In its broadest meaning, “Carolingian Renaissance” refers to the centrally inspired cultured revival that accompanied Charlemagne’s achievement at the end of the eighth century in making himself ruler of a large empire, and took up the theme, which, in his politics, reached its apotheosis in his imperial coronation at Rome in 800. It was a movement, primarily, to reform the Church: clerical corruption was tackled, new standards of Latinity were imposed, and the text of the Bible and the Liturgy standardized. Among a small elite, there was a cultural and intellectual renaissance, also encouraged by Charlemagne. Intellectuals from Lombardy and Spain such as Paul the Deacon, Peter of Pisa, and Theodulf of Orleans were invited to the court, where they not only engaged in theological controversy but also wrote classicizing Latin verse. Later, the Anglo-Saxon from York, Alcuin, became the most influential of these figures. A library was built up at court which contained the texts of Latin authors such as Lucan, Terence, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and Cicero, as well as Calcidius’ translation of Plato’s Timaeus; and after Charlemagne’s death, his biography was written by Einhard, in a form imitated from Suetonius. The intellectual renaissance survived the gradual disintegration of the Empire during the reign of his son, Louis the Pious (814-40) and his grandson Charles the Bald (d. 877). Indeed, Charles the Bald seems to have been enthusiastically interested in poetry, theology, and philosophy, protecting the greatest thinker of the whole period, John Scottus Eriugena. Encouraged, perhaps, by the way in which his court looked to Byzantium as a model, this period was a time in which knowledge of Greek, rare in the Middle Ages, was cultivated, not just by Eriugena but also by his fellow Irishmen Sedulius Scottus and Martin of Laon (see in general the essays in McKitterick 1994).
The Carolingian Renaissance is clearly important, then, in the story of the transmission of classical civilization and for intellectual history. But what relevance does this period have to the history of philosophy? To gather from the bulk of older and recent discussions, it is Eriugena, and Eriugena alone, who deserves to be considered as a philosopher. Moreover, Eriugena is usually considered to have cut himself off from his own background and century through his reading of Greek Neoplatonic Christian authors, and so to have been a virtual inhabitant of Constantinople rather than Laon or Soissons in the North of France. Other Carolingian scholars seem just to have been preservers and compilers: avatars of their epoch’s renaissance perhaps, but hardly thinkers in their own right. This impression, however, is far from wholly accurate. The characteristic methods of Carolingian thinking - excerption, paraphrase, compilation, and glossing - give the misleading impression of servility. But, often, the thinkers are exercising a careful choice, and even by the way they selected and interwove others’ material, they are indicating a clear set of their own ideas. And, arguably, these ideas and the more general approach and caste of mind from which they emerged cast medieval Latin philosophy in the mould which, from then on, it would continue to exhibit. I shall return to this point at the end of my discussion. The three areas in which Carolin-gian philosophy flourished were in logic, in the confrontation, as Christians, with pagan philosophical ideas, and in controversies over Christian doctrine. I have presented it under these headings elsewhere and tried to give an impression of the nature of philosophical thinking at the time through examples (Marenbon 1994, 1998; see also, for a logically-oriented view Marenbon 2008). Here, rather, I shall try to set out the different phases of philosophy in period from c. 780-c. 900, with bibliography to help any new explorers of this neglected area - but perhaps they should read the two caveats in my conclusion before they read any further.
World History
