Renaissance of the 12th century
It included social, political and economic transformations, and an intellectual revitalization of Western Europe with strong philosophical and scientific roots.
Islamic philosophers and scientists preserved and expanded upon ancient Greek works, especially those of Aristotle and Euclid, which were translated into Latin, significantly revitalizing European science.
The movement was strengthened by new Latin translations of ancient and medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers, including Avicenna, Maimonides, Averroes.
Aristotelian logic later gained prominence in emerging universities, displacing Latin literary traditions until revived by Petrarch in the 14th century.
Charlemagne's inclination towards education, which led to the creation of many new churches and schools where students were required to learn Latin and Greek, has been called the Carolingian Renaissance.
Therefore, some medieval historians have since argued that connecting the term "renaissance" to the two previous periods is a misleading description, and not useful in describing the social changes of the 9th and 10th centuries.
The Harvard professor Charles Homer Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070.
The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities.
The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry...[9]The English art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Western Europe's first "great age of civilisation" was ready to begin around the year 1000.
From 1100, he wrote, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were constructed and decorated with sculptures, hangings, mosaics and works belonging to one of the greatest epochs of art and providing stark contrast to the monotonous and cramped conditions of ordinary living during the period.
Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis is considered an influential early patron of Gothic architecture and believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God: "The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material".
The era of the Crusades brought large groups of Europeans into contact with the technologies and luxuries of Byzantium for the first time in many centuries.
[citation needed] Literate clerics would be specialists of some subject or other, such as music, medicine or history etc., otherwise known as Roman cohors amicorum, the root of the Italian word corte 'court'.
In return, kings were encouraged to build monasteries that would act as orphanages, hospitals and schools, benefiting societies and eventually smoothing the transition from the Middle Ages.
[13] The development of medieval universities allowed them to aid materially in the translation and propagation of these texts and started a new infrastructure which was needed for scientific communities.
A new form of Christian theology developed during this period, championed by scholastics or "schoolmen" who emphasized a more systematic and rational approach to divine matters.
France—particularly the University of Paris—became a center of the transmission of these new texts but several early French figures such as Roscelin, Peter Abelard, and William of Conches were either condemned for heresy or obliged to bowdlerize their treatment of sensitive subjects like Plato's world soul.
Subsequently, scholastic scholars of the 13th century such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas became revered as doctors of the Church through using secular study and logic to uphold and buttress existing orthodoxy.
