In 427, three years before his death, Augustine of Hippo compiled the Retractations, a kind of critical bibliography in which he passed in chronological review his writings as a catholic Christian, clarifying, defending and, where necessary, correcting passages which the course of events or his own theological development had called in question. In a very human way Augustine tended, in practice, to defend his previously-expressed views to a rather greater degree and to criticise them less than had been his original intention; but this means that where he declares a change of opinion, this statement may fairly be regarded as his final and definitive view. Two such statements are relevant to our purposes here: in his review of his earliest Christian work, Against the Academics, which appeared in 386, Augustine expresses his displeasure at the praise he there bestowed on the Platonist and Academic philosophers; while in his discussion of the two books On Order, which were written at the end of the same year, he regrets that he attributed too much to those liberal studies, of which many of the saints had been ignorant and many of their most enthusiastic disciples lacking in sanctity. Such views would seem, on first reading, to be exactly what we should expect of Augustine in the last years of his life, the result of an increased rigorism brought about by many years of controversy, which had left little of the humanism which had marked his first years as a Christian.

Jean Mabillon’s incidental treatment in his De re diplomatica of the lead bulla of an emperor Charles with the reverse legend Renovatio Roman. Imp. gives no inkling of the reputation it was to acquire in later historiography of the Carolingian empire. Mabillon himself favoured an attribution to Charles the Fat, although between the publication of the first and supplementary volumes of his epoch-making work it had been correctly attributed to the first Charles by the numismatist François Le Blanc. Without these early publications, modern discussion of early Carolingian imperial and renaissance ideology might have been deprived of one of its key texts: for the bull was already in a much damaged condition in the late-nineteenth century and both sides are now almost completely illegible. Its uniqueness, and the great rarity of the ‘imperial bust’ coins which are icono-graphically linked with it, invite us to consider whether the slogans and images of a ‘renewed Roman empire’ were known to more than a privileged few in Charlemagne’s lifetime: even so, if the Annales Mettenses, completed in 805, have been rightly interpreted, someone in the court circle had felt the need to appease critics by emphasising the strictly-Frankish roots of his imperial authority at the same time as the dies of the new coins were being prepared.

Einhard tells us that Charlemagne had a special liking for ‘those books of St Augustine called The City of God’. If only he had told us why. Did Charlemagne demand readings from book 5 on the happy Christian emperors? Or was he, as Ladner suggests, particularly attracted by ‘the idea of a society embracing earth and heaven, a society which a man could join through personal renewal’? If Ladner is right, then, he tells us, we should talk not of a Carolingian renaissance—‘secondary classicising features notwithstanding’—but of a Carolingian reform ‘as just one phase in the unfolding history of the realisation of the Reform idea in Christian history’ and specifically ‘an attempt to recreate the religious culture of the fourth and fifth centuries’. But is Lander right about Charlemagne? I have my doubts: perhaps what he really enjoyed most was book 22’s meaty chapter on the resurrection of the flesh or its rattling good miracle-story.

Despite its attendant manifestations of renewal, the process of the re-Christianisation of the Peloponnese during the ninth and tenth centuries has not generally been viewed in the context of a renaissance. The remarkable upsurge in church-building in the province from the end of the tenth century onwards, the approximate beginnings of which are marked by the appearance of a large church on the Spartan acropolis, has had its causes ascribed to movements other than the re-vitalisation of religious life in the area. It is true that the great period of church-building in the Peloponnese occurs at a later date than the comparable flourishing in Hellas, where the famous churches of Skripou, of Gregory the Theologian at Thebes, and of John the Baptist in Athens were all built in the ninth century. The late date of this architectural activity has doubtless been one factor which has led some historians to hold an unnecessarily complicated and even untenable view of the impulses which lay behind it.

For the most part the authors of the few lurid and fragmentary accounts we have of eleventh and early twelfth-century heretics concentrated almost exclusively on their virulent denunciations of the church, its authority, its sacraments and its priests. Consequently such success as they had has generally been explained in negative terms as the exploitation of anti-clerical sentiment arising from resentment of the church’s corruption on the one hand and the extension of its claims on the other, or as the embrace of alien doctrines imported from outside western christendom. That the second explanation is no longer held to apply before the middle of the twelfth century makes it the more necessary to ask again whether the ability of extremely varied manifestations of religious dissent to attract support in many places did not imply the existence of some positive alternative to orthodoxy, some conception of what a church might be, or what its renewal should involve.

The consequential implications for those who adopted a life of apostolic poverty in the twelfth century can in turn raise many complex questions. This paper makes little attempt to resolve the questions raised. Rather it is hoped that in discussing them suggestions will be forthcoming which will help either to achieve some degree of clarification or raise further and perhaps more searching questions in the minds of others.

It is unusual for a period of Christian renewal to begin with a massacre, yet that is what happened when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the count of Toulouse, boasted that they rode through moslem corpses heaped up in the Haram al-Sharif with blood ‘even to the horse bridles’ This should not obscure the fact that the crusading movement was motivated partly by a growing devotion to the humanity of Christ in the western church in the late eleventh century, or, as the author of the Gesta Francorum expressed it, a desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell’. It was this sentiment which led the crusaders to seek to restore the shrine churches of Jerusalem and in the eighty-eight years of their rule they filled the city with fine churches and monasteries closely resembling those which were being built in the west at the same time. It should be emphasised that the crusaders were seldom concerned to rebuild existing churches in Frankish style: their primary interest was to restore churches which had been ruined by war and persecution in the centuries of moslem rule. The pilgrim Saewulf, who visited the east four years after the Latin conquest, reported that ‘nothing has been left habitable by the Saracens, but everything has been devastated . . . in all. . . the holy places outside the walls. . . of Jerusalem’.

The Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille was composed in 1183 when its author was in his sixties and when the greater part of his writing must have lain behind him. That writing, as D’Alverny has most recently demonstrated, overwhelmingly consists of treatises of theological and devotional learning. Whilst it would be oversimplification to suggest that these religious works offer little evidence germane to Alan as a renaissance figure, there is no doubt that the Anticlaudianus offers the deepest insights into the secular influences upon Alan’s modes of thought. In this paper I should like to examine the essential nature and purpose of the Anticlaudianus against the liberating twelfth-century influences which directed the author towards its composition, against the extraordinary range of secular authors which he deploys, and finally and most importantly against the attempted synthesis between secular and sacred, between the insights of classical humanism and doctrinal Christianity, which is such a feature of the intellectual thought of the century. Alan is far from being a pioneer in this direction, but his vision of the synthesis illumines the whole intellectual tradition within which he wrote.

Let them be forbidden access to this work, wrote Alan of Lille in his Anticlaudianus, who would only look for the image of sensuality and not the truth of reason . . . Do not allow those tasteless men, who cannot take their studies beyond the bounds of the senses, to impose their own interpretations on this book . . . lest the majesty of its secret meanings be profaned, like pearls cast before swine, when divulged to the unworthy. But what is this majestic secret significance which Alan wished to keep hidden from people so lacking in good taste as to want to probe it and misunderstand it? On the surface the Anticlaudianus, Alan’s most famous work, is an epic romance about a celestial journey and a great battle which is clearly being used as a moral treatise, a summa de virtutibus et vitiis. His long poem tells the story of how the goddess Nature, in council with the Virtues, seeks to make a new type of person, the homo perfectus. They realise that such a divine being cannot be created unless a soul is brought from God, whereupon Phronesis, the searcher after truth to whom the secrets of God are revealed, undertakes a journey to heaven in a chariot constructed by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses. With the aid of Theology and Faith, Phronesis meets the heavenly host, the Virgin Mary, and eventually God himself, who has a soul made for her. She brings this soul, carefully sealed to keep it fresh, back to the waiting body, and the novus homo is complete. He then has to prove himself in a great pitched battle between the virtues and the vices.

In the history of Christian renewal, the council of Constance (1414–18) holds an important, and on the whole unhappy, position. It embodied the highest aspirations: as is well known, its aim was the regeneration of the Roman church at every level—the familiar ‘reform in head and members’; this cause was the council’s chief preoccupation from mid-1415 until its close; yet by common consent its achievement was, if not null, then negligible, in relation both to the task it had set itself, and to the real requirements of the day; and thus—it is tempting to conclude—in failing to reform itself, the medieval church made necessary the different and in many respects regrettable reform of the sixteenth century.

The climax of the Italian renaissance in the early sixteenth century merges almost imperceptibly and rather surprisingly with the beginnings of the catholic reformation. Within a single generation, it seems, religious and moral interests came to rival, or even to supplant, that interest in pagan antiquity which had long been the inspiration of Italian culture. The stages by which this transformation occurred have not been clearly defined, but the process can be seen at work in the case of one prominent humanist who decided to devote his career to the defence and then to the renewal of the church of Rome.

Learning to write the new humanistic script can surely be taken as a sign of humanistic interests’ in the fifteenth century. This is the conclusion of the compilers of a catalogue entitled Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century which was produced in conjunction with an exhibition held in the Bodleian library, Oxford in 1970. As long as our interests are confined to the small circle of English humanists in this period who are known by name this statement may not lead us on to reflection or comment since its truth is self-evident. The situation is altered, however, and the words quoted above assume a new meaning and suggest a new line of approach in the light of an unexpected encounter with anonymous attempts to imitate the script in the unusual setting of a monastic letter–book or register.

Wherever one turns in the pages of those who have written about the later medieval church there are reminiscences of Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’:

Shape without form, shade without colour
Paralysed force, gesture without motion

As Knowles put it, ‘by and large the whole body ecclesiastic was lukewarm’, adding of monasticism in particular that ‘it had little warmth to spare for others’. It was, he commented elsewhere, ‘an age of waning fervour’ - ‘the rhythm of life becomes universally slower, and scarcely any new feature appears until the abrupt end’. To other less compelling and considered writers it has been all too easy to characterise these waning medieval years simply as ones of ‘inevitable decline’, the retreat of the spiritual tide proceeding unchecked by the vain efforts of even the most able and dedicated men of the period to halt its recession - ‘it was his misfortune’, it has been said of Marmaduke Huby, one of the major English monastic figures of the period, ‘to be born at a time when ideals were at a low ebb, when the spirit of monasticism had grown languid and when material preoccupations demanded far too much attention’. There is little to be gained from such generalised speculation, which, if the subject of the passage was not known, could readily be ascribed, with equal non-validity, to almost any period in monastic history. Nonetheless, it remains true that the particular circumstances of church and society in the fifteenth century placed massive obstacles in the way of men like Huby, and there is ample evidence of the difficulties with which they had to contend.

It is curious that Glastonbury abbey should have attracted more attention for its beginnings than for its ending. The no-man’s-land between history, archaeology and legend, as misty and mysterious as the climate so often makes the abbey and its surroundings, has produced theory and counter-theory in abundance. In contrast, though the tragic deaths of abbot Whiting and his two companions have been described in minute detail a thousand times, little enough attention has been paid to the community which the king’s visitors found so much difficulty in bringing to an end. This community, well enough documented to permit the identification of all its members over the last fifteen years of its life, reveals characteristics which stand in marked contrast to the general level of religious life in the years immediately before the dissolution.

In his Paraclesis or Adhortatio ad christianae philosophiae studium Erasmus of Rotterdam proposed a famous anti-scholastic definition of the theologian:

In the context of this preface to the new testament the model was the supremely Christian life, ‘the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself’. Elsewhere, Erasmus sketched a portrait of exemplary Christian character as he had witnessed it at first hand, among his contemporaries. In response to a correspondent whom he judged to be in search of ‘some eminent pattern of religion’ he described the obscure Jehan Vitrier, ‘a man unknown to the world but famous and renowned in the kingdom of Christ’, as a foil, in the manner of Plutarch, for the more celebrated John Colet. Of Vitrier Erasmus said that ‘in truth his whole life was nothing else than one continual sermon’; of Colet that ‘nothing could divert him from the pursuit of a gospel life.’

In the sixteenth century Scotland was in close conscious relation with the continent. In international politics she had through the dynastic connections of her royal house acquired a crucial importance, and in ecclesiastical, academic, and literary spheres that relationship had never before and perhaps has never since been quite so intimate or so fully developed. The end of the Auld Alliance in 1560 did not weaken although it may have changed these ties. Indeed they were in many ways strengthened. In ever increasing numbers the sons of Scottish nobility went abroad in the furtherance of their general education and experience of the world. Almost every university in Europe was at some time visited by Scottish scholars and almost every educated Scot who in this century achieved distinction in religion, education or politics had spent some time at one or more of the great centres of learning. Nor was this traffic one way. Scotland had its modest share of travellers from overseas in the early days of the grand tour, and although only a few itineraries have so far come to light there is ample evidence in surviving alba amicorum and in the university rector’s books that a visit to the northern kingdom and an extended period of residence at one of its universities was unexceptional.

The universities at Oxford and Cambridge constituted two of the principal foci for the forces favouring renewal in sixteenth-century England. The towering personalities of John Fisher and Erasmus of Rotterdam set the goal of loosening the bonds of the traditional pedagogy and curriculum. The establishment of new foundations such as, at Cambridge, Christ College and, even more immediately, St John’s College and, at Oxford, Corpus Christi College and Cardinal College provided an institutional framework for the new learning. So, too, did the provisions for new ‘professorships’—the term will be used for the moment.