of Regensburg (in particular, St Emmeram, Prüfening, and Prüll), seconded by Bamberg, Salzburg, and Augsburg.
The author begins his account with a detailed analytical list of the ancient and early medieval sources available to the monks there by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from Hyginus to the Aratea, followed by collections of astronomical texts and tables, and the
“moderns,” Hermann of Reichenau to William of Conches. (Chapters 3 and 4 make up most of the book, and could have been subdivided. But this is a small point.) More important are two reservations I have about his list of sources: first, the inclusion of patristic commentaries on the Hexaemeron. I do not think that many readers would have been driven to these texts because of their cosmological content. Second, the author provides statistics accompanied by bar-graphs of the chronological distribution of the main texts. But some of these are represented by such small numbers, and their survival attended by so many problems, that they must be held in some suspicion. Still, they provide the most complete and up-to-date lists of relevant manuscripts, and they tell a fairly consistent story, with a large representation concentrated in the twelfth century, in south-east Germany often including the eleventh century as well. The author claims that the monastic communities of south-eastern Germany possessed more than the average western-European number of relevant texts. More importantly, he claims that this is the region, and these the communities, into which the Arabic astrolabe was first introduced to Western Europe, as a means of timing the hours of the Divine Office, but with many wider implications and applications for studying the heavens, especially the movements of the stars. This produced the most internationally influential treatises on the use of the astrolabe, those by Helperic of Auxerre and William of Hirsau.
The second half of the book (chapters 4-5), traces the monks’ involvement with the astrolabe (particularly in the twelfth century), including the striking observation that each community that used one would need at least two monks (Experten), one to fill in for the other if he were absent or ill. This led to the formation of Fachgruppen within each community, who could and would conduct their own free-wheeling research into the heavens. A fascinating section of this discussion is the description and analysis of the so-called “Sphere of St Emmeram,” a tombstone-like inscribed stone slab now in the Historisches Museum in Regensburg. The author wishes to correct its received date of the thirteenth century to the important period of the 50s or 60s of the eleventh century, by analysis of its (lost) written sources. Here the aid of a historian of stone architecture or sculpture might have made his argument more convincing.
Schonhardt restricts his discussion quite severely to astronomica; what is needed now is to marry his arguments to those of (for instance) Stephen Jaeger and Thomas McCarthy on eleventh-century German rhetoric and music, in order to discover whether the Haskins-Southern interpretation of the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” has truly been superseded.