The Idea of a Twelfth-Century Renaissance

The Late Medieval Kidney—Nephrology in and about the Fourteenth Century

“…The overall effect was the building of the infrastructure necessary for the rebirth that began in the 14th century when the scholasticism nurtured by the early universities gradually began to give way to the emancipating spirit of humanism, and started to nurture the inductive reasoning that would mark the beginning of the modern world as we now know it. In sum, it was the mounting enthusiasm and intensity of intellectual pursuits that began in the 14th century that catalyzed by the advent of the printing press in the mid‐15th century helped spread the very concepts that would form the scientific renaissance that followed (1,2,81).…”

“…The haughty attitude of 15th century scholars in further qualifying this period as the Dark Ages notwithstanding, the Renaissance did not burst forth on the European scene out of nowhere; but was the product of the intellectual maturation of the preceding centuries of the medieval era, which prepared the fertile ground for the efflorescence that would become the Renaissance. Indeed, if there was a renascence of knowledge in the Renaissance it was simply the product of the gestation that took place in and about the 14th century, the period covered in this article (1–3).…”

The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture

“…The worlds of the visual arts and of courtly literature speak a very clear language as to the emergence of a new culture, which was increasingly determined by rationality, critical self-reflection, and the formation of the individual self in its biographical uniqueness (Jackson 1967;Fajardo-Acosta 2010) but also a growing sense of contingency (van Nahl 2022). There are countless indications of this profound reform, whether we think of philosophy (Peter Abelard), medicine (Galenic teachings), the sciences, or literature and music (Holmes 1951(Holmes , 1965. Of course, we would have to distinguish carefully among the individual situations in the various parts of medieval Europe but this would not change the overall picture which I want to draw from in this paper, especially because my purpose here is to explore to what extent the early indications of this profound paradigm shift can be also identified in the Nordic countries at the same time, as reflected in the saga literature.…”