As Haskins in his now classic study of the Renaissance of the twelfth century reminds us, too close a focus on Latin obscures the fact that, over and above the revival of learning with which it is synonymous, the twelfth century was also ‘an age of new creation in literature and art beyond the mere imitation of ancient models’. Notwithstanding his own almost exclusive preoccupation with the achievements of the monastic and ecclesiastic intelligentsia, Haskins was well aware of how profoundly the secular world was also affected by the general broadening of horizons and the renewed intellectual vitality which characterised the twelfth century.

This is especially true of the field of literature. Here a whole series of innovations, generic, thematic and formal, laid the foundations for a written vernacular culture that was to flourish with ever-increasing creativity over the ensuing centuries. Such pervasive and durable concepts as chivalry, courtliness and Courtly Love, for example, trace their origins directly back to the lay world of the twelfth century. More general developments of the time, such as increased historical consciousness and a more acute sense of the relevance of the past to the present, the ‘re-discovery’ of the individual, the evolution of handwriting, book production and the decorative arts from Romanesque to Gothic modes, not to mention the political self-affirmation of the baronial classes or the growth of aristocratic patronage, are all reflected in one way or another in the pages of its secular texts.

Pride of place amongst the literary innovations of the century must go to the narrative genre of romance, one of whose founding fathers, Chrétien de Troyes, writing in French during the 1170s, explicitly links his own literary activity to the topos of the translatio studii. There was, we are told, not only continuity of culture between the ancient world and his, but also a direct transfer of learning from one to the other – a cultural counterpart to the translatio imperii – from Greece to Rome and ultimately to the French-speaking world of the twelfth century. Hand in hand with this appropriation of the written heritage of the past to the present goes a widening in the accessibility of knowledge, contemporary as well as ancient, as a whole new sector of society is brought within the purview of written culture.