About the book
The founding of universities in the great cities of Europe during the High Middle Ages is tied by Jacques Le Goff to the rise of the intellectual, the first kind of European since classical times to live from teaching and gathering knowledge. His argument is that these figures, with Abelard as the typical case, were a new type of person who was neither knight nor monk. Their method was scholastic dialectic, and their goal was knowledge for its own sake. In Spain, France, England and Germany, thinking and learning stopped being reserved for the upper ranks of Church and court, and that change, Le Goff shows, permanently altered European culture. The English text comes from a revised French edition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb singled out its contrast between the scholastic thinker laboring inside the academy and the humanist working at leisure in his own study, and called Le Goff a gifted writer.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
Excellent, be it only for the presentation of the difference between the pompous scholastic thinker laboring in the academy and the other nonacademic humanist laboring in the the "luxe calme et volupte" of his study.
Another of the attributes is the readability of the work Le Goff is a gifted writer.
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