Autorità dei Classici e autorità dei Padri nel secolo XI: intellettuali del monastero di S. Emmeramo in Ratisbona fra piacere della lettura e senso di colpa

In the XIth century the renewed interest of monks in the texts of the classical literature is balanced, in a time of monastic reforms, from their formal contempt for them in favor of the patristic and exegetical works. For this reason, the classics are then read by some monks with a neurotic guilt. This is well shown, for example, from the significant experience of two monks, Arnold and Otloh of Sankt Emmeram in Regensburg, who, even for different roads and at different times, attribute to reading the classics the cause of the sins of their youth and abandoned their 'guilty' classic readings to move towards the Fathers of the Church and to discover their sweetness. In the XIth century seems to renew therefore the crisis of identity that the cultivated people had lived at the time of St. Jerome under the solicitation of two divergent cultural patterns that were placed against each other.