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Hello, the 12th century Renaissance was a term developed by scholars in the 20th century to describe

a period of intense and prolonged intellectual, social, creative and technological growth

in Western Europe.

There was a rebirth in the 1100s in the strict sense of Renaissance

as the West rediscovered many classical texts, particularly Greek ones preserved and translated by Muslim scholars.

There were also new births of universities, of cities, of theologies, of Gothic cathedrals,

and of ways to tell stories in the ordinary language of the people rather than scholarly Latin.

Their legacies are still with us in

buildings and in the embedding of ideas which grew and flourished in the later Italian

Renaissance, the Enlightenment and down to the present day. With me to discuss the 12th century Renaissance are Laura Ash,

Associate Professor of English at Worcester College University of Oxford.

Elizabeth Mannhauz, Honorary Professor of European European Medieval History at the University of Cambridge, and

Giles Gasper, Reader in Medieval History at Durham University.

Laura Ash, why did the 12th century acquire the term as a century of Renaissance?

It was a period of really dramatic accelerated change in all sorts of fields.

I think broadly we could divide them into three. We could say

there is economic and social change, there is a huge amount of cultural,

intellectual, literary change, and then there is political and legal change. And

just to break those down a little bit,

...