ABSTRACT
The controversial appeal to the model o f the primitive Church sprang from the sharpened historical consciousness o f a century that was in the process o f rediscovering the lost philosophy and science o f the ancient world. By 1080 the law doctors were lecturing on the Digest and Code of Justinian in the Bologna schools; and the whole corpus o f Aristotle’s logic was known and taught at Chartres by 1140. The revival o f intellec tual and literary life that occurred in western Europe between 1050 and 1200 took many forms and flowed into many channels; but the common source was the flood of Latin translations that was making Greco-Arabic philosophical and scientific works available to Western scholars. The remote past had come alive again, and it seemed to offer an inexhaustible fund o f lessons for those who knew how to interpret it.
