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

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.