The medieval world

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  The existence of a ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ was first suggested in 1840 by French scholars.
  
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  But the debate did not really begin until the publication of Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927)
  
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  The debate raged during the 1940s and 1950s, see R.N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999), 1-11, 216.
  
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  According to a leading historian, the phrase ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ is ‘... a mere term of convenience which can mean almost anything we choose to make it mean... the sort of sublime meaninglessness which is required in words of high but uncertain import.’ [R.W. Southern, ‘The place of England in the twelfth-century renaissance,’ History 45 (1960), p. 201]
  

Definitions

monastic school

non-monastic school.

Fulbert of Chartres

Guibert of Nogent A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans. and ed. Paul J. Archambault (Pennsylvania, 1996)

Bec, Normandy

Berengar of Tours

Lanfranc of Bec

Roscelin

Rheims

Laon

St Victor

Petit Pont

Heloise

Hildegard of Bingen

amanuenses
The Curriculum

The seven liberal arts

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  They were divided into two groups:
  
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    The trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic/logic).
    
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    The quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).
    
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  The trivium was taught more widely than the quadrivium.
  

According to Adam of Perseigne, ‘...rhetoric adorns the discourse that grammar constructs from words, and... dialectic sharpens it by distinguishing truth from falsity.’ (Quoted in Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance, p. 29)

Civil or Roman law

Toledo

Euclid

Plato

The Arthurian legends of Chrétien de Troyes (c.1135-1183)