Meanwhile youth,
impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the universities,
and thereby hangs a story.
The Middle Ages were ``internationally minded.'' That
sounds difficult, but wait until I explain it to you. We modern
people are ``nationally minded.'' We are Americans or Englishmen
or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English or French
or Italian and go to English and French and Italian universities,
unless we want to specialise in some particular branch
of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn
another language and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow.
But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely
talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians.
They said, ``I am a citizen of Sheffield or Bordeaux or Genoa.''
Because they all belonged to one and the same church they felt
a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could
speak Latin, they possessed an international language which
removed the stupid language barriers which have grown up
in modern Europe and which place the small nations at such
an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example, take the case
of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and laughter, who
wrote his books in the sixteenth century. He was the native
of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin and all the world
was his audience. If he were alive to-day, he would write in
Dutch.
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