The Carolingian Renaissance

The Carolingian Renaissance was the first great cultural revival of the Latin West. Between roughly 780 and 900, the Frankish court, the major monasteries, and the cathedrals of the empire produced a flood of new manuscripts, correct editions of the Bible and the Church Fathers, new hymns, new liturgical books, new schools, new palaces, and new works of art in a self-conscious attempt to renew Christian Roman culture. The movement was not a return to classical paganism; it was a Christian humanism that used the Latin classics as a tool for understanding the Bible, training the clergy, and unifying the empire. Its products — accurate biblical texts, the Carolingian minuscule, the Romanesque liturgy, the schools that would train the scholars of the eleventh century — shaped European intellectual life for centuries and laid the foundation of the medieval synthesis that would follow.

The state of Latin learning before the renaissance

In the mid-eighth century, the level of Latin literacy in the Frankish realm was low. The liturgy was celebrated, the sacraments were administered, and the Gospel was preached, but the manuscripts in use were often faulty, the priests barely understood the Latin they read, and the schools that had flourished in late Roman Gaul had largely disappeared. A council held in 747 at the request of Pope Zachary had ordered bishops to teach, but the order went largely unheeded. When Boniface, the English missionary, complained of the poor Latin of his Frankish pupils, his complaint was the rule, not the exception.

Charlemagne’s drive to reform the Church and the liturgy could not succeed without a parallel drive to reform Latin learning. The first signs of change came in the 770s, with the arrival at the Frankish court of Peter of Pisa, an Italian grammarian who taught the king the rudiments of Latin, and of Paul the Deacon, a Lombard historian and poet who came to the court as a refugee. Charlemagne soon gathered around him a wider circle of scholars, including the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin of York, the Visigothic Spaniard Theodulf, the Italian Paulinus of Aquileia, and the Irish philosopher and astronomer Dicuil.

The court school and the circle of scholars

The inner circle of scholars at the Carolingian court has often been called a “court school,” but it was not a school in the institutional sense. It was a small, mobile intellectual community attached to the king’s chapel, the chancery, and the household. The scholars taught Latin grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, computation, astronomy, chant, and the Bible to a small group of students drawn from the royal family, the higher clergy, and the sons of the greater aristocrats. They also produced manuscripts, drafted letters, and advised the king on ecclesiastical policy.

The dominant figure of the early renaissance was Alcuin of York, who came to the Frankish court in 782 and remained at the center of Carolingian intellectual life until his death in 804. Alcuin was a Northumbrian, trained in the cathedral school of York, who had been one of the leading scholars of the insular and Anglo-Saxon world. He became abbot of Saint-Martin at Tours, where he established the scriptorium that would produce the corrected biblical texts and the Carolingian minuscule that bear his name. He also wrote a flood of educational treatises, theological works, biblical commentaries, and letters that circulated throughout Europe.

The other great figures of the renaissance were Theodulf, a Visigothic Spaniard who became abbot of Fleury and bishop of Orléans; Paulinus of Aquileia, an Italian who directed the school at Metz; the Irish philosopher and geographer Dicuil; Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, who wrote a popular treatise on grammar; and Rabanus Maurus, the German pupil of Alcuin who became archbishop of Mainz and the teacher of an entire generation. The scholars of the renaissance were remarkably cosmopolitan. They came from every part of the British Isles, the Continent, and even beyond, and they corresponded with one another in a network of friendships, arguments, and Latin verses that has been preserved in their surviving letters.

The reform of the liturgy

The deepest change the renaissance brought was in the liturgy. Charlemagne wanted his realm to worship in the same way, with the same texts, the same chants, and the same calendar. The Frankish Church had inherited a great variety of local uses, some Gallican, some Roman, some hybrid, and the resulting confusion was a barrier to Christian unity. In 785, Charlemagne sent to Rome for an authoritative copy of the Gregorian Sacramentary, the liturgical book that contained the prayers and prefaces used at Mass. The book was brought north and gradually adopted throughout the Frankish realm.

The Roman liturgy that came north was not adopted unchanged. The Franks had their own traditions of chant, of vestments, of processional practice, and of certain feasts, and these were retained in a hybrid use that historians call Romano-Frankish or Gallican-Roman. The final shape of the liturgy was settled only in the ninth century, and the resulting book — the Roman rite — has remained the basis of Western Catholic worship to the present day. The same period also saw the standardization of the calendar, the regular introduction of new feasts (including the feast of All Souls and the feast of the Holy Innocents), and the gradual triumph of Roman chant over Gallican.

The liturgical reform was driven by the same impulse that drove the scriptorium. A uniform liturgy required uniform texts, and uniform texts required corrected editions of the Bible and the Church Fathers. The empire-wide demand for liturgical books created the very market that the Carolingian scriptoria filled.

The correction of the Bible

The single most important achievement of the Carolingian Renaissance was the correction of the Latin Bible. By the eighth century, the Old Latin translations of the Bible had been corrupted by centuries of careless copying. Theodulf of Orléans described the state of the biblical text before the correction in a famous letter, complaining of scribal errors that turned nonsense into worse nonsense. To remedy the situation, Alcuin at Tours and Theodulf at Fleury produced new editions of the Bible based on the best available manuscripts, often brought from Rome or Northumbria.

The Tours Bibles produced under Alcuin, and the related Bibles of Theodulf, are the ancestors of almost every subsequent Latin Bible in the West. They were copied hundreds of times over the following centuries, and the text they established — the so-called textus receptus of the Vulgate — became the standard Bible of the Latin Middle Ages. When scholars in the twentieth century discovered the great pandects of Tours — the Grandval and the Bamberg Bibles, the Tours itself, and the Vivian Bible — they recognized in them the very books that the renaissance had produced and on which the Latin Church had been built for a thousand years.

The Carolingian minuscule and the scriptorium

To produce thousands of correct biblical and liturgical manuscripts required both a clear script and a disciplined scriptorium. The script that bears the name of the renaissance is the Carolingian minuscule, a small, clear, rounded hand developed in the late eighth century from Roman and insular prototypes. The minuscule was so legible, so easy to write, and so well adapted to reading that it became the basis of the lowercase alphabet of every modern European language. The capitals that accompany it in Carolingian manuscripts are likewise ancestors of the modern majuscule forms.

The scriptoria that produced the manuscripts were usually monastic. The greatest of them — Tours, Corbie, Fleury, Saint-Denis, Reichenau, Saint Gall, Bobbio, and a dozen others — had their own houses of production, their own masters, and their own traditions. They trained scribes to produce a uniform book, often with decorated initials, painted borders, and full-page miniatures. The scriptorium at Tours under Alcuin became the model: it produced a uniform book in a uniform hand, with a uniform layout, and the product was so successful that the Tours style was imitated across the empire.

Latin literature and learning

The renaissance produced a flood of new Latin literature. Alcuin wrote commentaries on the Psalms, the Gospel of John, and the Apocalypse; Theodulf wrote a long treatise on the Holy Spirit and a courtly poem, De ordine, that became a model for later Carolingian verse; Paul the Deacon compiled his Historia Langobardorum, a Lombard national history in Latin; the Irishman Dicuil wrote a geography of the world, the Liber de mensura orbis terrae; and the Frank Freculf of Lisieux composed a chronicle of world history from creation to his own time.

The renaissance was not limited to theology and history. Einhard wrote his Vita Karoli Magni, the first medieval biography of a lay ruler modeled on the Lives of Suetonius. The court poets, in a network of verse letters, imitated the elegies of Venantius Fortunatus and the odes of Horace. The schools produced new textbooks of grammar, rhetoric, and the liberal arts, and the De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae of Martianus Capella, the De institutione arithmetica of Boethius, and the De nuptiis of Fulgentius became the standard introductory texts of the medieval schools.

Carolingian art and architecture

The renaissance had a visual as well as a literary expression. The court chapel at Aachen, built by Charlemagne and dedicated in 805, was modeled on San Vitale in Ravenna and on the Anastasis Rotunda in Jerusalem. Its octagonal core, with its two-story ambulatory and its imported marble columns, was the most ambitious building in the West since the end of the Roman Empire. The court workshop at Aachen produced liturgical objects of gold, silver, gem, and ivory that combined Roman, Byzantine, insular, and Frankish elements in a new and distinct style. The book covers and the Lothar Cross, the Golden Altar of Basel, and the various palace ivories are among the great works of the early Middle Ages.

In painting, the court school produced the great palace psalters and gospel books, with their full-page miniatures of biblical scenes, their author portraits, and their elaborate canon tables. The Utrecht Psalter, with its swift, energetic pen drawings of Old and New Testament scenes, became the model for an entire tradition of linear drawing in the West. The Ebbo Gospels, the Coronation Gospels, the Godescalc Evangelistary, the Lorsch Gospels, and the Book of Kells — to name only the most famous — set the standard of illuminated manuscript production for centuries.

The later renaissance and its inheritance

The first generation of the renaissance — Alcuin, Theodulf, Paulinus, Paul the Deacon — died between 800 and 810. A second generation, including Walafrid Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Florus of Lyon, and the poet Sedulius Scottus, took up the work. The empire of Louis the Pious saw a great flowering of scholarship, with new commentaries, new histories (Einhard, Nithard, the Astronomer, Thegan), and a more mature tradition of biblical exegesis. After the partition of Verdun, the renaissance continued in the successor kingdoms: at Tours under the descendants of Alcuin’s school, at Reichenau and Saint Gall in the East, at Fleury in the West.

The renaissance slowed in the tenth century, as the empire itself fragmented under the assault of the Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens. But its products endured. The corrected Bible, the Carolingian minuscule, the Roman liturgy, the monastic schools, and the visual tradition of the court workshop became the inheritance of every part of Christendom. When the Ottonian dynasty in Germany, the Anglo-Saxons in England, and the Capetians in France launched their own cultural revivals in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, they took the Carolingian achievement as their starting point.

It should be noted that the older picture of the Carolingian Renaissance as a sudden and decisive break with a “dark” seventh century has been challenged in the recent scholarship. Rosamond McKitterick, in particular, has argued that the renaissance was less a clean rupture than a deliberate working-up of practices already present in insular, merovingian, and Roman Christian culture, and that the period between Gregory of Tours and Alcuin was less culturally depleted than nineteenth-century historians believed. On her reading, the “renaissance” is best understood as the moment when long-developing tendencies were given imperial backing and a new self-conscious vocabulary, rather than as the moment Latin learning was reborn.