Medieval sophistry

Regular readers may have detected that though I often disagree with his conclusions, I find it is always illuminating to read Christopher Page, particularly for the wealth of sources he introduces. In The Owl and the Nightingale, he looks at how a famous dictum of St Jerome that "giving money to entertainers [histrionibus, which can mean minstrels] is like sacrificing to devils", often quoted as an illustration of the complete outsider status of the medieval minstrel, gets gradually softened by 12th and 13th century writers.

William of Auxerre notes that as minstrels are still men (in the image of god), and it is right to give alms to men, then it can be permissible to give alms to minstrels, that is, St Jerome's ban cannot logically be held to be absolute. Peter the Chanter says that 'some people' argue that giving money that allows someone to become a minstrel is sacrificing to demons but not if the man is already a minstrel (a rather fine distinction?)  "providing he does not give to provide any wantoness". He first appears to disagree with this view by saying that if the money is given because the man is a minstrel, it is giving to demons; but then later allows that those artisans who should be tolerated by the church include "players of musical instruments...necessary so that boredom and depression can be relieved by them, and so that devotion, and not wantonness, may be inspired by them".

However still beyond the pale are those 'histriones' who "contort and distort their bodies with shameless jumps or shameless gestures" or who flatter their current audience and say shameful things about those absent (although one writer prevaricates that it might be permissable to give money to a minstrel to stop him from saying bad things about you to others). Thomas Chobham makes finer distinctions amongst these actors, flatterers and two kinds of musical instrument players, the first who "go to public drinking houses and wanton gatherings" and incite lust, and should be shunned as St Jerome suggests, and the acceptable musicians who "sing the deeds of princes and the lives of saints" thus providing comfort to the troubled.