The twelfth-century renaissance

Abstract

The epoch of the earliest Crusades, of vigorous new development in urban life, in bureaucratic methods of government and in higher education in the schools, some of which were shortly to become the earliest universities, has many claims to be viewed as a period of renaissance or renewal, a period in which learning revived with important consequences for European systems of law, for scholastic philosophy and for the importation of new knowledge from Greek and Arabic sources. C.H. Haskins in his classic study, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century , emphasised the influence of Rome, the ancient Rome of rulers and lawyers as well as of philosophers and writers. The revival of jurisprudence occurred in conjunction with the full recovery of the corpus of Roman law in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and then touched other bodies of law as well, the canon law of the church first and then feudal and local customs and the new law of the English royal court. The Roman tradition of rulership and law grew stronger in the twelfth century; Frederick Barbarossa restored the ideal of Empire and inserted his Roncaglian decrees into the Corpus iuris civilis while on the other hand one of his victims, Arnold of Brescia, promoted the Roman Senate as an instrument of popular rule. Above all, there was much sharp comment on new developments, as in Gerhoh of Reichersberg's Letter to Pope Adrian on the Novelties of the Day.