THE RENAISSANCE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY
After the fall of the western Roman Empire, the vestiges of Latin civilisation lingered on to varying degrees. While these times are often called the “Dark Ages”, knowledge still lingered, particularly in the monasteries. As the eminent historian Charles H Haskins* put it: “Throughout the earlier Middle Ages the chief centres of culture had been the monasteries. Set like islands in a sea of ignorance and barbarism, they had saved learning from extinction in Western Europe at a time when no other forces worked strongly toward that end.”
There was a resurgence of learning and literature in the ninth century, known as the Carolingian Renaissance, centred around the court of Charlemagne and his immediate successors. This resurgence, in the words of Haskins*, “originally confined to the establishment of a decent standard of education among the Frankish clergy, … had developed an interest in learning for its own sake... It was a revival … of the Latin Fathers, the Latin classics, and the Latin tongue which had suffered so severely in the 'Dark Ages' just preceding. ………. The movement conserved rather than originated….it came to an end …in the later years of the ninth century …..Fortunately, however, Charlemagne had insisted upon the establishment of schools in every monastery and cathedral ….” But these schools, often neglected, were hit hard in the lawless tenth century, that “age of anarchy and fist law.”
Around the end of the 11th, beginning of the 12th centuries, huge changes started to gather momentum in Christian western Europe, continuing through to near the middle of the 13th century. This is known as “The Renaissance of the 12th Century”, or “The Medieval Renaissance”.
Haskins* notes that a library of around the year 1100 would have had the bible and some other religious books, such as Carolingian religious commentaries, the service books of the church and various lives of saints, the textbooks of the late Latin author Boethius and some others, bits of local history, and perhaps certain of the Latin classics, too often covered with dust. Essentially that was the extent of the knowledge of the time.
By 1200 or not long after, Haskins notes, we should expect to also find the body of Roman law and the classics; a great body of recent theological writings and records; a mass of new history, poetry, and correspondence; the philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy recovered from the Greeks and Arabs during the 12th century; and the great feudal epics of France and the best of the Provencal lyrics.
There were many aspects to the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
There was a big resurgence in both reading and writing Latin poetry. Writing in the local languages appears and gathers momentum. Written history expands enormously, in part reflecting the growing activity of the age. But the style changes and new forms develop.
The late eleventh and the twelfth century saw a big growth in towns, hand in hand with the growth in trade. Many of the towns’ inhabitants travelled on business, sometimes long distances, meeting men from other towns, chancing upon them at the wayside shrines and markets and gathering in larger groups at the great fairs. News and ideas were exchanged and business was transacted.
The older cities of the South, especially in Italy, had maintained a tradition of lay education among the notaries and scribes and sometimes the trading class. The townsmen of the North now began to create lay schools where elementary education was given.
In the early middle ages laws throughout Europe were a mixture of local laws, rarely written down, some of which had started out centuries before as Roman law but had become bastardized over the generations. Others had virtually no perceivable Roman law ancestry.
The 12th century saw the availability for the first time of the full corpus of Roman Law. This was at the heart of the University which sprang up at Bologna early in the twelfth century. Here eminent jurists wrote extensive glossaries explaining the Roman laws and taught them to an eager audience, who then spread about, teaching it at other universities and making a living practicing it.
As Haskins* says: “this revival of Roman law did not take place in a vacuum, but was closely related to the larger currents of the age. It was a time of economic awakening in the Mediterranean and especially in Northern Italy, and the new trade and commerce demanded a law more flexible and more urban than the archaic and essentially rural custom of the Lombards. The towns came to prefer Roman law. It was an age of political consolidation, creating a demand for some 'common law' wider in its application than mere local custom and based on principles of more general validity”.
Ultimately Roman law spread through most of Europe, resisted only finally in England. Even there it had an effect, largely through the impetus it gave to writing down laws.
Haskins* says “The Renaissance of the twelfth century, like its Italian successor three hundred years later, drew its life from two principal sources… the knowledge and ideas already present ..[and].. an influx of new learning and literature from the East. But whereas the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was concerned primarily with literature, that of the twelfth century was concerned even more with philosophy and science. And while in the [fifteenth century] the foreign source was wholly Greek, in the twelfth century it was also Arabic.”
Western medieval Christendom had available to it Latin learning, although much of it was neglected until the 12th century. What it didn’t have was the mass of Greek learning. Greek was indecipherable to scribes of the middle ages, who on encountering it, would write “It’s Greek, therefore it cannot be read.” This is the origin of the phrase “it’s all Greek to me” which Shakespeare subsequently uses. In classical antiquity, most of the great Greek works, many of which postdated the rise of Rome, were never translated into Latin. This included the great medical works of Hippocrates and Galen, most of the mathematical and engineering works of Euclid and Archimedes and other Alexandrians, the astronomical writings of Ptolemy and the great bulk of the works of the philosophical and other works of Plato and Aristotle. And what they did have they badly summarized and paraphrased and intermingled with the supernatural and imaginary in their encyclopedias, such as the popular Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, which informs us:
“The race of the Sciopodes is said to live in Ethiopia. They have one leg apiece, and are of a marvelous swiftness, and the Greeks call them Sciopodes from this, that in summertime they lie on the ground on their backs and are shaded by the greatness of their feet.”
After the fall of Rome, books in Greek were ignored by the Latin west and essentially lost. However others valued this learning, mostly importantly the Arabs, whose religion taught them to honor learning. But the Arabs didn’t just preserve the Greek knowledge. As Haskins* says “The most vigorous scientific and philosophical activity of the early Middle Ages lay in the lands of the Prophet, whether in the fields of medicine and mathematics or in those of astronomy, astrology, and alchemy. To their Greek inheritance the Arabs added something of their own: observation of disease sufficiently accurate to permit of identification; large advances in arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry.. and the standard astronomical tables of the Middle Ages.”
Some of this knowledge reached the Latin west through Sicily. But, as Haskins* says: “the most important channel by which the new learning reached Western Europe ran through the Spanish peninsula….Restored to its ancient primacy by the Christian reconquest of 1085, Toledo was the natural place of exchange for Christian and Mohammedan learning. At this ancient centre of scientific teaching were to be found a wealth of Arabic books and a number of masters of the two tongues, and with the help of these ….. there arose a regular school for the translation of Arabic-Latin books and science, which drew from all lands those who thirsted for knowledge”.
The translation movement centred in Toledo features in Colin Windeyer’s novel Call the Intention Good.
Most marked of all the advances during the Medieval Renaissance were those in science.
Generally, it was an age of book learning, with a slavish devotion to what was said by the classical authors, with little experimentation and modern scientific method. There were exceptions, in particular the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He was an extraordinary figure and perhaps the first experimenter of the middle ages. However he combined his scientific impulses with the brutality of the time. Amongst his carefully observed and recorded experiments he is reported to have enclosed a prisoner in a barrel, observing while the man was put to death, carefully looking for any sign of the soul leaving the body. The Emperor Frederick is a background character in Colin Windeyer’s novels Call the Intention Good and Call the Acts Chaos.
To the medieval mind, science was only a branch of philosophy. Aristotle, in particular, appealed to an age which loved manuals and textbooks and found these under Aristotle's name in almost every field of philosophy and science, although at times they struggled to reconcile his teachings with orthodox Roman Catholicism.
In architecture, Romanesque hit its ultimate expression, making way for the engineering marvels of soaring Gothic architecture, which we count today as some of the most beautiful buildings ever erected.
As to the emergence and growth of Universities during the period, Haskins explains: “At the close of the eleventh century learning was almost entirely confined to the seven liberal arts of the traditional curriculum; the twelfth century filled [that] out …. with the new logic, the new mathematics, and the new astronomy, while it brought into existence the professional faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Universities had not existed hitherto because there was not enough learning in Western Europe to justify their existence; they came into being naturally with the expansion of knowledge in this period. The intellectual revolution and the institutional revolution went hand in hand.”
The first two universities were Paris and Bologna, which gave birth to other universities, initially Oxford, Salerno, Padua and Montpelier, which in turn mothered other universities. Soon universities were proliferating throughout the continent.
The Renaissance of the 12th century was a period of intellectual, social and economic revitalisation of western Christendom, which led on ultimately to the artistic Italian Renaissance of the 15th century and the subsequent scientific revolution which ushered in the modern times.
*Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
