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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.

The 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 Wester College University of Oxford, Elizabeth Mannhauts, Oneric Professor of European

Medieval History at the University of Cambridge and Charles Gaspett, 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

...