The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance by G. W. Trompf

 

"The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation" by G. W. Trompf, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979.

Wikipedia:

Garry Winston Trompf ("G.W. Trompf", born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 November 1940) is emeritus professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Sydney and adjunct professor in Peace and Conflict Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney.

He is noted for research in the history of ideas, in religious studies, and in the anthropology of Melanesian cultures.

Trompf has been described as "Australia’s only historian of ideas," is considered a leading authority on Melanesian religions, and is noted for his development of "retributive logic" (the logic of payback) and his analysis of historical recurrence (the recurrence of similar events in the rises and falls of empires, in the history of a given polity, or in any two specific events which bear a striking similarity).

An excerpt from, "The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance" by G. W. Trompf, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1973):

Any return to the "Renaissance debate" may seem somewhat futile, like the proverbial fouettement d'un chat perhaps, yet it may be refreshing to enter that worn battleground of historical controversy from a different angle, and to begin our "renaissance" investigations, not in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but in the eighth and ninth, not with Petrarch and the Quattrocento humanists, but with Northumbrian, Frankish, and Italian scholars of a very much earlier, less civilized Europe. Traditionally, the so-called Carolingian renaissance has found its embodiment in none other than the person of Emperor Charlemagne himself, alike acclaimed as unifier of the West, defender of the Roman Church, restorer of stability and justice to barbarian Europe, and grand patron of a cultural and artistic revival. From Charlemagne's own reign until the present day, scholars have spoken of this famed ruler, and the culture flourishing under him, in virtually the same breath. Leaving aside the acclamations of his own day, which were, as we shall see, adulatory enough, we can note a nostalgia for the Carolingian age d'or even among public and literary figures of the immediately succeeding generations. "Karolus bone memoriae," wrote Nithard, embroiled in the troubles which follow Charlemagne's death, "omnem Europem omni bonitate repletam reliquit. And memories of the new Davidic monarch drew out those heroic songs about his brave warriors doing battle with the new Philistines on the Spanish March. The Chanson de Roland was not alone as a medieval monument to Karolus Magnus; many were the legends about this revered Emperor, and for ambitious French monarchs, such as Philip II (Augustus) one could think of no one better to emulate than the one first "appointed by God to be the leader of all Latin Christendom." Charlemagne became a "saint"; in the Chanson, his white beard, his hieratic and patriarchal appearance implied a supernatural role as "God's vice-regent and the Father of all Christendom": in Dante's Paradiso he stands in the circle of Mars with such fine defensores fidei as Joshua and "the lofty Maccabee." Late medieval writers continued to extol; Charlemagne rated among the "Nine Worthies" popularized in de Longuyon's Les Voeux de Paon, artists did not forget him, and his name was uttered by the kings of France and the crusaders of Europe to remember and marvel. To some extent, of course, the greatness of his person overshadowed the civilization he fostered, but the Carolingian "age of gold" in general, with its unity, its chivalric idealism, still continued to seize the popular and scholarly imagination.

Rosamond McKitterick on Roman authority in early medieval Europe

Wikipedia:

Rosamond Deborah McKitterick (born 31 May 1949) is an English medieval historian. She is an expert on the Frankish kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, who uses palaeographical and manuscript studies to illuminate aspects of the political, cultural, intellectual, religious, and social history of the Early Middle Ages. From 1999 until 2016 she was Professor of Medieval History and director of research at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Professor Emerita of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge.

. . .McKitterick has been described as a "doyenne in her field; her decades of tireless research and teaching have been poured into a steady stream of major publications on Carolingian subjects." Thomas F. X. Noble considers McKitterick to be "one of the most original and productive historians of Europe's early Middle Ages".

Video Title: Rosamond McKitterick on Roman authority in early medieval Europe. Source: State Library Victoria. Date Published: February 21, 2017. Description:

In the 2017 Foxcroft Lecture, Cambridge scholar Rosamond McKitterick looks at how and why the authority of Rome was established in early medieval Europe.

Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. Episode 1, The Skin of Our Teeth.

 

Wikipedia - Carolingian Renaissance:

Kenneth Clark was of the view that by means of the Carolingian Renaissance, Western civilization survived by the skin of its teeth. A substantial portion of the classical corpus we possess today owes its survival to the copies produced by Carolingian scribes. As Conrad Leyser notes, "fewer than 2,000 Latin manuscripts survive from the period before AD 800; from the century after AD 800, we have over 7,000. For every eighth-century copy of a text that has survived, we have ten copies from the ninth century."

As important a role as the Carolingians played in collecting, copying, and disseminating ancient manuscripts and knowledge, it is equally important to remember that they did this through their own value systems. As such, it is important to recognize that although many ancient texts and ideas were preserved by the Carolingians, it is impossible to know how many others were not, whether accidental or otherwise. The Carolingians were a Christian people and certainly sought to preserve Christian documents and knowledge. Therefore, it is likely non-Christian resources were deliberately passed aside in favor of preserving Christian ones. However, this was not always the case. Secular texts and information were indeed preserved by the Carolingians, often as part of educational reforms undertaken during the Carolingian Renaissance. And none of this is to suggest that ancient Christian sources were preserved unscathed (or at all) by the same Renaissance. Indeed, these manuscripts were likely to become distorted or lost as well. For example, Christian sources might be copied so many times that their original versions were lost, separating contemporaries and those of us today from their original productions such as scripts and materials. Also, Christian authorities among the Carolingians might believe themselves experts, no longer needing entire ancient Christian texts. As such, they could purposely omit portions of ancient manuscripts no longer believed necessary for preservation and instruction.

However, the use of the term renaissance to describe this period is contested because its aims and output differ markedly from those of the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance. The Carolingian project was a top-down initiative, driven by royal patronage and executed by literate elites who trained and served in ecclesiastical institutions, in contrast to the wide-ranging social movements of the later Italian Renaissance.

Earlier scholarship sometimes portrayed the Carolingian period as an attempt to recreate the previous culture of the Roman Empire, motivated by humanist and antiquarian interests. More recent historiography, however, tends to view the Carolingian Renaissance primarily as a religious reform project. Rather than a pure revival, Carolingian scholars described their engagement with classical learning as correctio. This notion of correctio, combined with pragmatic concerns, aimed to "correct" and transform older knowledge into something useful and suitable for a newly unified Christian society—society whose salvation Charlemagne, as its ruler, felt personally responsible for.

Wikipedia:

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster. His expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated with Italian Renaissance art, most of all that of Leonardo da Vinci. After running two art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, the largest and best known being the Civilisation series in 1969.

. . .The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the art experts Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.

. . .In 2014 the Tate held the "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation" exhibition, highlighting Clark's impact "as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century". The exhibition, drawing on works from Clark's personal collection and many other sources, examined his role as "a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster ... bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience". The BBC called him "arguably the most influential figure in 20th century British art". Clark's early and continuing insistence that Victorian architecture and art should be considered seriously contributed to a gradual change in public taste. The art historian Ayla Lepine writes that Clark's writing and his "perennial commitment to John Ruskin's output and significance" made an important contribution to the re-evaluation of Victorian art and architecture.

Video Title: Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. Episode 1, The Skin of our Teeth. Source: thecitysurfer. Date Published: June 17, 2022. Description:

The Skin of Our Teeth

Civilisation Episode 1 of 13.  Non - remastered SD edition with Original 4x3 aspect ratio and color.  Broadcast  Sunday 23 February 1969 20:15. BBC2.   

Opening music: Cesar Frank, Chorale no. 3 in A minor.

Sir Kenneth Clark begins his classic 1969 series on the history of civilisation with the re-establishment of civilisation in Western Europe, in the tenth century after the fall of Rome to barbarism. He travels from Byzantine Ravenna to the Celtic Hebrides examining aqueducts, cathedrals, the lives of the Vikings and of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.

Vichy on the Potomac: Towards Regime Liberation In The United States

 

Regime change in Washington is a matter of U.S. national security, international law, human dignity, and the survival of the West. America needs a clean break from Israel.

The threat that Islam poses to America and the West cannot be defeated until the psychological and spiritual control its religious stepmother in Judaism possesses over Washington is finally done away with.

And this won't be an easy task. There are many psychological and religious hurdles in the way. 

Even more than Christian biblical hogwash, the outlandish Holocaust narrative penetrated the American soul more than perhaps any other people, even more than the Jewish people themselves. 

Many will go to their graves believing six million Jews were killed by Hitler and three thousand Americans were killed by Osama bin Laden on 9/11. 

These modern myths and political fairytales shaped their lives, political choices, and historical consciousness. It is not their fault for putting faith in the political and religious authorities that lied to them. They are victims of a totalitarian edifice that's wholly evil and runs on psychological slavery.

The generation that grew up in the shadow of WWII were bombarded with Holocaust propaganda and consequently they developed an irrational attachment to Jews, and the State of Israel in particular. They cannot be saved or awakened. But they also can't be blamed. 

The political and cultural engineering that elevated the Holocaust myth to indisputable historical gospel was an act of media brainwashing that can only be paralleled with religious brainwashing. 

And the effect it had can only be described as religious in nature since it is considered a great sin to even broach the topic and question it. Those who do are imprisoned and treated like lepers, or worse, much like apostates. 

A re-telling of modern Western and Jewish history is in order before a restoration of intellectual and political freedom can even be considered. Without a solid grounding in facts nothing can be changed for the better. The Zionist and Masonic capture of the Western mind must be broken. That is paramount. Regime change in Washington begins with a change in worldview at the ground level. 

Forget a new ballroom. The entire White House needs a cleaning out and a renovation. Or there might need to be a new capital entirely.

With Washington mentally liberated and spiritually extricated from its unnaturally one-sided relationship with the Jewish state, it will be free to pursue a foreign policy in its interests, not those of Israel's.

The time of entertaining this little monster on the world stage is coming to an end. The Jewish pseudo-suffering complex has run its course. Nobody cares about European pogroms against Jews in 1341 or how Jews were slandered by Roman soldiers in 54 B.C. 

It's time for Jews to grow up and face reality.

Israel has to be reminded of its size and miniscule strategic relevance. It is not an empire in the making. It is not Sparta. It is not a frontline state heroically defending the West against the barbarians. It does not get to dictate anything. It will survive thanks to global goodwill only, if at all. 

It will either fall in line or get left behind. 

It will relinquish its godlike power over Washington with or without its say so.

Alcuin of York

 

Wikipedia:

Alcuin of York (c. 735 – 19 May 804), also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin, was an Anglo-Latin scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure in the 780s and 790s. Before that, he was also a court chancellor in Aachen. "The most learned man anywhere to be found", according to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (c. 817–833), he is considered among the most important intellectual architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. Among his pupils were many of the dominant intellectuals of the Carolingian era.

. . . Alcuin is honoured in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church on 20 May, the first available day after the day of his death (as Dunstan is celebrated on 19 May).

Alcuin is also venerated as a Saint by Eastern Orthodox Christians in the British Isles and Ireland. The Orthodox Fellowship of John the Baptist publishes a liturgical calendar that is widely used in that region, and this calendar includes a feast for St Alcuin.

Alcuin College, one of the colleges of the University of York, is named after him. In January 2020, Alcuin was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time. In December 2024, Alcuin was prominently featured in Part 2 of a 3-part podcast series on Charlemagne in The Rest Is History.

At the entrance of St. Michael's Catholic Cemetery, a private cemetery in Hong Kong, two lines of his poem "Ashes and Dust" are demonstrated as Duilian; which is "You are now, traveller, what I once was, and what I am now you will one day become."

An excerpt from, "Remembering Alcuin" The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Vol. 11 (1991):

Had Alcuin been canonized, he would surely have become the patron saint of editors. Chief inspiration of what one historian has called "the radiance of learning in the days of Charles the Great," Alcuin not only managed to awaken in rough and unlikely lords a passion for theological dialectic, but he also contrived to reintroduce commas into written texts and to restore the differentiation of fricatives in Latin spelling. It was as if he held that people who could not rightly order the small things could be counted on to disorder the great things as well. Tidiness in the placement of commas was not less important to God than the just resolution of public questions, and the two might very likely be linked—for where language is without law other endeavors may be expected to unravel lawlessly as well. Alcuin met defeat in some ventures (his demurs had no apparent effect on Charlemagne's program for converting the Saxons by offering them baptism or death, and some say he never succeeded in teaching Charlemagne to write because the warrior's hand, long inured to the heft of his sword, was no longer supple enough to master the formation of letters); he was, nevertheless, almost perfectly successful, within the limits of his time, in purging texts of distorting errors and in encouraging and supporting the development of the script (the Carolingian minuscule) that gave rise to the most beautiful manuscripts of the mediaeval period. Among the guardians of language down the ages—a notably crotchety lot—he is one of the most graceful and gracious. A minor editor retiring from a treasured post twelve centuries later hopes above all to have grown more worthy of his blessing.

Video Title: Alcuin of York. Source: Anglo-Saxon England Podcast. Date Published: April 16, 2022. Description:

Even as its glory days slipped into the past, Northumbria was still able to produce one last great mind who would have a profound impact on the rest of the world. Alcuin of York came from an obscure family but would go on to find success in the court of Emperor Charlemagne as one of his advisors and teachers. Here he would help formulate new standards for education that would shape the future of Western education.