Note 430 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
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As regards France, the record of intellectual history between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries is hardly less scanty than as regards England. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the intellectual life of the French philosophic schools, as we saw, was more vigorous and expansive than that of any other country; so that, looking further to the Provençal literature and to the French beginnings of Gothic architecture, France might even be said to prepare the Renaissance.430 Outside of the schools, too, there was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a notable dissemination of partially philosophical thought among the middle-class laity. At that period the anti-clerical tendency was strongest in France, where in the thirteenth century lay scholarship stood highest. In the reign of Philippe le Bel (end of thirteenth century) was composed the poem Fauvel, by François de Rues, which is a direct attack on pope and clergy;431 and in the famous Roman de la Rose, as developed by Jean le Clopinel (= the Limper) of Meung-sur-Loire, there enters, without any criticism of the Christian creed, an element of all-round Naturalism which indirectly must have made for reason. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris in the time of St. Louis in a key of sentiment and lyricism, the poem is carried on by Jean de Meung under Philippe le Bel in a spirit of criticism, cynicism, science, and satire, which tells of many developments in forty years. The continuation can hardly have been written, as some literary historians assume, about its author’s twenty-fifth year; but it may be dated with some certainty between 1270 and 1285. To the work of his predecessor, amounting to less than 5,000 lines, he added 18,000, pouring forth a medley of scholarship, pedantry, philosophic reflection, speculation on the process of nature and the structure and ills of society, on property, morals, marriage, witchcraft, the characters of women, monks, friars, aristocrats—the whole pageant of medieval knowledge and fancy.