Charles Homer Haskins

When Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 where the Treaty of Versailles was drawn up, he brought only three advisors including Haskins, who served as chief of the Western European division of the American commission.

His histories of medieval Europe's institutions stress the efficiency and successes of their governing bureaucracies, implicitly analogous to those of modern nation states.

Haskins's most well known pupil was medieval historian Joseph Strayer, who went on to teach many American medievalists of the next generation(s) at Princeton University, some still active today.

Other eminent medievalists trained by Haskins included Lynn White, Jr. (UCLA), Gaines Post (Wisconsin and Princeton), Carl Stephenson (Cornell), Edgar B. Graves (Hamilton College), and John R. Williams (Dartmouth).

Haskins opened a broader view when he asserted, "The continuity of history rejects violent contrasts between successive periods, and modern research shows the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed.

The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry.

[9] Once the ice had been broken, other scholars concentrated on an earlier, more constrained revival of learning in some circles under the patronage of Charlemagne, and began talking and thinking of a "Carolingian Renaissance" of the ninth century.