[lbo-talk] jobs for medievalists

[C. G. Estabrook]

I don't know if scholasticism under this description adequately captures
economics, but a more sympathetic (if not contradictory) account of the
"mindset" behind medieval scholasticism -- which meant formally just the
practice of the schools (= the universities, a medieval invention) -- was
given by C. S. Lewis (a substantial scholar, whatever else he was) in a
famous Oxford lecture forty years ago:

"At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a
wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted
'a place for everything and everything in the right place'. Distinction,
definition, tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent
activities, he was equally full of the impulse to formalise them. War was
(in intention) formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of
chivalry; sexual passion (in intention), by an elaborate code of love.
Highly original and soaring philosophical speculation squeezes itself into
a rigid dialectical pattern copied from Aristotle. Studies like Law and
Moral Theology, which demand the ordering of very diverse particulars,
especially flourish. Every way in which a poet can write (including some
in which he had much better not) is classified in the Arts of Rhetoric.
There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than
sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that
they would most have admired the card index.

"This impulse is equally at work in what seem to us their silliest
pedantries and in their most sublime achievements. In the latter we see
the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of passionately systematic
minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity. The
perfect examples are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante's Divine Comedy; as
unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and
varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday."  --CGE

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Ted Winslow wrote:


> Daniel Davies wrote:
> 
> > I hear that this one hasn't been filled yet ... strangely enough the
> > combination of financial economics and Medieval Latin isn't a 
> > particularly popular skillset.
> 
> There's a fit in mindset though - "scholasticism" in the sense of
> "treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it
> into into an exact logical category."  Bedlamite economics linked to
> Bedlamite theology (as in "starting from a mistake, a remorseless
> logician can end up in Bedlam").