ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we saw how and why knowledge about nature could exist in twelfth-century Europe. We saw that different groups - canons, monks, masters, poets - all had a certain interest in discussing 'nature' in some sense, but each took a different view of what constituted proper knowledge. This chapter looks at these issues in an extreme form, where the knowledge of one group was heresy to another, and where two new groups - the two major Orders of friars - were put together to fight for one form of belief. It was a question of control of knowledge. What mattered was which group had the power, whether political, economic or indeed military, to insist upon their own knowledge and suppress that of other groups. The knowledge we are dealing with here is that about the 'Egyptian gold' of philosophy, about deep theological principles and about nature. The groups are Cathar and Catholic Christians, masters in the studio, and above all the new Orders of clergy, the friars.
