Carolingian Renaissance

Back during Charlemagne's time, he reinstated classical Christian education across the clergy.

And really, it sort of helped to foment the Carolingian Renaissance.

But the other thing it did is it so rooted the faith and the thinking.

You brought that up in your comment where young men and women are thinking properly they can't they can think and they're thinking from a christian worldview and yet they have a they can help contribute to society and so it did that into the minds and hearts of the people then so that even when they were overrun by the germanic tribes and even when they were occupied they proselytized their occupiers so whatever happens in the continent of africa If God allows us to reach many, many young people with this kind of thinking and theology and a real heart for the Lord, whatever happens economically, And ideologically, they will be able to proselytize whoever occupies that nation.

In the East, the path Dennis opened up was followed by a long line of commentators on the divine liturgy, such as St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Germanus of Constantinople, and Nicholas Cabasilas.

In the West, the first detailed exposition of the mass was written during the Carolingian Renaissance by Amalarius of Metz, a disciple of our own Alcuin of York.

Medieval commentators include St. Peter Damian, reforming cardinal of the 11th century, and Pope Innocent III, reforming pope of the early 13th.

Later in the 13th century, commentaries come from St. Thomas, his teacher St. Albert, his Franciscan friend St. Bonaventure, and in the form of a veritable encyclopedia of the liturgy from William Durandus, Bishop of Mende.

To pass from the continual barbarisms, obscurities, puerilities of Gregory of Tours, of Fredegarius, or even of the authors of the Liber Pontificalis, to the easily flowing prose or hexameter verse of Alcuin is like going from the ill-spelt productions of a half-educated ploughman to the letters of Cooper or the poetry of Goldsmith.

Alcuin has been called the Erasmus of the eighth century, and though in one respect the comparison is too flattering, since the Northumbrian did but little for critical science, it gives on the whole not an incorrect impression of the literary position of this man, the child and champion of the Carolingian Renaissance.

It is evident that he and the men with whom he associated, Angles, Saxons, or Franks, were tired of the barbarism which had pervaded Europe for three centuries, and looked back with longing, perhaps sometimes with unwise longing, to the great days of Roman supremacy and peace.

Even their Teutonic names were to them somewhat of a humiliation.

If important books were not carefully copied and preserved, they could eventually disappear.

The renewed interest in learning during Charlemagne's reign became so important that historians later gave it a name, the Carolingian Renaissance.

Carolingian refers to Charlemagne's family, and Renaissance means rebirth.

It was a rebirth or a renewal of learning.

He was a patron.

of what's been called the Carolingian Renaissance.

The Renaissance, oh, you know, it's spelled, it's a long word, would be in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, but this has been called the Carolingian Renaissance because he was a patron to many scholarly endeavors.

He had at least two famous court scholars Alcuin from York and Theodulf from Spain.

He believed in the pursuit of learning and the liberal arts.

It's just like we ain't got them, right? But medieval people aren't looking at it that way.

And interestingly, like when medieval people are relating to like older texts in particular, like most of them, if they're like coming from, you know, the high to late medieval period were actually made during the Carolingian Renaissance and like copied out in that way, which is why when you get to the.

Quote unquote Renaissance.

Let's show the fuck up.

you know, what like original things are, like when they want to like go back to a version of the past, which is something that is about different.

So they go back and they're like, we're going to find the oldest versions of these texts we can.

And they get to text from the Carolingian Renaissance.

And they're like, so we're going to write in our own version of Carolingian minuscule.

Royal assemblies brought together leading secular and ecclesiastical figures, while the missi dominici carried instructions into the provinces and reported abuses.

His court at Aachen became the center of a revival in scholarship now known as the Carolingian Renaissance.

Charles recruited intellectuals from across Europe, including Alcuin of York, Paul the Deacon from Italy, and Theodulf of Orléans from Visigothic Spain.

Palace and monastic schools trained clergy and administrators.

The political reverberations of Wilfrid's reforms echoed into the reign of Æthelred and later kings as ecclesiastical appointments became more tightly aligned with the papacy.

This alignment would ultimately facilitate England's participation in wider Christendom during the Carolingian Renaissance.

At the same time, Wilfrid's insistence on Roman law and canon practice began to influence the legal traditions that would later underpin medieval English jurisprudence.

In short, his career illustrates how a single bishop could shape not only liturgy but also the very fabric of royal authority and secular law across early England.