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Margaret Harvey, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c.1350–1440. By James G. Clark. Pp. xii + 316. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) Oxford University Press, 2004. isbn 0 19 927595 5. £55, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 56, Issue 2, October 2005, Pages 739–742, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli211
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Extract
This book aims to redress what its author considers to be a bias in English historical scholarship, since the time of Knowles, in judging that by the later Middle Ages monastic culture had fallen away from its earlier peak until the monasteries were marginal to culture. St Alban's, with Thomas Walsingham as a central figure, provides an excellent source for study because it has left a wealth of material, both in historical writing and other types of literary pursuit. Probably the major discovery here is a very careful analysis of writings by several monks which shows considerable learning in classical culture and an ability to imitate and to play with classical allusions and references which is often thought to belong to later Renaissance scholarship. It is Clark's contention that St Alban's under Abbot De la Mare was a centre of a new monastic education programme which produced an array of extremely well-educated monk–scholars with a precocious interest in the kind of culture that has been thought of as coming to England much later. The author considers very thoroughly the reading which lies behind the work of Walsingham and some of his younger colleagues and concludes that while Walsingham relied on florilegia and high medieval imitations for some of his knowledge of classics he was also extremely well read in the Roman poets Ovid, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Persius, and Juvenal as well as in the Roman historians and philosophers Livy, Martial, and Sallust. He could paraphrase, summarize, and make cross-references in ways which show very intimate knowledge, which was unusual for his time. He seems to have been able to read these in sound reliable copies too, which could have come from St Alban's own library.
