convent in Naples and wandered from court to court—from Geneva to Paris,
from London to Germany to Venice—denouncing the university scholars and
seeking patrons for his scheme to replace the warring sects of disunited Chris-
tendom. For him, religion and philosophy had metamorphosed into an eclectic
mix of pagan hermeticism, Jewish Kabbalah, magical symbolism, and new
science. Bruno was full of the boldness of new combinations, but insulation
from politics was lacking, and he was burned for heresy.
The aristocrat Montaigne took a more cautious path. Montaigne’s interest
in allaying doctrinal conflicts was stimulated by the diverse religious ties of his
family and political connections. Through his mother he was related to Portu-
guese Jews, forced converts to Catholicism, who had settled in Bordeaux; his
distant cousin Francisco Sanchez, from this same mixed religious background,
attended the same college in Bordeaux, and developed an anti-scholastic skep-
ticism about the same time as Montaigne. In the 1570s, just when he was
writing his Apologie de Raymond Sebond and beginning his Essais, Montaigne
was active in mediating between the Catholic Royalists and the French Prot-
estant leader, Henry of Navarre, whose conversion to Catholicism and ascen-
sion to the French throne Montaigne finally negotiated in 1588.^16 Montaigne’s
creative energy was no doubt multiplied by the successful trajectory of his
political connections; it also helps explain why he became far more famous
than Sanchez. Montaigne sought to mediate religious strife by a classically
tinged skepticism, expressed with a literary touch. His philosophy makes light
of doctrinal conflicts as well as the claims of Copernicus and Paracelsus to
have produced a new science. Montaigne’s “plague on all houses” represents
the culminating skepticism in an age when the bases of intellectual life were
fragmented and in flux.
Medieval Christendom was built on the monasteries, the papacy, and the
universities. By now the first two had crumbled, and the third had become
unfocused and scattered.
The Question of Intellectual Stagnation
Studies of intellectual life have preferred to focus on periods of creativity. Yet
we recognize what is creative only by contrast. Comparison of the dark side
against the light, and against the gray in between, is necessary for seeing the
structural conditions associated with all of the varieties of intellectual life. A
second reason to study stagnation is perhaps of greater immediate significance.
There is no guarantee that we ourselves—denizens of the late twentieth cen-
tury—inhabit a period of creativity. There is some likelihood that future
intellectual historians looking back will concentrate on the great ideas of the
first third of the century, and regard the rest as a falling off into mediocrity.
Almost all subsequent periods regarded late medieval philosophy as a
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^501