England and the Nature of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance

This paper has three goals. The first goal is to suggest an alternative to R. W. Southern’s model of England as an intellectual colony of France. I will propose instead that, at least from the second half of the twelfth century, England can best be seen (or perhaps also be seen) as an important provincial hinterland of several Continental centers of intellectual and cultural development, most notably Paris, but also Bologna, Salerno, and Toledo. In other words, not Colonial India or Jamaica to Imperial Britain but contemporary India to Silicon Valley or the American Midwest to New York City. The second goal is to stress why the international nature of intellectual development in the period was so important. It is a truism that Western Christianity and its use of Latin made national borders relatively unimportant to medieval intellectual life. What this paper seeks to illustrate, by looking at English students and scholars abroad, is how the pooling of personnel and economic resources from all over Europe created the critical mass for such developments as the blossoming of scholastic theology at Paris, the growth of canon law at Bologna after Gratian, and the translation of much Arabic learning in Spain, particularly Toledo. To provide a single telling example, Robert of Ketton, the English translator of the Qur’an and various scientific texts, worked closely in Spain with Hermann of Carinthia, who came from nearly the opposite end of Catholic Europe. This kind of pooling of intellectual talent was common and helped make the Twelfth-Century Renaissance possible. The third goal is to argue that if one does view England as provincial, or for that matter colonial, even a very brief review of intellectual activity there indicates the sheer vibrancy of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.