I came across this passage by Charles Homer Haskins that made my heart swell with Medieval happiness
The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
The title of this book will appear to many to contain a flagrant contradiction. A renaissance in the twelfth century! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the Italian Renaissance which followed? How could there be a renaissance in the Middle Ages, when men had no eye for the joy and beauty and knowledge of this passing world, their gaze ever fixed on the terrors of the world to come? [...]
The answer is that the continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive periods, and that modern research shows us the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed. The Middle Ages exhibit life and color and change, much eager search after knowledge and beauty, much creative accomplishment in art, in literature, in institutions. The Italian Renaissance was preceded by similar, if less wide-reaching movements; indeed it came out of the Middle Ages so gradually that historians are not agreed when it began, and some would go so far as to abolish the name, perhaps even the fact, of a renaissance in the Quattrocento.
To the most important of these earlier revivals the present volume is devoted, the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century which is often called the Medieval Renaissance. This century [...] was in many respects an age of fresh vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureacratic states in the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek Science, with its Arabic additions, and much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its mark on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry.
Oh Charles Homer Haskins, you tell 'em!