I've been trying to find more info about the 12th century renaissance and not finding much. The only real material is from Charles Haskins book published in 1927, who orignially identifed it. Old copies of the book are available through Amazon for a decent price. Is the 12th Century Renaissance out of fashion, or was it ever really in fashion?
Here's some info I found in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century Charles H. Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070. In 1927, he wrote that: "[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of 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 of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry...[7]"
Aristotles work was found during the Spanish Reconquista in the 1100s and seems to be one of the main events of the 12th century renaissance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism "The renaissance of the 12th century saw a major search by European scholars for new learning. James of Venice, who probably spent some years in Constantinople, translated Aristotle's Posterior Analytics from Greek into Latin in the mid-twelfth century,[12] thus making the complete Aristotelian logical corpus, the Organon, available in Latin for the first time. Scholars travelled to areas of Europe that once had been under Muslim rule and still had substantial Arabic-speaking populations. From central Spain, which had come under Christian rule in the eleventh century, scholars produced many of the Latin translations of the 12th century. The most productive of these translators was Gerard of Cremona,[13] (c. 1114–1187), who translated 87 books,[14] which included many of the works of Aristotle such as his Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology. Michael Scot (c. 1175–1232) translated Averroes' commentaries on the scientific works of Aristotle.[15]"
Apparently the 12th century Renaissance was derailed due to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages "A series of famines and plagues, beginning with the Great Famine of 1315–17 and especially the Black Death of 1348, reduced the population perhaps by half or more as the Medieval Warm Period came to a close and the first century of the Little Ice Age began. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. Soil exhaustion, overpopulation, wars, and epidemic diseases helped cause hundreds of famines in Europe during the Middle Ages, including 95 in Britain and 75 in France.[2][3] In France, the Hundred Years' War, crop failures and epidemics reduced the population by two-thirds.[4][better source needed]"
The term "12th century renaissance" originally referred to a massive flowering of intellectual life in medieval western Europe, particularly in the cathedral schools of Paris. It was a reaction against the "Dark Ages" trope that for so long referred to all the Middle Ages, not just the early ones. The idea of a twelfth century renaissance was an important effort to push back against it for the high Middle Ages, although it sort of had the side effect of making the early Middle Ages seem darker.
Haskins did not invent the term--in his introduction, he talks about the different medieval renaissances already recognized by scholars before 1927!--but he certainly popularized it.
For him, "twelfth century renaissance" was really a forerunner of The Renaissance: the revival of classical antiquity, 'secular' learning, philosophy, Latin, natural philosophy/theology (the forerunner of science), written law. One contributor to this effort was the translation of ancient Greek works into Latin--not from Greek, but from Arabic, in the schools of Spain and Norman Italy as well as Paris.
There is little doubt that the 12th century indeed witnessed massive change in medieval Europe--cultural/intellectual, social, economic, political. In the near-century since Haskins' still-relevant work, scholars have put forth an ENORMOUS body of research that has pretty much exploded our understanding of a twelfth-century "renaissance" into an earthquake that stretched across all aspects of society, resonated far beyond the halls of elite Paris, and indeed bled backwards into the eleventh and forwards into the thirteenth century.
Giles Constable (The Reformation of the Twelfth Century) and Jean LeClerq (Love of Learning and the Desire for God) broadened the 'secular' renaissance to religious learning and religious institutions--the twelfth century is the real birth of different religious orders and ways of life, not just same old Benedictine monasticism.
Some scholars have emphasized the role that monastic women played in religious and intellectual developments--check out John Van Engen, ed., Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World; Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century; Alison Beach, Women As Scribes.
Stephen Jaeger has shown the real roots of the "twelfth-century" renaissance in the schools of the eleventh century (Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe).
Anna Sapir Abulafia has published extensively on Christian-Jewish relations and how they both reflected and helped shape the course of the century.
A really nice overview of sort of the state of scholarship on the twelfth century right now is the essay collection European Transformations edited by Thomas Noble and John Van Engen. Pretty much THE top people on the century. Basically you should read this.
As to a "crisis of the late Middle Ages" bringing the twelfth century renaissance to an end...well, late medievalists are currently working on overturning the idea of our era as a period of endless catastrophe, because it wasn't. It's our version of the Dark Ages--another effect of stressing the splendor of the twelfth century (which was great, don't get me wrong) at the cost of what came before and after.