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THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
Intellectual and Cultural Life
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
Controversy: Was there a Twelfth-Century Renaissance?
 The existence of a ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ was first suggested in 1840
by French scholars.
 But the debate did not really begin until the publication of Charles Homer
Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927)
 The debate raged during the 1940s and 1950s, see R.N. Swanson, The
Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999), 1-11, 216.
 According to a leading historian, the phrase ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ is
‘... a mere term of convenience which can mean almost anything we choose
to make it mean... the sort of sublime meaninglessness which is required in
words of high but uncertain import.’ [R.W. Southern, ‘The place of England in
the twelfth-century renaissance,’ History 45 (1960), p. 201]
Definitions
Jurisprudence (law)
Schools
monastic school
non-monastic school.
Fulbert of Chartres
Guibert of Nogent A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans.
and ed. Paul J. Archambault (Pennsylvania, 1996)
Bec, Normandy
Berengar of Tours
Lanfranc of Bec
Roscelin
Rheims
Chartres
Laon
Mont Ste Geneviève
St Victor
Petit Pont
Heloise
Peter Abelard Historia Calamitatum (History of My Troubles), in The Letters of
Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice and Michael Clanchy (Harmondsworth,
2003)
Hildegard of Bingen
amanuenses
The Curriculum
The seven liberal arts
o They were divided into two groups:
 The trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic/logic).
 The quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).
o The trivium was taught more widely than the quadrivium.
2
According to Adam of Perseigne, ‘...rhetoric adorns the discourse that grammar
constructs from words, and... dialectic sharpens it by distinguishing truth from
falsity.’ (Quoted in Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance, p. 29)
ars dictaminis
ars versificandi
ars predicandi
Civil or Roman law
Digest
Decretum
The Transmission of Classical Texts
Toledo
Spanish Reconquista
Euclid
Ptolemy
Plato
Aristotle
libri naturales
Politics
Vernacular Literature
The Arthurian legends of Chrétien de Troyes (c.1135-1183)
Alexanderlied (c.1135-c.1170)
König Rother (c. 1150)
The Poem of the Cid (1207 but based on an earlier oral tradition)
Layamon’s Brut (early 13th century)