England was next to experience the reawakening, and, though there were notable schools at such places as Canterbury and Winchester, it was in Northumbria that the schools flourished most. At the monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth and at the Cathedral School of York, some of the greatest of early medieval writers and schoolmasters appeared, including the Venerable Bede and Alcuin. The latter went to France in 780 to become master of Charlemagne’s palace school. The Carolingian renaissance and its aftermath The cultural revival under Charlemagne and his successors
Charlemagne (742/743–814) has been represented as the sponsor or even creator of medieval education, and the Carolingian renaissance has been represented as the renewal of Western culture. This renaissance, however, built on earlier episcopal and monastic developments, and, although Charlemagne did help to ensure the survival of scholarly traditions in a relatively bleak and rude age, there was nothing like the general advance in education that occurred later with the cultural awakening of the 11th and 12th centuries.
Learning, nonetheless, had no more ardent friend than Charlemagne, who came to the Frankish throne in 768 distressed to find extremely poor standards of Latin prevailing. He thus ordered that the clergy be educated severely, whether by persuasion or under compulsion. He recalled that, in order to interpret the Holy Scriptures, one must have a command of correct language and a fluent knowledge of Latin; he later commanded, “In each bishopric and in each monastery let the psalms, the notes, the chant, calculation and grammar be taught and carefully corrected books be available” (capitulary of 789 ce). His promotion of ecclesiastical and educational reform bore fruit in a generation of churchmen whose morals and whose education were of a higher standard than before.
The possibility then arose of providing, for the brighter young clerics and perhaps also for a few laymen, a more advanced religious and academic training. It was perhaps to meet this modest need that a school grew up within the precincts of the emperor’s palace at Aachen. In order to develop and staff other centres of culture and learning, Charlemagne imported considerable foreign talent. During the 8th century England had been the scene of some intellectual activity. Thus, Alcuin, who had been the master of the school at York, and other English scholars were brought over to transplant to the Continent the studies and disciplines of the Anglo-Saxon schools. From Moorish Spain came Christian refugees who also contributed to this intellectual revival; disputations with the Muslims had forced them to develop a dialectic skill in which they now instructed Charlemagne’s subjects. From Italy came grammarians and chroniclers, men such as Paul the Deacon; the more formalistic Classical traditions in which they had been bred supplied the framework to discipline the effervescent brilliance of the Anglo-Saxons. Irish scholars also arrived. Thanks to these foreigners, who represented the areas where Classical and Christian culture had been maintained in the 6th and 8th centuries, the court became a kind of “academy,” to use Alcuin’s term. There the emperor, his heirs, and his friends discussed various subjects—the existence or nonexistence of the underworld and of nothingness; the eclipse of the sun; the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and so on. Recognizing the importance of manuscripts in the cultural revival, Charlemagne formed a library (the catalog of which is still extant), had texts and books copied and recopied, and bade every school to maintain a scriptorium. Alcuin developed a school of calligraphy at Tours, and its new script spread rapidly throughout the empire; this Carolingian minuscule was more legible and less wasteful of space than the uncial scripts hitherto employed.
Outside the court at Aachen were to be found here and there a few seats of culture—but not many. The archbishop of Lyon reorganized the schools of readers and choir leaders; Alcuin in Saint-Martin-de-Tours and Angilbert in Saint-Riquier organized monastic schools with relatively well-stocked libraries. It was necessary to wait for the second generation, or even the third, to witness the greatest brilliance of the Carolingian renewal. Under Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious and especially under his grandsons, the monastic schools reached their apogee in France north of the Loire, in Germany, and in Italy. The most famous were at Saint-Gall, Reichenau, Fulda, Bobbio, Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin-de-Tours, and Ferrières. Unfortunately, the breakup of the Carolingian empire, following local rebellions and the Viking invasions, ended the progress of the Carolingian renaissance. Influences of the Carolingian renaissance abroad
In England—at least in the kingdom of Wessex—King Alfred the Great stands out as another royal patron of learning, one who wanted to imitate the creativity of Charlemagne. When he came to the throne in 871, cultural standards had fallen to a low level, partly because of the turmoil of the Danish invasions. He was grieved to find so few who could understand Latin church services or translate a letter from Latin into English. To accomplish an improvement, he called upon monks from the Continent, particularly those of Saint-Bertin. Moreover, he attracted to his court certain English clergy and young sons of nobles. Since the latter did not know Latin, he had translated into Wessex English some works of Pope Gregory the Great, Boethius, the theologian and historian Paulus Orosius, Venerable Bede, St. Augustine, and others. He himself translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This promotion of learning was continued by Alfred’s successors and spread elsewhere in England; and in the reformed monasteries at Canterbury, York, and Winchester, the young monks renewed the study of religious and secular sciences. Among the master scholars of the late 10th century was the Benedictine monk Aelfric, perhaps the greatest prose writer of Anglo-Saxon times. In order to facilitate the learning of Latin for young monks, Aelfric composed a grammar, glossary, and colloquy, containing a Latin grammar described in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, a glossary in which master and pupil could find a methodically classified Latin vocabulary (names of birds, fish, plants, and so forth), and a manual of conversation, inspired by the bilingual manuals of antiquity.
Among the other Saxons—those of the Continent who presided over the destinies of Germany—there were also significant gatherings of masters and students at selected monasteries, such as Corvey and Gandersheim. In any case, wherever teaching became important in the 10th century, it concentrated largely on grammar and the works of the Classical authors. Thus, when Gerbert of Aurillac, after a course of instruction in Catalonia, came to teach dialectic and the arts of the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, harmonics, and astronomy) at Reims, he aroused astonishment and admiration. His renown helped in his later election as Pope Sylvester II. The first half of the 11th century contained the first glimmerings of a rediscovered dialectic. A new stage in the history of teaching was beginning. Education of the laity in the 9th and 10th centuries
The clergy who dominated society thought it necessary to give laymen some directives about life comparable to those offered in monastic rules and thus issued what were called miroirs (“mirrors”), setting forth the duties of a good sovereign and exalting the Christian struggle. Already the image of the courtly and Christian knight was beginning to take shape. It was not a question of governing a state well but, rather, of governing oneself. The layman must struggle against vice and practice virtue; he must emphasize his religious heritage. Alcuin became indignant when he heard it said that the reading of the Gospel was the duty of the clergy and not that of the layman. Huoda, wife of Bernard, duke of Septimania, addressed a manual to her 16-year-old son, stressing the reading and praying that a young man should do. In the libraries of the laity, the volumes of the Old Testament and New Testament took first place, along with prayer books, a kind of breviary designed for day-to-day use.