In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them
as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a
Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King
of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century
thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of
opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain
Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of
twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the
fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.
Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the
basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in
the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and
categorizing which she terms a "discourse of opposites" permeated
all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it
was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of
that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to
maintain them. Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites
in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes,
conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in
a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa
manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing
reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the
period."
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