Communication in Europe and its Influence

By the end of the sixth century, under the auspices of Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590–604), another invasion of Europe from Rome began. The monastic tradition, founded by St. Benedict (c. 480–547) and originally dedicated to prayer and asceticism, now formed itself into a proselytizing militia. When the churchmen moved north they were met with accommodation more than resistance as local rulers availed themselves of the literacy-based administrative skills the monks could provide. None were more appreciative or proactive in accepting what the newcomers brought than the Frankish king Charlemagne (742–814). Although his capacity to read and write is debated by historians—apparently he sought to acquire the skill as an adult—he promoted the cause assiduously, overseeing the creation of written legal charters and of schools for the teaching and standardizing of Latin, which had become plagued with inconsistent usage. This Carolingian Renaissance, as it is called, although short-lived (his empire fragmented in the ninth century), left a profound imprint on subsequent European communication. It also yielded a new script, Carolingian miniscule, using lower-case characters with clean lines and improved punctuation.

Written knowledge became ensconced in monastic libraries that might contain several hundred to a thousand manuscripts. In contrast, however, libraries in Damascus, Cairo, and Córdoba, when Spain came under Moorish occupation in the tenth century, had upward of one hundred thousand volumes. These collections, fully employing the new medium of paper, evidenced far greater intellectual diversity than was permitted in Christendom, where the Catholic Church aggressively censored what was copied and knowledge was steeped in theological assumptions. When the church did allow secular classics from antiquity to become available, they were subject to revisionist interpretation—thus, for example, Plato was appreciated for the otherworldliness of his philosophy and his disavowal of sensory experience. Medieval texts were usually read aloud; although silent reading would begin to appear in the later Middle Ages and became the norm after printing, for most of the era it was the exception. In his Confessions (c. 400), St. Augustine of Hippo expresses both bewilderment and admiration when he observes St. Ambrose reading silently.