ABSTRACT
It is worth bearing in mind that a resurgence of interest in the culture of the classical Greek and Roman worlds occurred at the court of Charlemagne, and can be noted even more markedly from the twelfth century onwards and not, as is so often written, only as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, it is probably more correct to observe that this interest had always been present since the decline of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. Though many classical texts were deliberately destroyed or simply lost in the course of time, the Catholic Church had assiduously retained all those elements of classical civilization of which the underlying ideas did not conflict with Christian doctrine, and had passed these on through the manuscript texts which were the primary carriers of information. Thus, the ‘great tradition’ continued, for the cultured elite always had access to, and communicated with the culture of the ancient Mediterranean.
