PART III

THE TRANSITION FROM MEDIAEVAL TO MODERN ATTITUDES

THE RECOVERY OF THE ANCIENT LEARNING
THE REAWAKENING OF SCHOLARSHIP AND
THE RISE OF RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY




CHAPTER X

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING


THE PERIOD OF CHANGE. The thirteenth century has often been called the
wonderful century of the mediaeval world. It was wonderful largely in that
the forces struggling against mediaevalism to evolve the modern spirit
here first find clear expression. It was a century of rapid and
unmistakable progress in almost every line. By its close great changes
were under way which were destined ultimately to shake off the incubus of
mediaevalism and to transform Europe. In many respects, though, the
fourteenth was a still more wonderful century.

The evolution of the universities which we have just traced was one of the
most important of these thirteenth-century manifestations. Lacking in
intellectual material, but impelled by the new impulses beginning to work
in the world, the scholars of the time went earnestly to work, by
speculative methods, to organize the dogmatic theology of the Church into