TheCarolingian Renaissance was the first of threemedieval renaissances, a period of cultural activity in theCarolingian Empire.Charlemagne's reign led to an intellectual revival beginning in the 8th century and continuing throughout the 9th century, taking inspiration from ancient Roman and Greek culture[1] and theChristian Roman Empire of the 4th century. During this period, there's an increase of literature, writing, visual arts, architecture, music, jurisprudence, liturgical reforms, and scriptural studies. Carolingian schools were effective centers of education, and they served generations of scholars by producing editions and copies of the classics, both Christian and pagan.[2]
The movement occurred mostly during the reigns ofCarolingian rulers Charlemagne andLouis the Pious. It was supported by the scholars of the court, notablyAlcuin of York.[3] Charlemagne'sAdmonitio generalis (789) andEpistola de litteris colendis served as manifestos. Alcuin wrote on subjects ranging from grammar and biblical exegesis to arithmetic and astronomy. He also collected rare books, which formed the nucleus of the library atYork Cathedral. His enthusiasm for learning made him an effective teacher. Alcuin writes:[4][5][6]
In the morning, at the height of my powers, I sowed the seed in Britain, now in the evening when my blood is growing cold I am still sowing in France, hoping both will grow, by the grace of God, giving some the honey of the holy scriptures, making others drunk on the old wine of ancient learning
Another prominent figure wasTheodulf of Orléans, a refugee from theUmayyad invasion of Spain who became involved in the cultural circle at the imperial court before Charlemagne appointed him bishop of Orléans. Theodulf’s greatest contribution to learning was his scholarly edition of theVulgate Bible, drawing on manuscripts from Spain, Italy, and Gaul, and even the original Hebrew.[7]
The effects of this cultural revival were mostly limited to a small group of courtliterati.[1] According to John Contreni, "it had a spectacular effect on education and culture inFrancia, a debatable effect on artistic endeavors, and an unmeasurable effect on what mattered most to the Carolingians, the moral regeneration of society".[8][9] The secular and ecclesiastical leaders made efforts to write better Latin, to copy and preserve patristic and classical texts in theCarolingian libraries, and to develop a more legible, classicizing script, with clearly distinct capital and minuscule letters. It was theCarolingian minuscule thatRenaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed ashumanist minuscule, from which has developed early modernItalic script. They also applied rational ideas to social issues for the first time in centuries, providing a common language and writing style that enabled communication throughout most of Europe.
AsPierre Riché points out, the expression "Carolingian Renaissance" does not imply thatWestern Europe was barbaric or obscurantist before the Carolingian era.[10] The centuries following thedissolution of the Roman Empire in the West did not see an abrupt disappearance of the ancient schools. Indeed, from them emergedMartianus Capella,Cassiodorus, andBoethius, essential icons of theRoman cultural heritage in theEarly Middle Ages, thanks to which the disciplines of liberal arts were preserved.[11] The 7th century saw the "Isidorian Renaissance" in theVisigothic Kingdom of Hispania[12] in which sciences flourished[13][14][15] and theintegration of Christian and pre-Christian thought occurred,[16] while the spread of Irish monastic schools (scriptoria) over Europe laid the groundwork for the Carolingian Renaissance.[17][18]
There were numerous factors in this cultural expansion, the most obvious of which was that Charlemagne's uniting of most of Western Europe brought about peace and stability, which set the stage for prosperity. This period marked an economic revival in Western Europe, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Local economies in the West had degenerated into largelysubsistence agriculture by the early 7th century, with towns functioning merely as places of gift-exchange for the elite.[19] By the late 7th century, developed urban settlements had emerged, populated mostly by craftsmen and merchants and developing street grids, artisanal production, and regional and long-distance trade.[19] A prime example of this type ofemporium wasDorestad.[19]
The development of the Carolingian economy was fueled by the efficient organization and exploitation of labor on large estates, producing a surplus of primarily grain, wine and salt.[20][21] In turn, inter-regional trade in these commodities facilitated the expansion of towns.[20][21] Archaeological data shows the continuation of this upward trend in the early 8th century.[19] The zenith of the early Carolingian economy was reached from 775 to 830, coinciding with the largest surpluses of the period, large-scale building of churches as well as overpopulation and three famines that showed the limits of the system.[22] After a period of disruption from 830 to 850, caused by civil wars andViking raids, economic development resumed in the 850s, with the emporiums disappearing completely and being replaced by fortified commercial towns.[22]
One of the major causes of the sudden economic growth was theArab slave trade. Following the rise of theArab Muslim caliphates, theArab elites created a major demand for slaves in the Muslim world, withEuropean slaves particularly prized. As a result of Charlemagne's wars of conquest inEastern Europe, a steady supply of capturedSlavs,Avars,Saxons, andDanes reached merchants in Western Europe, who then exported the slaves viaAmpurias,Girona, and thePyrenees passes toMuslim Spain and other parts of the Arab world.[23] The market for slaves was so lucrative that it almost immediately transformed the long-distance trade of the European economies.[24][25] The slave trade enabled the West to re-engage with the Arab Muslim caliphates and theEastern Roman Empire, so that other industries, such as textiles, were able to grow in Europe as well.[26]
Kenneth Clark was of the view that by means of the Carolingian Renaissance, Western civilization survived by the skin of its teeth.[27] A substantial portion of the classical corpus we possess today owes its survival to the copies produced by Carolingian scribes. AsConrad Layser notes, "fewer than 2,000 Latin manuscripts survive from the period before AD 800; from the century after AD 800, we have over 7,000. For every eighth-century copy of a text that has survived, we have ten copies from the ninth century."[28]
However, the use of the termrenaissance to describe this period is contested because its aims and output differ markedly from those of the 15th- and 16th-centuryRenaissance. The Carolingian project was a top-down initiative, driven by royal patronage and executed by literate elites who trained and served in ecclesiastical institutions, in contrast to the wide-ranging social movements of the laterItalian Renaissance.[29]
Earlier scholarship sometimes portrayed the Carolingian period as an attempt to recreate the previous culture of theRoman Empire, motivated byhumanist andantiquarian interests.[30] More recent historiography, however, tends to view the Carolingian Renaissance primarily as a religious reform project.[31] Rather than a pure revival, Carolingian scholars described their engagement with classical learning ascorrectio. This notion ofcorrectio, combined with pragmatic concerns, aimed to "correct" and transform older knowledge into something useful and suitable for a newly unified Christian society—society whose salvation Charlemagne, as its ruler, felt personally responsible for.[32]
A lack of Latin literacy in eighth-century western Europe caused problems for the Carolingian rulers by severely limiting the number of people capable of serving as courtscribes in societies where Latin was valued. Of even greater concern to some rulers was the fact that not all parish priests possessed the skill to read theVulgate Bible. An additional problem was that thevulgar Latin of the laterWestern Roman Empire had begun to diverge into the regional dialects, the precursors to today'sRomance 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.
To address these problems,Charlemagne ordered the creation ofschools in acapitulary known as theCharter of Modern Thought, issued in 787.[33] A major part of his program of reform was to attract many of the leading scholars of the Christendom of his day to his court. Among the first called to court wereItalians:Peter of Pisa, who from 776 to about 790 instructed Charlemagne in Latin, and from 776 to 787Paulinus of Aquileia, whom Charlemagne nominated aspatriarch of Aquileia in 787. TheLombardPaul the Deacon was brought to court in 782 and remained until 787, when Charles nominated himabbot ofMontecassino.Theodulf of Orléans was aSpanish Goth who served at court from 782 to 797 when nominated asbishop of Orléans. Theodulf had been in friendly competition over the standardization of theVulgate with the chief among the Charlemagne's scholars,Alcuin of York. Alcuin was aNorthumbrianmonk anddeacon who served as head of the Palace School from 782 to 796, except for the years 790 to 793 when he returned toEngland. After 796, he continued his scholarly work as abbot of St. Martin's Monastery inTours.[29] Among those to follow Alcuin across the Channel to the Frankish court wasJoseph Scottus, an Irishman who left some original biblical commentary and acrostic experiments. After this first generation of non-Frankish scholars, theirFrankish pupils, such asAngilbert, would make their own mark.
The later courts ofLouis the Pious andCharles the Bald had similar groups of scholars many of whom wereof Irish origin. The Irish monkDicuil attended the former court, and the more famous IrishmanJohn Scotus Eriugena attended the latter becoming head of the Palace School atAachen.
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 thetrivium andquadrivium as the basis for education.[34]
Another contribution from this period was the development ofCarolingian minuscule, a "book-hand" first used at the monasteries ofCorbie 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 ofClassical Latin. ThisMedieval Latin became a common language of scholarship and allowed administrators and travellers to make themselves understood in various regions of Europe.[35]
The earliest concept of Europe as a distinct cultural region (instead of simply a geographic area) appeared during the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century, and included the territories which practicedWestern Christianity at the time.[36]
Carolingian workshops produced over 100,000 manuscripts in the 9th century, of which some 6000 to 7000 survive.[37] The Carolingians produced the earliest surviving copies of the works ofCicero,Horace,Martial,Statius,Lucretius,Terence,Julius Caesar,Boethius andMartianus Capella.[38] No copies of the texts of these authors were made in the Latin West in the 7th and 8th centuries.[38]
According toRoger Wright, the Carolingian Renaissance is responsible for the modern-day pronunciation ofEcclesiastical Latin. Up until that point there had been no conceptual distinction betweenLatin andRomance; the former was simply regarded as the written form of the latter. For instance in early medieval Spain the word for 'century'—which would have been pronounced */sjeglo/— was properly spelled ⟨saeculum⟩, as it had been for the better part of a millennium. The scribe would not have read aloud ⟨saeculum⟩ as /sɛkulum/ any more than an English speaker today would pronounce ⟨knight⟩ as */knɪxt/ rather than /naɪt/.[39]
Non-native speakers of Latin, however—such as clergy of Anglo-Saxon or Irish origin—appear to have used a rather different pronunciation, presumably attempting tosound out each word according to its spelling. The Carolingian Renaissance in France introduced this artificial pronunciation for the first time to native speakers as well. No longer would, for instance, the word ⟨viridiarium⟩ 'orchard' be read aloud as the equivalentOld French word */verdʒjǽr/. It now had to be pronounced precisely as spelled, with all six syllables: /viridiarium/.[40]
Such a radical change had the effect of rendering Latin sermons completely unintelligible to the general Romance-speaking public, which prompted officials a few years later, at theCouncil of Tours, to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, inrusticam romanam linguam or 'plain roman[ce] speech' (while the liturgy retained the new pronunciation to this day).[41]
As there was now no unambiguous way to indicate whether a given text was to be read aloud as Latin or Romance, and native Germanic speakers (such as church singers) numerous in the empire might have struggled to read words in Latin orthography according to Romance orthoepy, various attempts were made in France to devise a new orthography for the latter; among the earliest examples are parts of theOaths of Strasbourg and theSequence of Saint Eulalia. As the Carolingian Reforms spread the 'proper' Latin pronunciation from France to other Romance-speaking areas, local scholars eventually felt the need to create distinct spelling systems for their own vernaculars as well, thereby initiating the literary phase of Medieval Romance.[42] Writing in Romance does not appear to have become widespread until theRenaissance of the Twelfth Century, however.[43]
Carolingian art spans the roughly hundred-year period from about 800–900. 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 ofRomanesque art and eventuallyGothic art in the West.Illuminated manuscripts,metalwork, small-scalesculpture,mosaics, andfrescos survive from the period.
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 ofOtto I in 936, and was a conscious attempt to create a Roman Renaissance, emulatingRoman,Early Christian andByzantine architecture, with its own innovation, resulting in having a unique character.[45] This syncretic architectural style can be exemplified by thefirst church of St Mark's in Venice, fusingproto-Romanesque and Byzantine influences.[46]
There was a profusion of new clerical and secular buildings constructed during this period, John Contreni calculated that "The little more than eight decades between 768 to 855 alone saw the construction of 27 new cathedrals, 417 monasteries, and 100 royal residences".[45]
Around AD 755, Charlemagne's fatherPepin the Short reformed thecurrency of theFrankish Kingdom.[47] A variety of local systems was standardized. Minormints were closed and royal control over the remaining bigger mints strengthened,[47] increasing purity.[48] In place of the goldRoman andByzantinesolidus then common, he established a system based on a new .940-finesilverpenny (Latin:denarius;French:denier) weighing 1/240 of apound (librum,libra, orlira;livre).[48] (TheCarolingian pound seems to have been about 489.5 grams,[49][50] making each penny about 2 grams.) As the debased solidus was then roughly equivalent to 11 of these pennies, theshilling (solidus;sol) was established at that value, making it 1/22 of the silver pound.[51] This was later adjusted to 12 and 1/20, respectively. During the Carolingian period, however, neither shillings orpounds were minted, being instead used as notionalunits of account.[48] (For instance, a "shilling" or "solidus" of grain was a measure equivalent to the amount of grain that 12 pennies could purchase.)[52] Despite the purity and quality of the new pennies, however, they were repeatedly rejected by traders throughout the Carolingian period in favor of the gold coins used elsewhere, a situation that led to repeated legislation against such refusal to accept the king's currency.[51]
TheCarolingian system was imported toEngland byOffa of Mercia and other kings, where it formed the basis ofEnglish currency until the late 20th century.[48]
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