In the Carolingian period, under the Frankish rulers Charlemagne (768–814) and his son Louis the Pious (814–40), significant intellectual and educational developments occurred. Royal prescription decreed that monasteries and bishops’ houses should be centers of education. At Charlemagne’s palace school, the seven liberal arts—the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the Quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy)—were cultivated. Latin was restored to the position of a literary language, and there was a revival of interest in classical texts, both Christian and pagan. The works of Sallust and Suetonius were especially influential. Einhard drew upon Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars for his life of Charlemagne and thus chose to imitate a style that differed radically from general medieval hagiography and biography and allowed for a rather secular and critical interpretation. Einhard’s treatment of Charlemagne gave impetus to numerous royal biographies; but biography as a form became an instrument of the church, and rulers tended to be treated from clerical perspectives. Thus they hardly advanced the general cause of historiography. The classical eulogy and the Christian tradition of saints’ Lives combined to reduce the amount of factual information required in biography.
The Suetonian model permitted more precision, but it proved to be too bare for medieval taste. The rhetorical tradition defeated it. We cannot expect to find objectivity either; biographers wanted to praise or excuse. Their saving grace is that they remember the traditional advice to the historian to tell the truth and to report events as an eyewitness wherever possible . . . Sudden flashes of realism light up their most conventional stories. If we judge them as propagandists, we have to admire their ingenuity. All do their best for rulers who fell short of what was expected of a Christian hero.49
Historians who quoted and imitated Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Jugurthan War failed to make use of a significant factor in his works: ‘there is no sign of any interest in Sallust’s theory of historical causation . . . none of them so much as noticed that he had an overall theory of the development and decline of political societies.”50
The Carolingian revival of learning was oriented towards preparation for Bible study. During the reign of Charlemagne, several attempts were made to revise the Latin text of the Bible.51 The most important was that of Alcuin, presented to the king at his coronation as emperor on Christmas Day 800. Alcuin was certainly familiar with the Greek text and used this occasionally to correct the Latin. Some evidence exists to suggest that at least some Christian scholars were acquainted with Jewish interpretations of the Old Testament—with their emphasis on a literal reading of the text—if not with Hebrew itself.52 During this period “there begins a veneration for the Fathers that invests their views on the meaning of Scripture with dogmatic authority.”53 Commentaries produced by piecing together excerpts from the fathers were common in the ninth century. Such commentaries not only served the devotion of the faithful but also brought to attention “the inconsistencies and gaps in the patristic tradition.”54 Differences among the patristic authorities meant that attempts had to be made at reconciliation or harmonization or, as in the case of Paschasius and John the Scot—who was familiar with Greek theology—one might be led to compare, criticize, and even discuss the differences and the meaning of the text.
The primary concern of historians during the Carolingian period was contemporary history. Royal historiography possessed a commanding subject in Charlemagne and his family. During the period, “a new form of historical writing is evolved in the Annales, which develop gradually from entries in a liturgical calendar to an increasingly fuller narration”;55 but this too was oriented towards contemporary events. Nothing comparable to the works of Augustine, Orosius, or Bede were produced during this time.
What might be called national history continued as a major concern of the post-Carolingian period as it had been in the early medieval period. “The lesson that destiny of nations is the noblest of all historical themes” was not lost.56 Most of these works were similar in intent to the earlier histories of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. “A whole series of attempts was made to apply to other races the theme in Virgil’s Aeneid of a noble group of people guided by the gods towards a splendid destiny.”57 Widukind produced his work on Saxon history, Dudo wrote about the Normans, and Richer about the Franks. This form of writing reached its apogee in the romantic and fantastic Historia regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth (about 1100–1154). He attempted to establish for the Celts a more illustrious and detailed past and a more glorious and consequential destiny than was the case of any other national historian. Trojan origins, visions and heavenly visitations, and Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are described in imaginary and graphic contours. “Although some, even contemporary, readers were not deceived by the work, and William of Newburgh, one of the best English historians of the 12th century, denounced it as a tissue of absurdities, many seriously accepted it as history.”58
Scholars are accustomed to speak of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a proto-Renaissance, as a time of great progress in learning and culture. Knowles has summarized the humanism of this period by outlining its three dominant characteristics: “first, a wide literary culture,” which demonstrated itself in a “capability of self-expression based on a sound training in grammar and a long and often loving study of the foremost Latin authors”; “next, a great and what in the realm of religious sentiment could be called a personal devotion to certain figures of the ancient world; and, finally, a high value set upon the individual, personal emotions, and upon the sharing of experiences and opinions within a small circle of friends.”59 During this period, the universities at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were founded. The Crusades to recover the holy land from the Seljukian Turks reached their culmination in the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Contacts between the East and West, in spite of the church split in 1054, produced cross-fertilization between Byzantium and Latin Europe. Aristotelian logic and philosophy, partially through the mediation of the Arabs, began to dominate Western thought through translations and the greater availability of his works.
The introduction of the whole canon of Aristotle to the West was a process continuing over a hundred years. The first wave, that of the logical works, was absorbed easily and avidly . . . The second wave, that of the difficult and profound philosophical works, gave more trouble and was less easily absorbed, though its effects were epoch-making. Finally, the ethical and political and literary treatises presented Europe with a philosopher who regarded human life from a purely naturalistic, this-world point of view . . . the atmosphere, the presuppositions of this great body of thought were not medieval and Christian, but ancient Greek, not to say rationalistic in character.60
Aristotelian thought made possible the birth of ‘theology’ in the systematic and scholastic sense that was to dominate religious studies in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.61
Aristotle’s thought, it should be recalled, did not encourage historiographic studies. For Aristotle, history was too chaotic: “The historian has to expound not one action, but one period of time and all that happens within this period to one or more persons however disconnected the several events may be” (Poetics 1459a). History also lacked the element of universality: “The historian describes the thing that has been; the poet the kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is more important and philosophic than history, for its statements have universal validity, while those of the historian are valid only for one time and one place” (Poetics 1451b). The urge to systematization is basically anti-historical in perspective.
This period of the proto-Renaissance, in its earliest phase, also witnessed some significant developments in historiography. In England, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, radical changes characterized society and the old cultural systems were challenged. In response to the threat of change, English monastics saw themselves as the custodians of the past and to preserve that past monasteries became the centers of antiquarian concerns.62 Monastic charters were collected, documents transcribed, historical and annalistic texts assembled, buildings and inscriptions studied, and the remains of saints gathered. “The post-Conquest monks were sure that they had a great past, but they were uncertain of their present and future . . . The monastic antiquaries searched the records to give detail and lucidity to their inherited conviction of greatness . . .”63
William