John of Salisbury and William of Malmesbury: currents in twelfth-century humanism

Abstract

In their excellent little book Scribes and Scholars Reynolds and Wilson comparejohn of Salisbury and William of Malmesbury as classicists. The fact that the two men have never before been so compared, and the fact that even Reynolds’s and Wilson’s account contains a good many errors, shows how much is yet to be learned about the humanistic scholarship of the twelfth century. William and John are comparable in a number of ways, but most particularly in their interest in Greco-Latin antiquity: it is central to their scholarship, it is a major preoccupation in their works, it provides a key (and if we add biblical and patristic antiquity as well, the key) to their thinking about their contemporary world.

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