Title: The awakening of Europe
Description: In this survey of early medieval thought and of the society that nurtured it, the author concentrates on three main epochs: the age of Alcuin, architect of the Carolingian Renaissance, when working copyists, libraries and schools established a tradition of learning and devotion which survived even the horrors of the tenth century; the age of Gerbert and the Ottos, when millennial fantasies and social disruption contrasted with real if limited achievements in the spread of Arab and Byzantine thought; and finally the heroic age of Abelard, which witnessed the rise of vernacular languages, the early Crusades and, in the Hildebrandine Revolution, the first great clash of Empire and Papacy.
Subjects: Medieval Civilization