Carolingian Renaissance: Learning Under Charlemagne

The Carolingian Renaissance was a revival of learning, education and book culture in the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and his successors, from about 780 to 900. Led by scholars such as Alcuin of York, it reformed Latin, founded schools at cathedrals and monasteries, created the clear script known as Carolingian minuscule and produced thousands of manuscripts. Many works of ancient Roman literature survive today only because Carolingian scribes copied them.

Background: why reform was needed

By the 8th century, the Roman school system had long disappeared in the West. Latin was still the language of the Church and law, but spoken Latin had evolved into early Romance dialects, and written Latin was often inconsistent. Handwriting varied from region to region, and copies of the Bible and liturgical books contained many errors.

For Charlemagne, who ruled the Franks from 768 and was crowned emperor in 800, this was a religious and political problem. A Christian ruler, in his view, was responsible for the salvation of his people, and that required priests who could read, understand and correctly perform the liturgy. Accurate texts and educated clergy were also useful to govern a vast and varied realm.

Scholars at court

Charlemagne gathered scholars from across Europe. From Italy came Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, Paulinus of Aquileia and Paul the Deacon, historian of the Lombards. From Spain came Theodulf, later bishop of Orléans, a poet and theologian. Above all, from Northumbria came Alcuin of York (c. 735-804), whom Charlemagne met at Parma in 781 and invited to his court.

Alcuin became the leading teacher of the palace school, which educated the king’s family and young nobles. Members of the court circle used nicknames from the Bible and classical literature; Charlemagne was “David” and Alcuin “Flaccus”, after the poet Horace. In 796 Alcuin became abbot of St Martin’s at Tours, which became a major centre of book production. The court’s later scholars included Einhard, author of the Life of Charlemagne, and the Irish geographer Dicuil.

Laws for learning

The programme was set out in royal decrees. A letter known as On the Cultivation of Letters (Epistola de litteris colendis), probably from the 780s, urged abbots and bishops to study so that their writing would be correct. The General Admonition (Admonitio generalis) of 789 ordered that schools be set up in every monastery and cathedral to teach boys the psalms, musical notation, chant, the calculation of the church calendar (computus) and grammar, and that books be carefully corrected.

Alcuin and Theodulf each produced revised texts of the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. Standard collections of sermons, church law and liturgy were also circulated. Charlemagne’s court centre at Aachen, with its Palatine Chapel, consecrated in 805, deliberately recalled Rome and Ravenna.

Carolingian minuscule

The most visible legacy is a new handwriting. Carolingian minuscule used clear, rounded lower-case letters, with spaces between words and fewer confusing abbreviations. It developed in several Frankish centres, including Corbie, from around the 780s; an early royal example is the dedication poem of the Godescalc Evangelistary, a luxurious gospel book written in 781-783 to mark Charlemagne’s journey to Rome, whose main text is in older display scripts.

By the 9th century the script was used throughout the empire. Centuries later, in the 15th century, Italian humanists found classical texts in Carolingian manuscripts, admired their script and imitated it, believing it ancient. Their “humanist” hand became the basis of roman typefaces, and therefore of the lower-case letters used in printing today.

The programme reached beyond the clergy to parts of the lay elite. Einhard reports that Charlemagne spoke Latin, understood some Greek and tried late in life to learn to write, keeping writing tablets under his pillow, though with little success. His sister Gisela, abbess of Chelles, corresponded with Alcuin, and in the early 840s the Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda wrote a handbook of moral advice for her teenage son, showing that serious learning was not confined to monks.

Art, architecture and music

The revival reached the arts as well. Court workshops produced luxurious manuscripts written in gold and silver on purple-dyed parchment, carved ivory book covers and fine metalwork, drawing on late Roman and Byzantine models. The Utrecht Psalter, made near Reims around 820-835, is famous for its lively pen drawings, and the school of Tours produced great illustrated Bibles under Alcuin’s successors.

Architecture looked to Rome. Besides the chapel at Aachen, monasteries such as Lorsch, whose gatehouse still stands, and the abbey of Saint-Riquier (Centula) showed new ambitions in stone building. The Plan of St Gall, drawn at Reichenau around 820-830, shows an ideal monastery complete with church, school, library, scriptorium, infirmary and workshops.

Music was reformed too. Pepin the Short and Charlemagne promoted the Roman chant used in the papal liturgy, and the effort to teach it consistently across the empire encouraged the development of written musical notation in the 9th century, the distant ancestor of the staff notation used today. The resulting repertory forms the core of what later became known as Gregorian chant.

Saving the classics

Carolingian scholars copied not only Christian works but also pagan authors, valued as models of good Latin. Texts by Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Tacitus and many others were copied in monasteries such as Fulda, Corbie, Lorsch, Reichenau and Tours. For a great number of classical Latin works, the oldest surviving manuscript is Carolingian, and some, such as parts of Tacitus, depended on one or two such copies.

The palaeographer Bernhard Bischoff catalogued some 7,000 manuscripts and fragments surviving from the 9th century, compared with fewer than 2,000 Latin books and fragments surviving from all the centuries before 800. The real output was far larger, since many books were later lost.

The second generation

The movement continued after Charlemagne’s death in 814, under Louis the Pious and his sons. Hrabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda and later archbishop of Mainz, wrote encyclopaedic works and trained a generation of teachers. Lupus of Ferrières searched for manuscripts of Cicero, and the Irish scholar John Scotus Eriugena translated Greek theology at the court of Charles the Bald. Political division after the Treaty of Verdun in 843 and Viking raids slowed but did not end the work.

Legacy

The term “Carolingian Renaissance” was coined by 19th-century historians, and some modern scholars prefer to speak of “Carolingian reform” or “correction”, which better matches the aims of the time. The movement was centred on the Church and limited to a small educated elite. Even so, it gave Europe a common written Latin culture, a network of schools and libraries, and the textual basis on which later medieval and Renaissance scholarship was built. When the Italian humanists of the 14th and 15th centuries hunted for lost classical texts, it was largely in Carolingian manuscripts that they found them.

Timeline

• 768: Charlemagne becomes king of the Franks.
• 781: Charlemagne meets Alcuin at Parma; the Godescalc Evangelistary is begun.
• c. 780s: The Epistola de litteris colendis urges improved learning.
• 789, 23 March: The Admonitio generalis orders schools in monasteries and cathedrals.
• 796: Alcuin becomes abbot of St Martin’s, Tours.
• 800: Charlemagne is crowned emperor in Rome.
• 804: Alcuin dies at Tours.
• c. 830s-850s: Hrabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrières and others continue the revival.

Why it matters

The Carolingian Renaissance shaped how Europeans wrote, studied and remembered the ancient world. Its schools and scriptoria saved much of Latin literature, and its script still lives in the lower-case letters on this page.