Note 466 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The life of the rest of Europe in the later medieval period has little special significance in the history of freethought. France and Italy, by German admission, were the lands of the medieval Aufklärung.466 The poetry of the German Minnesingers, a growth from that of the Troubadours, presented the same anti-clerical features;467 and the story of Reynard the Fox was turned to anti-ecclesiastical purpose in Germany as in France. The relative freethinking set up by the crusaders’ contact with the Saracens seems to be the source of doubt of the Minnesinger Freidank concerning the doom of hell-fire on heretics and heathens, the opinion of Walter der Vogelweide that Christians, Jews, and Moslems all serve the same God,468 and still more mordant heresy. But such bold freethinking did not spread. Material prosperity rather than culture was the main feature of German progress in the Middle Ages; architecture being the only art greatly developed. Heresy of the anti-ecclesiastical order indeed abounded, and was duly persecuted; but the higher freethinking developments were in the theosophic rather than the rationalistic direction. Albert the Great (fl. 1260), “the universal Doctor,” the chief German teacher of the Middle Ages, was of unimpeached orthodoxy.469