The centuries following the turn of the millennium
were also a period
in which northwestern European culture, especially that of the nuclear
regions of the old Frankish state, became more of a force to be
reckoned with than in the past. There are two major contexts to look
at. One is the traditional world of learning. What happened here did
not burst the robust ecclesiastical framework that had preserved the
culture of the late Roman world for so many centuries, but it greatly
expanded the repertoire of this tradition. Learning acquired a new
institutional focus, the university, and a new intellectual style,
scholasticism, marked by a mercilessly systematic approach to
exposition and argument. Meanwhile, the limited corpus of inherited
Latin literature was enriched by a transfusion of previously
unavailable material from Arabic and Greek.
By the fourteenth century a Muslim scholar could report
a rumour to the
effect that the philosophical sciences were widely cultivated in the
land of the Franks, with abundant teachers and numerous students.
The other major context of cultural change in this
period was the lay
aristocracy. North of the Alps the collapse of the Roman world seems to
have engendered a society in which the normal condition of the
aristocracy was illiteracy-a stunning lapse by the standards of the
Eurasian civilizations of the day. Even Charlemagne, an outstanding
patron of literary culture, never really learned to write; his
biographer tells us that this was not for want of trying, but that the
king had come to it too late in life to make much progress. From around
the thirteenth century this situation was changing. It was not that the
lay aristocracy became proficient in classical Latin, as the Chinese
gentry were in classical Chinese. Instead, what emerged was a
compromise: French, the vernacular that had become the international
language of the European aristocracy, became a literary language, while
aristocrats (and not only aristocrats) became literate in it. Poetry in
French already had a considerable history, but the development of a
substantial prose literature was new Much of the content of this
literature was chivalric. But as early as the thirteenth century it was
possible for readers literate in French to consult an encyclopedia; by
the end of the fourteenth they could read works of Aristotle in French
translation, and substantial libraries of books in French were to be
found at many royal courts. Partly by a process of imitation and
emulation, comparable vernacular literatures developed elsewhere in
western Europe. The appearance of printing in Germany in the mid-
fifteenth century, and its rapid spread, gave further impetus to these
developments.
