Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The translation movement was a pivotal event, because it ushered in a period that historians call the “twelfth-century renaissance.”23 The return of classical works to the western mainstream—which would not have been possible without people like Gerard of Cremona—shook up whole spheres of thought, radically transforming academic disciplines including philosophy, theology, and law. But it also had tangible, real-world effects, as technologies developed on the basis of new knowledge and, in the spirit of an exciting new scientific age, found their way into ordinary people’s lives. Within the traditional centers of study—monasteries and cathedral schools—the twelfth century saw an explosion in the sheer number of books produced. Many of these were carefully wrought Latin copies of ancient texts—the Bible, of course; the works of the church fathers; service books for use in church; and the works of the early medieval geniuses Boethius, Isidore of Seville, and the northern English monk-historian the Venerable Bede, who in the early eighth century had written the huge Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But alongside these now appeared works by Aristotle and Euclid, Galen and Proclus. Roman poets like Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Terence, and rhetoricians like Cicero, Cato, and Seneca did not require translation, of course—but interest in them was revived, and their works were