Carolingian Renaissance

Carolingian Renaissance
The Carolingian Renaissance was as a period of intellectual and
cultural revival in the Carolingian Empire occurring from the late
eighth century to the ninth century, as the first of three medieval
renaissances. It occurred mostly during the reigns of the Carolingian
rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. It was supported by the
scholars of the Carolingian court, notably Alcuin of York[1] For moral
betterment the Carolingian renaissance reached for models drawn from
the example of the Christian Roman Empire of the 4th century. During
this period there was an increase of literature, writing, the arts,
architecture, jurisprudence, liturgical reforms, and scriptural studies.
Charlemagne's Admonitio generalis (789) and his Epistola de litteris
colendis served as manifestos. The effects of this cultural revival,
however, were largely limited to a small group of court literati: "it had
a spectacular effect on education and culture in Francia, a debatable
effect on artistic endeavors, and an unmeasurable effect on what
Carolingian minuscule, one of the products of the
mattered most to the Carolingians, the moral regeneration of society,"
Carolingian Renaissance.
[2]
John Contreni observes. Beyond their efforts to write better Latin, to
copy and preserve patristic and classical texts, and to develop a more
legible, classicizing script, the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed
as humanist minuscule, from which has developed early modern Italic script, the secular and ecclesiastical leaders of
the Carolingian Renaissance for the first time in centuries applied rational ideas to social issues, providing a common
language and writing style that allowed for communication across most of Europe.
Sir Kenneth Clark was of the view that by means of the Carolingian Renaissance, Western civilization survived by
the skin of its teeth.[3] The use of the term renaissance to describe this period is contested[4] due to the majority of
changes brought about by this period being confined almost entirely to the clergy, and due to the period lacking the
wide-ranging social movements of the later Italian Renaissance.[5] Instead of being a rebirth of new cultural
movements, the period was more an attempt to recreate the previous culture of the Roman Empire.[6] The
Carolingian Renaissance in retrospect also has some of the character of a false dawn, in that its cultural gains were
largely dissipated within a couple of generations, a perception voiced by Walahfrid Strabo (died 849), in his
introduction to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne,[7] summing up the generation of renewal:
Charlemagne was able to offer the cultureless and, I might say, almost completely unenlightened
territory of the realm which God had entrusted to him, a new enthusiasm for all human knowledge. In its
earlier state of barbarousness, his kingdom had been hardly touched at all by any such zeal, but now it
opened its eyes to God's illumination. In our own time the thirst for knowledge is disappearing again:
the light of wisdom is less and less sought after and is now becoming rare again in most men's minds.[8]

Scholarly efforts
The lack of literate persons in eighth century western Europe caused problems for the Carolingian rulers by severely
limiting the number of people capable of serving as court scribes. Of even greater concern to the very pious rulers
was the fact that not all parish priests possessed the skill to read the Vulgate Bible. An additional problem was that
the vulgar Latin of the later Western Roman Empire had begun to diverge into the regional dialects, the precursors to
today's Romance languages, that were becoming mutually unintelligible and preventing scholars from one part of
Europe being able to communicate with persons from another part of Europe.

Carolingian Renaissance

To address these problems, Charlemagne ordered the creation of

schools in a capitulary known as the Charter of Modern Thought,
issued in 787.[9] A major part of his program of reform was to attract
many of the leading scholars of his day to his court. Among the first
called to court were Italians: Peter of Pisa, who from 776 to about 790
instructed Charlemagne in Latin, and from 776 to 787 Paulinus of
Aquileia, whom Charlemagne nominated as patriarch of Aquileia in
787. The Lombard Paul the Deacon was brought to court in 782 and
remained until 787, when Charles nominated him abbot of
Montecassino. Theodulf of Orlans was a Spanish Goth who served at
court from 782 to 797 when nominated as bishop of Orlans. Theodulf
had been in friendly competition over the standardization of the
Alcuin (pictured center), was one of the leading
Vulgate with the chief among the Charlemagne's scholars, Alcuin of
scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance.
York. Alcuin was a Northumbrian monk and deacon who served as
head of the Palace School from 782 to 796, except for the years 790 to
793 when he returned to England. After 796, he continued his scholarly work as abbot of St. Martin's Monastery in
Tours.[5] Among those to follow Alcuin across the Channel to the Frankish court was Joseph Scottus, an Irishman
who left some original biblical commentary and acrostic experiments. After this first generation of non-Frankish
scholars, their Frankish pupils, such as Angilbert, would make their own mark.
The later courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald had similar groups of scholars. Among the most important
was John Scotus Eriugena.
One of the primary efforts was the creation of a standardized curriculum for use at the recently created schools.
Alcuin led this effort and was responsible for the writing of textbooks, creation of word lists, and establishing the
trivium and quadrivium as the basis for education.[10]
Another contribution from this period was the development of Carolingian minuscule, a "book-hand" first used at the
monasteries of Corbie and Tours that introduced the use of lower case letters. A standardized version of Latin was
also developed that allowed for the coining of new words while retaining the grammatical rules of Classical Latin.
This Medieval Latin became the common language of scholarship and allowed administrators and travelers to make
themselves understood across Europe.[11]

Carolingian Renaissance

Carolingian art
Carolingian art spans the roughly hundred-year period from about
800900. Although brief, it was an influential period. Northern Europe
embraced classical Mediterranean Roman art forms for the first time,
setting the stage for the rise of Romanesque art and eventually Gothic
art in the West. Illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, small-scale
sculpture, mosaics, and frescos survive from the period.

Aachen Gospels (c. 820), an example of

Carolingian illumination.

Carolingian architecture
Carolingian architecture is the style of North European architecture promoted by
Charlemagne. The period of architecture spans the late eighth and ninth centuries
until the reign of Otto I in 936, and was a conscious attempt to create a Roman
Renaissance, emulating Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine architecture, with
its own innovation, resulting in having a unique character. Its architecture was
the most salient Carolingian art to a society that never saw an illuminated
manuscript and rarely handled one of the new coins. "The little more than eight
decades between 768 to 855 alone saw the construction of 27 new cathedrals,
417 monasteries, and 100 royal residences", John Contreni calculates.[12]

A copy of the Plan of Saint Gall

Carolingian music
In Western culture, there had been an unbroken tradition in musical practice and theory from the earliest written
records of the Sumerians (c. 2500 BC) through the Babylonians and Persians down to ancient Greece and Rome.
However, the Germanic migrations of the 5th century brought about a break with this tradition. Most in western
Europe for the next few centuries did not understand the Greek language, and thus the works of Boethius, who saw
what was happening and translated ancient Greek treatises into Latin, became the foundation of learning during this
period. The advent of scholarly reforms by Charlemagne, who was particularly interested in music, began a period of
intense activity in the monasteries of the writing and copying of treatises in music theory the Musica enchiriadis is
one of the earliest and most interesting of these. Charlemagne sought to unify the practice of church music by
eliminating regional stylistic differences. There is evidence that the earliest Western musical notation, in the form of
neumes in camp aperto (without staff-lines), was created at Metz around 800, as a result of Charlemagne's desire for

Carolingian Renaissance
Frankish church musicians to retain the performance nuances used by the Roman singers.[13] Western musical
practice and theory of today can be traced in an unbroken line from this time to the present, thus it had its beginnings
with Charlemagne.

Economic and legal reforms

Charlemagne was faced with a variety of currencies at the start of his reign. To correct problems these various
currencies caused, he standardized a system based on a pound of silver (Livre tournois). Deniers were minted with a
value of 240 deniers to a pound of silver. A second value, the solidus, was also created as an accounting device with
a value of twelve deniers or one twentieth of a pound of silver. The solidus was not minted but was instead used to
record values such as a "solidus of grain" which was equal to the amount of grain that twelve deniers could
purchase.[14]

References
Cantor, Norman F. (1993). The Civilization of the Middle Ages: a completely revised and expanded edition of
Medieval history, the life and death of a civilization. HarperCollins. ISBN0-06-017033-6.
Mortimer Chambers; Raymond Grew, David Herlihy, Theodore K. Rabb, Isser Woloch (1983). The Western
Experience: To 1715 (3rd edition ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN0-394-33085-4.
Martin Scott (1964). Medieval Europe. New York: Dorset Press. ISBN0-88029-115-X.

Footnotes
[1] G.W. Trompf, "The concept of the Carolingian Renaissance", Journal of the History of Ideas, 1973:3ff.
[2] John G. Contreni, "The Carolingian Renaissance", in Warren T. Treadgold, ed. Renaissances before the Renaissance: cultural revivals of late
antiquity and the Middle Ages 1984:59; see also Janet L. Nelson, "On the limits of the Carolingian renaissance" in her Politics and Ritual in
Early Medieval Europe, 1986.
[3] Clark, Civilization.
[4] Notably by Lynn Thorndike, as in his "Renaissance or Prenaissance?" in Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943:65ff)
[5] Scott pg 30
[6] Cantor pg 190
[7] Einhard's use of the Roman historian Suetonius as a model for the new genre of biography is itself a marker for the Carolingian Renaissance;
see M. Innes, "The classical tradition in the Carolingian Renaissance: Ninth-century encounters with Suetonius", International Journal of the
Classical Tradition, 1997.
[8] Lewis Thorpe, tr., Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, 1969:49f.
[9] Carolingian Schools, Carolingian Schools of Thought.
[10] Cantor pg 189
[11] Chambers pg 204-205
[12] Contreni 1984:63.
[13] James Grier Ademar de Chabannes, Carolingian Musical Practices, and "Nota Romana" (http:/ / links. jstor. org/
sici?sici=0003-0139(200321)56:1<43:ADCCMP>2. 0. CO;2-#), Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Spring,
2003), pp. 43-98, retrieved July 2007
[14] Scott pg 40

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