Any return to the Renaissance debate may seem somewhat futile, like the proverbialfouettement d'un chat perhaps, yet it may well be refreshing to enter that worn battleground of historical controversy from a different angle, and to begin our investigations, not in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but in the eighth and ninth, not with Petrarch and the Quattrocento humanists, but with Northumbrian, Frankish, and Italian scholars of a very much earlier, less civilized Europe. Traditionally, the so-called Carolingian renaissance has found its embodiment in none other than the person of the Emperor Charlemagne himself, alike acclaimed as unifier of the West, defender of the Roman Church, restorer of stability and justice to barbarian Europe, and grand patron of a cultural and artistic revival. From Charlemagne's own reign until the present day, scholars have spoken of this famed ruler, and the culture flourishing under him, in virtually the same breath. Leaving aside the acclamations of his own day, which were, as we shall see, adulatory enough, we can note a nostalgia for the Carolingian age d'or even among public and literary figures of the immediately succeeding generations. bone memoriae, wrote Nithard, embroiled in the troubles which followed Charlemagne's death, omnem Europem omni bonitate repletam reliquit.1 And memories of the new Davidic monarch drew out those heroic songs about his brave warriors doing battle with the new Philistines on the Spanish March. The Chanson de Roland was not alone as a medieval monument to Karolus Magnus, many were the legends about this revered Emperor, and for ambitious French monarchs, such as Philip II (Augustus) one could think of no one better to emulate than the one first appointed by God to be the leader of all Latin Christendom.2 Charlemagne became a saint; in the Chanson, his white beard, his hieratic and patriarchal appearance implied a supernatural role as God's vice-regent and the Father of all Christendom:3 in