The reign of that monarch (768-814) saw the first large and systematic effort towards a restoration of letters. The motives which actuated the new Emperor of the West were primarily political and social. He felt that it was of vital moment for his realm to mitigate the mischief and reproach of illiteracy. In 782 he induced Alcuin to leave York and take up his abode at Aachen, as the head of a school in connexion with the Court. With AlcuhVs advice and aid, he did his best to stimulate and improve the only educational agencies which existed,—those of the episcopal and monastic schools. Bishops were encouraged to provide elementary instruction for the children of the laity. The Capitulary of 789 directs the more important monasteries to establish higher schools in addition to the ordinary schools provided by religious houses. Not a few of these higher schools became distinguished. Foremost among them was that of the Abbey of Fulda. Others belonged to the Abbeys of Tours, Reims, St Gall, and Corvey. Throughout the ninth century such schools rendered good service to learning. Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda (d. 856), who was free from any blind prejudice against the classics, did much to liberalise monastic studies. His pupil, Lupus Servatus, had a wide range of reading in good Latin authors, and studied them with a zeal not unworthy of the Renaissance. Many of these monastic schools perished in the tenth century. In the second half of that century, however, the Emperor Otto the Great (936-73) enlarged the horizon and stimulated the culture of the German people. His reign brought security to such seats of study as existed; and their welfare was promoted by his brother, the learned Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne.
Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, who died in 1003, shows how much was possible for a gifted scholar in the tenth century. He had not merely read a great deal of the best Latin literature, but had appreciated it on the literary side, had imbibed something of its spirit, and had found in it an instrument of self-culture. His case is, indeed, a very exceptional one. But some knowledge, at least, of the Latin classics was not even then a rare accomplishment. A tradition of learning, derived especially from Fulda, had been created, which descended without a break to the time when the University of Paris arose. Nowhere on the Continent was there such a violent interruption, or such a general blight upon culture, as was caused in England and Ireland by the raids of the destroying Northmen. From about the end of the tenth century onwards culture began to be somewhat more widely diffused. There are indications that the course of Latin reading in the better schools was now no longer confined to meagre text-books, but had become fairly liberal. Thus at the school of Paderborn in Westphalia, early in the eleventh century, the plan of study included Virgil, Horace, Statius, and Sallust. Towards the close of that century, Bernard of Chartres, after teaching his pupils the rules of grammar from Donatus and Priscian, led them on to the Latin poets, orators, and historians, dwelling especially on the rhetorical precepts of Cicero and Quintilian. His method is praised by John of Salisbury, writing in the middle of the twelfth century, who was himself strongly imbued with a love of classical studies, being especially familiar with Horace, and with much of Cicero. Among other classics who found medieval readers may be named Terence (a favourite), Ovid, Lucan, Martial, Caesar, Livy, and Suetonius. The incipient revival of a better literary taste was checked in the thirteenth century by the influence of the Scholastic Philosophy. That discipline, intent on subtleties of logic and meta-physic, was indifferent to literary form, and soon became encumbered with the technical jargon which Erasmus ridicules. Such doctors as Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus lent the prestige of their authority to barbarous Latin. In the Universities dialectic now shared the foremost place with theology, and their professors were generally adverse to the literary subjects represented by the trivmm. In England, France, and Germany, during the thirteenth century, the study of ancient literature gained no ground, but rather receded; and the fourteenth century showed no improvement. Italy, meanwhile, where the Scholastic Philosophy had taken less hold, had been showing some signs of a growing interest in the Latin classics for more than a century before Petrarch. With him the Italian revival of learning began in earnest, and at a time when, owing to the causes above noticed, there were as yet few symptoms of such a movement in the other countries of Europe.
The medieval fortunes of the Latin classics differed widely from those of the Greek. The classical Latin language and literature were never wholly lost. But, after the fifth century, a knowledge of classical Greek rapidly faded out of the West, until it became practically extinct. Between the fall of the Western Empire and the Renaissance, no general provision for teaching Greek existed in the West, similar to that which was made in regard to Latin. Charles the Great wished, indeed, to restore Greek, mainly for the practical purpose of intercourse with the East. One of the Capitularies attests his design (“ Graecas et Latinos scholas in perpetuum manere ardinavimus”); but it is doubtful whether his purpose was anywhere fulfilled. Some study of Greek was fostered, as we have seen, in the Irish monasteries; and a few instances of it occur in other places. Thus in the tenth century Greek was studied by some brethren of the Abbey of St Gall. The Council of Vienne (1311) had proposed to establish chairs of Greek in several cities of Europe; but nothing was done. Several eminent men of western Europe, in the course of those centuries, certainly possessed some knowledge of Greek, though it is often difficult to say how much. After the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, sporadic settlements of Greeks occurred in the West, especially in France; and Latin controversialists had a new motive for acquiring the language of their opponents. Grosseteste, according to Matthew Paris, was aided by a Greek priest of St Albans in translating the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs into Latin. The Benedictine historians give lists of the persons in each century who were reputed to know Greek; but it may well be that these lists, short though they are, include men who had merely gained some slight knowledge of the language from intercourse with Greeks. In Italy, doubtless, the number of those who knew some Greek was larger than elsewhere, owing to the greater closeness of Italy’s relations with the East. But even at Constantinople itself, in the fourteenth century, a sound knowledge of ancient Greek was confined to a narrow circle; and an intelligent appreciation of the ancient Hellenic literature was probably rarer still.
Enough has been said to guard against the notion that the Italian revival of learning wa’s something more sudden and abrupt than it actually was. The movement in the second half of the fourteenth century would appear almost miraculous, if the new light were supposed to have flashed upon Italy, at Petrarch’s word, from a background of utter darkness. The fact is rather that the dawn had long been growing in the sky. On the other hand, the revival which dates from Petrarch was, in a very definite sense, the beginning of a new era. The appreciation of classical antiquity which came with it differed in two respects from any which the earlier Middle Ages could show. In the first place, the excellence of literary form exhibited by the ancient masters of Latin style now became a direct object of study and of imitation. Such portions of these authors as had been read in the period preceding the Renaissance had been valued chiefly for the facts, or sentiments, or supposed allegorical meanings, which could be drawn from them; they were, as a rule, but dimly apprehended as literature, and had very little influence on the medieval writing of Latin. The second difference was still more important. Ancient literature was now welcomed, not only as supplying standards of form, but as disclosing a new conception of life; a conception freer, larger, more rational, and more joyous, than the medieval; one which gave unfettered scope to the play of the