Carolingian Renaissance

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Carolingian minuscule, one of the products of the Carolingian Renaissance.

The Carolingian Renaissance was the first of three

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 of

Carolingian rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. It was supported by the scholars of the Carolingian court, notably Alcuin of York.[3] Charlemagne's Admonitio generalis (789) and Epistola 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 at York 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 in the Carolingian renaissance was Theodulf of Orléans, a refugee from the Umayyad 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 the Vulgate 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 court

preserve patristic and classical texts, and to develop a more legible, classicizing script, with clearly distinct capital and minuscule letters. It was the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed as humanist minuscule, from which has developed early modern Italic 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.

Background

Lorsch Abbey gatehouse, c. 800, an example of the Carolingian architectural style – a first, albeit isolated classical movement in architecture

As Pierre Riché points out, the expression "Carolingian Renaissance" does not imply that Western Europe was barbaric or obscurantist before the Carolingian era.[10] The centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West did not see an abrupt disappearance of the ancient schools, from which emerged Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus and Boethius, essential icons of the Roman cultural heritage in the Middle Ages, thanks to which the disciplines of liberal arts were preserved.[11] The 7th century saw the "Isidorian Renaissance" in the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania[12] in which sciences flourished[13][14][15] and the integration 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 collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Local economies in the West had degenerated into largely subsistence agriculture by the early seventh century, with towns functioning merely as places of gift-exchange for the elite.[19] By the late seventh century, developed urban settlements had emerged, populated mostly by craftsmen, merchants and boaters and boasting street grids, artisanal production as well as regional and long-distance trade.[19] A prime example of this type of emporium was Dorestad.[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.

Viking 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 the slave trade. Following the rise of the Arab empires, the Arab elites created a major demand for slaves with European slaves particularly prized. As a result of Charlemagne's wars of conquest in Eastern Europe, a steady supply of captured Slavs, Avars, Saxons and Danes reached merchants in Western Europe, who then exported the slaves via Ampurias, Girona and the Pyrenees passes to Muslim 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 Muslim and Eastern Roman empires so that other industries, such as textiles, were able to grow in Europe as well.[26]

Import

Walahfrid Strabo (died 849), in his introduction to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne,[n 1]
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.[32]

Scholarly efforts

See also: Carolingian minuscule and Medieval Latin

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 court scribes 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 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.

Alcuin (pictured centre), was one of the leading scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance.

To address these problems,

Alcuin of 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.[29] 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 many of whom were of Irish origin. The Irish monk Dicuil attended the former court, and the more famous Irishman John Scotus Eriugena attended the latter becoming head of the Palace School at Aachen.

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.[34]

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 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 practiced Western 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 of Cicero, Horace, Martial, Statius, Lucretius, Terence, Julius Caesar, Boethius and Martianus Capella.[38] No copies of the texts of these authors were made in the Latin West in the 7th and 8th centuries.[38]

Reform of Latin pronunciation

According to Roger Wright, the Carolingian Renaissance is responsible for the modern-day pronunciation of Ecclesiastical Latin. Up until that point there had been no conceptual distinction between Latin and Romance; 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 to sound 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 equivalent Old 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 the Council of Tours, to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, in rusticam 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 the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence 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 the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, however.[43]

Carolingian art

Main article: Carolingian art

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 of

metalwork, small-scale sculpture, mosaics, and frescos
survive from the period.

Carolingian architecture

Main article: Carolingian architecture
Instrumental music
cithara (word used by the early 9th century Stuttgart Psalter) being held as a citole three centuries later.
Documents created during the Carolingian Renaissance show the growth of instrumental music with new instruments. The images may document earlier European cythara (lute types) or else a "revival of the Roman kithara."[44]

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

Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine architecture, with its own innovation, resulting in having a unique character.[45] This syncretic architectural style can be exemplified by the first church of St Mark's in Venice, fusing proto-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]

Carolingian currency

See also:
English currency

Around AD 755, Charlemagne's father

pound (librum, libra, or lira; livre).[48] (The Carolingian 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, the shilling (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 or pounds were minted, being instead used as notional units 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]

The

England by Offa of Mercia and other kings, where it formed the basis of English currency until the late 20th century.[48]

Gallery

See also

Notes

  1. ^ 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.[31]

References

Citations

  1. ^
    OCLC 52849131
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3
    .
  3. ^ Trompf (1973).
  4. ^ "Alcuin - Biography".
  5. ISBN 978-0-7180-1871-9
    .
  6. ISBN 978-1-108-97642-8
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3
    .
  8. ^ Contreni (1984), p. 59.
  9. ^ Nelson (1986).
  10. ^ Pierre Riché, Les Carolingiens. Une famille qui fit l'Europe, Paris, Hachette, coll. « Pluriel », 1983 p. 354
  11. ^ Michel Lemoine, article Arts libéraux in Claude Gauvard (dir.), Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, Paris, PUF, coll. « Quadrige », 2002 p. 94
  12. ^ Sur le sujet, voir Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique, Paris, 1959
  13. ISBN 9781504034692
    .
  14. ISBN 978-0853235828
    .
  15. ISBN 9783506765178
    .
  16. ^ Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique, Paris, 1959
  17. ^ Pierre Riché, Éducation et culture dans l'Occident barbare (VIe-VIIIe siècles), Paris, Le Seuil, coll. « Points Histoire », 1995, 4e éd.. p.256-257, 264, 273-274, 297
  18. ^ Louis Halphen, Les Barbares, Paris, 1936, p. 236 ; Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge, Paris, 1944, p. 181.
  19. ^ a b c d Verhulst 2002, p. 133.
  20. ^ a b Verhulst 2002, p. 113.
  21. ^ a b Verhulst 2002, p. 135.
  22. ^ a b Verhulst 2002, p. 134.
  23. ^ Verhulst 2002, p. 105.
  24. doi:10.1093/past/177.1.17
    .
  25. ^ Frost, Peter (September 14, 2013). "From Slavs to Slaves". Evo and Proud.
  26. ISBN 9781107394704
    .
  27. ^ Clark, Civilization.
  28. ^ Thorndike (1943).
  29. ^ a b Scott (1964), p. 30.
  30. ^ Cantor (1993), p. 190.
  31. ^ Innes (1997).
  32. ^ Lewis Thorpe, tr., Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, 1969:49f.
  33. Carolingian Schools
    , Carolingian Schools of Thought.
  34. ^ Cantor (1993), p. 189.
  35. ^ Chambers & al. (1983), pp. 204–205.
  36. ^ Dr. Sanjay Kumar (2021). A Handbook of Political Geography. K.K. Publications. p. 127.
  37. ^ Buringh 2010, p. 237.
  38. ^ a b Buringh 2010, p. 139.
  39. ^ Wright, pp. 44–50
  40. ^ Wright, pp. 104–7
  41. ^ Wright, pp. 118-20
  42. ^ Wright, pp. 122–32, 143–4
  43. ^ Wright 2002, p. 151
  44. S2CID 195057025
    . Retrieved 24 November 2016.
  45. ^ a b Contreni (1984), p. 63.
  46. ^ Brown, Thomas; Holmes, George (1988). The Oxford History of Medieval Europe. Great Britain: Oxford University Press. p. 55.
  47. ^ a b Allen (2009).
  48. ^ a b c d Chown (1994), p. 23.
  49. ^ Ferguson (1974), "Pound".
  50. ^ Munro (2012), p. 31.
  51. ^ a b Suchodolski (1983).
  52. ^ Scott (1964), p. 40.

Bibliography

External links
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