The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles H. Haskins

Examines the historical background and major cultural developments of the Mediaeval Renaissance.

Despite its age, this book is still the premiere piece fo scholarship on the Twelfth Century. The late Harvard professor Haskins was a master at presenting detailed, insightful research in an easy, accessible manner. Everyone, from the average reader to the advanced researcher will be greatly satisfied with this erudite work.
In this book, which he did throughout all of his career, he presents history in the broader sense: history that is flowing and morphic, not static and pigeonholed. He believed that breaking history up into little arbitrary units of measure, like the century or a decade, while convenient, led to unrealistic expectations of periods or breaks between events, eras, and cultures. History for Professor haskins was very much alive and could not be contained for our convenience, hence it overflowed our self-imposed boundaires, and events which occurred in one era, had their origins far back in time and their ramifications felt far forward in time. Nothing is encapsulated and cut off from the rest of time.
The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is a very important book, because it recaptures the early Middle Ages from the dustbin of Dark Ages ignorance where all the centuries after the Fall of Rome and the better known Italian Renaissance of the 15th Century are thrown. It proves that scholarship and learning were vigorous, that the liberal arts flourished in towns, cathedrals, monasteries, and the newly founded universities (which is covered much more fully in his book The Rise of the Universities), and therein lay the expansion of the earlier Carolingian scholarship, the salvation of the Latin classics and laws, and rediscovery of Greek philosophy, literature, and sciences, and the influx of Arabic learning that was so influential in the later eruption of learning that led to the greater Renaissances and modern times. He proves however, that there were local origins of learning and that the arts grew very much out of their own cultural bedrocks. These were not ignorant scribes only copying work from far away and a millennia before, but intelligent and resourceful scholars who bettered themselves and their times.
Haskins is a master historian and this book remains a classic of the genre.