Jason Carr
History

Impressions:  Twelfth Century Renaissance.  Charles R. Young, editor.  

      This collection of opinion is a bewildering introduction to the subject of
the 12th Century Renaissance.  It seems to be a compendium of academic
temperament rather as much as a primer on Medieval culture.  
      Even on subjects potentially interesting to me some of the acamedicians
seem to take on an obscurantist stance.  While reading William Hechscher's piece
on the Medieval toleration of pagan elements I had to check my pages regularly
to reassure myself I was still reading the same essay.  This example sticks out
because it is generally more confusing than the others.  If the entire collection
were steeped in this much esoterica then I would understand that perhaps I just
wasn't up to the reading.  There is a possibility that Young selected this essay
to instruct, and also to jab at solipsistic academics.  Young knew that his
students would be thrown: "The greatest conceivable distance, the highest degree
of resignation, and at the same time the most sweeping 'all-round' view of what
Roman and Pagan Antiquity may have meant in the Middle Ages, is found in the
often discussed Roma and Item de Roma of the cleric Hildebert of Lavardin (died
1133) who was a pessimist in matters of renovatio."<1>  If Young thought
everyone would be able to power through muddy statements such as this, he
would have also felt no need to remind us who Seneca was.<2>
      The reader becomes the unintentional moderator between contestants in
semantic skirmishes about the meaning of the word Renaissance itself.  One is
reminded of the advice given Alice:  my words will mean whatever I wish them
to mean.  It is a question of who is going to be the master, I or my words.  It
seems that, given number of essays starting out with arguments of definition,
that a preliminary and companion text should be devoted to the subject.
      Charles Young seems to be aware of this problem, and hints at some sort
of recipe for accord.  "Although [Kristeller's] lecture was addressed to the
problem of understanding the Italian Renaissance, his comments might apply with
equal validity to the differences that have divided scholars in their
interpretation of the twelfth-century renaissance."<3>  Young ends his collection
with Kristeller as an attempt to apply a healing balm to delicate academic skins,
and also to the problems which they have addressed.
                                   NOTES



                                   NOTES



<1>  page 61

<2>  page 45

<3>  page 108.
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/