The Awakening of Europe

by Philippe Wolff, Anne Carter (Translator)

The Awakening of Europe (The Pelican History of European Thought 1) by Philippe Wolff.

Genres: Medieval, History, European History, Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 30, 1968

Reviews

[Sense of History]

Read this in the original French edition, as a history student at the university. It's a great evocation of how in the Middle Ages Europe succeeded in picking up the intellectual tide again. Perhaps outdated by now, as the original edition was published in 1971. I guess in the meanwhile there's much more information on how the cultural heritage of the classic antiquity was preserved within abbeys in Europe itself and how great the inflow was of manuscripts through Byzantium and the Arab world.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent study on the intellectual awakening of the West, through the Middle Ages. Read this in French when I was a university student.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unusual look at intellectual history. Wolff "focuses" on three individuals though much of each section is about other things. Overall a fair minded look at an earlier renaissance.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking at the recovery of the cultural life of Europe during the period beginning at the end of the 8th century to the 12th, Wolff considers three 'renaissances' associated with the lives and works of, respectively, Alcuin, Gerbert and Abelard. As the continent struggled to re-assimulate the achievements of Greece and Rome into the 'barbarian' cultures of the Celts and Franks, the work task of recovering grammar, science and logic came onto the agendas of the principle thinkers of each epoch.

The achievement which provided the platform for this work was Charlemagnes success in forging the unity of the Franks and his refoundation of an entity claiming to be the Roman Empire in the West, in 800. The need for a literate cadre of administrators and cultural intregrators required examination of the use of written language and the need for it to be a consistent medium for conveying meaning.

For the next generation, interaction with the more advanced cultures of the Muslim world brought the possibility of science back onto the agenda. Beyond that, thinkers had to contend with the discrepancies between the religous texts that were fundamental to their world, and what they were now observing as objecvtive fact. Dilectical thinking provided the mechanism for scrutinising contradictions and proposing reconciliation of apparent conflict.

This is a rich study, and Wolff's approach is refreshingly materialistic, seeing the advances in culture - crab-like as they might have been - as founded on improvements in agricultural cultivation and the growth of population size. His claim that the cultural diversity of Europe was the key to a line of progress that favoured inquiry and synthesis goes a long way to explaining how European culture came to develop as it did during succeeding generations.