Philosophy, cosmology, and the twelfth-century Renaissance

Abstract

This chapter is an exercise more in literary history than in the history of philosophy. In it I will attempt to isolate one particularly influential strain in the thought of the early twelfth-century schools, define the emphases that distinguish it from other intellectual currents in the period, and trace its influence in several areas of twelfth-century intellectual culture. The group of thinkers with whom I will be chiefly concerned, and whom I have labelled for convenience the ‘cosmologists’, are united by their interest in the study of the natural universe as an avenue to philosophical and religious understanding. Because some of the most prominent among them were associated at different points in their careers with the cathedral school at Chartres, it has been traditional to assume that this school was the centre of such studies, and Chartres has been extolled as the nurse of humanist values and intellectual freedom in the early twelfth century. While we are now learning to see the activity of the School of Chartres as part of a broader scholastic movement, it remains clear that there are important and widely influential common elements in the thought of those masters whose names have been most frequently associated with Chartres.

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