ABSTRACT
The ninth century saw a great renaissance of learning and the arts both in eastern and western Europe, the latter usually known as the Carolingian renaissance. The two flowerings of letters and culture were, however, very different in character. The Carolingian renaissance originated under different conditions, had a different character, and brought quite different results. It was more purely a renaissance: a re-birth of the old Greco-Roman learning: there was only a limited mingling of different streams of culture. One striking feature in all this proliferation of Latin verse was the writers’ delight in the mere arrangement of words, in acrostics and anagrams and riddles, in the making of verses in which the initial letters of each line formed words, and sometimes where letters taken diagonally across the verse formed words also. The white Pangur and the Irish monk often caught their prey they were highly skilled hunters.
