Texts in Context:
The Real Renaissance
By Gabriel Blanchard
Just what do we mean by
"the High Middle Ages?"
For Thine Is the Kingdom
The immense blossoming of European culture in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries is hard to describe. The change is more dramatic than most non-specialists find easy to believe, and involves more facets of life and civilization than can be easily listed. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has seen a lot more “hype,” but the changes it involved, with the exception of the Protestant Reformation (debatably), were far less dramatic and had more precedent. If there is an era that truly deserves to be hailed as possessing a new energy of civilization-spanning rebirth, it is the beginning of the High Middle Ages.
Relations between the Roman Empire and the papacy are strained—it’s just like old times. However, a major intellectual change is about to … leave them as strained as usual, and then proceed after another century to make them much worse! But we will come to that. In 1095, the East Roman Emperor sends envoys to the pope, schism notwithstanding, bearing a plea for military aid against the Seljuq Turks.1 The Seljuqs handed the Romans quite a bad defeat at the Battle of Manzikert2 twenty-four years ago, and have conquered most of Anatolia since—and at this point in history, Anatolia is nearly half the empire.
His Holiness agrees to mediate help. However, he frames the eastern situation to the princes of the west more creatively than the emperor expects. In 1096, a whole First Crusade arrives on his doorstep,3 and the notion in their heads is less that they are there to reinforce New Rome—though the nobles do swear fealty to the Empire for whatever they might conquer—and more that they are there to restore Christian rule over the Holy Land. Moreover the war itself is conceived, not as an excusable evil at best (hitherto the normal view among Christians), but actually as a form of penance. Alongside the continued movements of the Truce and Peace of God, this represents a dramatic shift in the Church’s approach to violence and, indirectly, to the state.
And the Power
Speaking of which, crown and crozier in the west of Europe have tensions of their own. From the middle of the eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth, a string of reform-minded men are chosen as popes, many of them from the Cluniac branch of the Benedictines; the fourth member of this papal “dynasty,” Nicholas II (r. 1058-1061), established the law that only cardinals could elect the pope. Two others, St. Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) and Callixtus II (r. 1119-1124), are notable participants in the Investiture Contest, a struggle over the right to invest4 bishops and abbots, in which their principal opponents are the papacy’s own creature, the Holy Roman Emperor.5
In purely secular matters, this is the golden age of the Normans. The eponymous House of Normandy, established in the early tenth century, have become the monarchs of England as of 1066. After only a couple of generations, they will run out of sons; thanks to a strategic marriage, however, their claim will pass to the House of Anjou (or the Angevins—thanks for that totally normal noun-adjective relationship, French), later known in England as the Plantagenets. Another family of Norman aristocrats, the Hautevilles, will soon establish the Kingdom of Sicily, as well as the Principality of Antioch (one of the crusader states of the Levant).
The Middle Ages have remained, if not my profession, my hobby ... I see the period everywhere, transparently overlaying my daily concerns, which do not look medieval, though they are.
And the Glory
In the sphere of the fine arts, we encounter one of the most striking shifts in the history of architecture: that from the Romanesque style to the Gothic. The Romanesque, as its name suggests, drew mainly upon Roman models. It is characterized by thick, sturdy walls pierced by few windows, long arcades and colonnades, and semicircular arches and vaults; the total impression is of solidity and strength. Spreading with surprising rapidity from twelfth-century France, Gothic architecture is all about light—both in the sense “not heavy” and in the sense “radiance.” Buttresses (“flying” and otherwise) allow for far more slender walls; this in turn permits buildings to soar far higher than any Romanesque building could. It likewise allows many more, much larger windows: now the Medieval art of stained glass unveils its brilliance. Yet the most characteristic tell of Gothic architecture is its arches. Pointed arches had existed in the antiquity, but the shape rarely seems to have been favored; Islamic architecture, however, had taken a shine to the pointed arch, mostly in its “four-centered” or “keyhole” forms, and it may be from Muslim Spain that the French got the idea. Gothic architecture favors lancet and ogee arches in many variations, often with decoration in the form of foiling.6
Literature is also transfigured before us. The region we call southern France was known to the ancient Romans as Provincia Nostra, “our province”; the locals have shortened the name and slurred it a little, so it is now simply Provence, and their dialect of Latin has evolved into a language called Old Provençal or Old Occitan7—a bit like a halfway point between Old French and medieval Italian. A movement of romantic poets, known in Old Provençal as the troubadours, have begun doing something virtually unprecedented. You see, they are not only are they writing love poetry (normally addressed to married noblewomen), which people have been doing for millennia: They are claiming that romantic love, far from having the maddening, destructive, or at best embarrassing character attributed to it in classical antiquity, is in truth an ennobling power in its own right. Confronted with the adulterous implications of this troubadour model, they double down. What comes to be known as “courtly love” becomes a devotion that is half-amorous and half-worshipful. It will continue in tension with the Catholic faith for centuries—a tension typified by the unhappy story of Lancelot’s love for Guinevere in the Arthurian cycle. (Another poet, not Provençal but Tuscan, will propose a method for reconciling eros with agapé; but once we reach him, the end of the High Middle Ages will be in sight.)
Forever and Ever, Amen
Finally, the twelfth century opens upon another golden age, that of Scholasticism. There is a pleasing collection of ironies in the fact that this nearly begins with a romance between a priest and his the nun who was his lawful wife. (It will be another hundred-odd years before we encounter the most illustrious of them all, whose lowing has filled the world.) There has been a kind of Scholasticism going on in the Muslim world, and also among the Jews, particularly in Spain, but the Christians of northern Europe have shown little interest in it till now. As the glittering windows of Notre-Dame de Paris slowly take shape above the infant University of Paris, volumes freshly translated from their original Arabic or Greek begin to pour in, notably including a vast corpus by Aristotle.
The peoples of Western Europe were not wholly unfamiliar with Aristotle by any means. Boethius had translated a variety of Greek classics into Latin, including prominent Neoplatonists like Porphyry, as well as two of the six parts of Aristotle’s Organon (or “Toolbox”), the Categories and the On Interpretation, which both deal with certain matters of grammar and logic. Besides the other four parts (the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations), the medievals now have access to books like the Metaphysics, De Anima (“On the Soul”), the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and the Poetics, along with the works of a host of commentators and continuers, like the physician Avicenna and an Andalusi judge given the Latin name Averroës.8 We shall be hearing more about him presently.
1The realm of the Seljuq (or Seljuk) Turks covered much of the Near East and Central Asia from the late eleventh century to the late twelfth. In the thirteenth, their successors were mostly swept away by the Mongols, but a few hung on as Mongol vassal states, like the Sultanate of Rum (pronounced like “room”—the Turkic way of saying Rome). The Mongols withdrew in the fourteenth century, and the Ottoman Turks arose out of the ashes of the Seljuqs.
2Manzikert (modern Malazgirt) is in eastern Turkey, about a hundred miles from the border with Iran.
3In fact, the First Crusade is so gung-ho, it shows up twice. Thanks to a preacher called Peter the Hermit, before the official forces proposed by the pope have finished organizing, around twenty thousand peasants set off for the Holy Land, without all those pesky “provisions” and “equipment” that make the walk from Belgium to Syria so tedious. This “Peasants’ Crusade” appeared on the Emperor’s front step a few months ahead of the First Crusade proper (having thrown a few pogroms on their way, and more or less ravaged the Balkan provinces for food). The emperor hardly knew what to do with them: he couldn’t arm and victual a host that size on no notice, not that they were a fighting force even if he could. Eventually he just told them where the Seljuqs were and let them go; the majority were killed or captured.
4Investiture is a formal (and usually ceremonial) installation in office, along with the bestowal of its regalia. E.g., a newly-vowed member of a convent is invested with her order’s habit; some years later, selected as abbess, she is then invested for that office with a miter and crozier—normal regalia for abbesses as well as bishops at this time. Investiture is not always religious: a royal coronation is a form of secular investiture, and also exhibits the distinction between selection to office and formal installation (e.g., the present King of Great Britain was legally king as soon as his mother passed).
5There was also an English “theater” of the conflict, expressed most vividly in the strife between King Henry II and St. Thomas Becket (who was ultimately martyred in 1179).
6Though perhaps most familiar in the word trefoil, that term applies to this type of decoration only when it results in three “leaves.” Other numbers of leaves have their own prefixes (borrowed, like foil, from French), e.g. quatrefoil for four and cinquefoil for five; all collectively fall under the term multifoil.
7Provence, Provençal, and Occitan are pronounced prø-vôns, prõ-vôn-säł, and ŏk-sĭ-tän, respectively.
8“Avicenna” is not terribly far from ibn Sīna, but one really feels that “Averroës” does not represent the best possible effort to Latinize ibn Rushd.
Gabriel Blanchard is an editor and freelance author by profession, a Classicist by education, a Medievalist by accident, and a rational animal by substance (with the property of a capacity for laughter). He lives in Baltimore, MD.
This post is a part of our broader series Texts in Context, which offers background on the figures of our Author Bank. If you’re just joining us and would like to start at the beginning—or if you’ve been reading since that beginning and want a refresher—we have a three-part introduction to understanding history, covering what history is as a discipline, how we subdivide it and why, and how to spot fake or distorted stuff that’s trying to pass itself off as scholarship.
Published on 17th March, 2025. Page image of a detail from one of the rose windows of Chartres Cathedral (one of the earliest and most celebrated examples of Gothic architecture), photographed by Wikimedia contributor MOSSOT and made available by them under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).
