Charles Homer Haskins’ The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) is an acknowledged masterpiece of modern medieval historiography. Not only has this celebrated book sparked several generations of scholarship and debate, but, almost eight decades later, it continues to capture the historiographical interest of medievalists. Since Haskins, not a few historians have tried their hand at describing this ‘renaissance’ of learning that took place in Western Europe during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and there are, today, countless titles bearing the term ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ to show for it. In the course of the now tired debate over the appropriateness of this phrase, at least three new words have been offered to replace (or join) the French borrowing: renewal, revolution, and reformation. Whatever one's word of choice, and renaissance seems to have remained a favorite, it has become commonplace to credit the great American medievalist with coining the term ‘the renaissance of the twelfth century’ and, in doing so, single-handedly opening up new vistas of research.

In fact, Haskins did not coin the term nor did he give the first explanation of what that renaissance entailed. He did, as medievalists well know, popularize and articulate the intellectual revival of the twelfth century more effectively than anyone else. More to the point, Haskins’ book was not so much a groundbreaking assessment of medieval learning as it was a culmination of earlier more fragmentary attempts to describe and define an already apparent intellectual rebirth in twelfth-century Europe. My purpose here is not to discredit Haskins for his achievement, or to minimize his well-deserved appreciation, but to shed light on an important but often ignored period in medievalism, one that helped bring about Haskins’ magnum opus in the first place. An excursion into the historiographical background to Haskins’ work will not only help correct a misplaced emphasis, it will also better situate the context out of which a supposed anti-Burckhardtianism on the part of medievalists allegedly sprang.

The starting point for any discussion of a medieval renaissance, it is often said, is Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 classic, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Although sometimes seen as the foundational work of Renaissance historiography, this historical ‘essay’, for that was what Burckhardt himself called it, was itself the resounding culmination of many years of growing debate on the period and concept of a renaissance.